Discover the exploitative incentives for slowplaying, and how you can use them to make more money
Last week we covered the first part of our guide to slowplaying strong hands in poker – the theory part.
In that post, we talked about why it’s important to sometimes slowplay with the top of the range; we also discussed when it is appropriate to include this move into your gameplan; and then we finished by exploring how exactly to do it – what are the hands suited for this type of strategy and how to recognize them.
If you haven’t read last week’s post, don’t worry, you can find it later in my website homepage (all past issues are there).
Now we move our attention to how the act of slowplaying with strong hands can be incentivized by mistakes and leaks ir our opponents strategies. What does your opponent need to do to make checking with a strong hand superior to betting for you? That’s what we’ll answer next.
EXPLOITATIVE REASONS TO SLOWPLAY
In this context of reasons to slowplay exploitatively, we first need to remind ourselves of how to slowplay correctly in theory.
We discussed that last week. We can basically distill slowplaying down to 2 major possibilities:
- Your blockers make your opponent more likely to put money into the pot when you slowplay;
- Your blockers make your opponent less likely to put money into the pot when you fastplay.
Scenario 1 is when you have blockers to your opponent’s checking range. By doing so you decrease the probability of him checking, and thus increase the probability of facing a bet. That’s awesome for a nutted hand that slowplayed, as you want to face bets.
Scenario 2 is when you have blockers to your opponent’s calling range. By doing so you decrease the probability of him calling, and thus increase the probability of facing a fold. That’s terrible for a nutted hand that fastplayed, as you want to get calls. So fastplaying becomes an inferior option to slowplaying.
Notice how, in the end, what you want is for your opponent to put money into the pot. Sometimes your blockers make it more likely that they will put money into the pot when you check – either because you’ll face more bets when checking, or because you’ll face less calls when betting. In either case you should check to let your opponent build the pot for you.
With exploitative slowplaying, we turn ourselves to factors other than blockers that could lead to our opponents putting too much money into the pot when we check, or putting too little money into the pot when we bet.
You see where this is going right?
If your opponent puts more money into the pot than he should in theory when you check, he is boosting the EV of slowplaying for you. If your opponent puts lessmoney into the pot than he should in theory when you bet, he is decreasing the EV of fastplaying for you, which can end up making slowplaying the best option.
Let’s begin analyzing the first scenario.
1 – OPPONENT PUTS TOO MUCH MONEY INTO THE POT
What is too much money? Obviously this statement presumes a comparison – and here the comparison is straightforward: how much solver invests into the pot x how much your opponent invests into the pot.
Notice the use of the word investment. What matters to you is the actual amount of money your opponent puts into the pot. This very simple and obvious remark helps us understand that what we are interested at when analyzing our opponent’s strategy with the intention of slowplaying is the product bet sizing x frequency.
The more often your opponent bets, the more money they’re putting into the pot. But also, the bigger they bet, the more money they’re investing. Both things are relevant to us.
A good exploitative opportunity to slowplay more than GTO is when your opponent bets more often than he is supposed to, or bets bigger than he is supposed to – or both.
A very typical circumstance where that happens is when playing against recreational players out of position on the turn.
For example, imagine you are SB vs BB. You open AK preflop and get called by the BB, who is a recreational player.
Flop comes Qs7d2c, a very dry texture. In this type of board, you can cbet very frequently, and AK is a very high frequency bet:
After getting called on the flop, on a turn Ah, OOP’s AK is supposed to bet 100% of the time with an overbet sizing:
But now is where things start to get interesting. If you have studied poker enough, you’ll know that a double broadway board is not very good for the BB here in this circumstance. The BB should be 3betting preflop with his AK, AQ, AA and QQ combinations, so he almost never has very strong hands on this board.
For that reason, when checked to in this spot, the BB is supposed to reopen the betting only 17% of the time:
Want to take a guess at how often recreational players reopen the betting here when checked to?
I will give you a few seconds to think…
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Here’s the answer:
A staggering 50% of the time!
That’s an incredibly huge deviation from equilibrium. If we node lock the IP player to reopen the betting this much, this is how the OOP player responds:
This is part of the reason why you see me slowplaying strong hands OOP against recreational players in my videos, in almost any spot. They put too much money into the pot when checked to.
2 – OPPONENT PUTS TOO LITTLE MONEY INTO THE POT
The second scenario is essentially the inverse of the first.
Instead of putting too much money into the pot when checked to, what our opponent is doing now is putting too little money into the pot when facing a bet.
This happens when they overfold relative to solver, or underraise – or both.
If your opponent can’t be expected to call enough and raise enough facing a bet, that’s terrible news for your strongest hands, because now the EV of betting decreases for them. It could decrease so much that betting becomes an inferior option to checking, and therefore slowplaying is the correct, highest EV play.
One example where that happens is when playing BB vs BTN, in the XC-X-B line.
Imagine you have K8o and you defend your BB. Flop comes K72r; you face a 30% pot cbet and call. Turn comes the 9s, the action goes check-check and the river is a blank 3h.
This is what your river strategy should look like, in solver land:
Notice how 2pair+ is already supposed to be slowplayed around 55% of the time.
This is not the strategy you should play against real opponents, however.
In this node, regulars massively overfold and underraise relative to solver- against all bet sizes.
On the river, facing a bet, on this board runout:
- Solver folds 23% of the time against 30% pot bet; regulars fold 49%! Solver raises such bet 24%, regs raise only 11%;
- Solver folds 43% of the time against a 70% pot bet; regulars fold 61%! Solver raises such bet 9% of the time, regs raise only 6.4%;
- Solver folds 58% of the time against a 120% pot bet; regulars fold 74%!Solver raises such bet 5% of the time, regs raise only 3.2%.
These are some huge deviations from equilibrium. Regulars are not even close to putting as much money into the pot as they should facing bets. They are folding way way way too much with their bluffcatchers, and not raising enough for thin value and as a bluff.
For that reason, fastplaying strong hands in this situation has its EV drastically decreased. You bet a 2pair+ type hand hoping to get called by worse or raised by a worse hand (thinner value or bluff), and when those things don’t happen enough, the money you make by betting yourself decreases a lot.
When we nodelock the numbers above (while keeping the betting strategy vs check intact) into the BTN’s river strategy, this is what the OOP betting strategy becomes:
We observe 2 main things:
- Every marginal pair or unpaired hand becomes a pure bluff for 1.2x sizing, the most profitable bluff sizing;
- Every top pair+ hand becomes a pure check – betting is no longer a viable option against someone that folds so much.
SUMMARY
The examples I gave you here were not random. The 2 scenarios we covered – a fish that bets too much when checked to; and a regular that folds too much when bet into – are extremely common throughout the game tree of NLHE.
The first adjustment you should make after reading this post is to stop fastplaying value vs fish.
Yes, you read that right.
Contrary to what 99.9% of people think, recreational players are not randomly calling you down with any 2 cards. In fact they overfold relative to solver defense frequencies. And when checked to, they put way more money into the pot than they should. The combination of these 2 things incentivizes you to play your strongest hands passively against them. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past 7 years with great success. That’s what I teach my students to do. That’s what I’m teaching you now.
I realize this goes very much against the norm and that might make you feel very uncomfortable. “There is no way this guy is right and everyone else is wrong”.
I get it. Even though I showed you all the numbers and models above, letting this sink in will take some time. I don’t expect you to change your approach overnight based on a single article. But I’m here to help you make more money, and this change is one the ways you can achieve that.
The same adjustment is valid for regulars. In this case, it’s not like they put too much money into the pot when checked to. Regulars often have betting frequencies that are very close to solver, and they don’t overbluff much in most spots. That being said, regulars overfold by a lot on the river, against all bet sizes. So they fit into the 2nd scenario from before – they don’t make slowplaying better than it should be; they make fastplaying worse than it should be. And a lot of the times this is enough incentive to slowplay instead of fastplay.
So next time you’re on the river with a strong hand, consider letting your opponent do the betting for you. I guarantee you it will make you more money in the long run.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Until then – keep it simple.
Saulo