Okay, so for the first two parts of this series we’ve been looking at the fact that value-shoving is often a better idea than the age-old tactic of simply betting a normal amount and hoping to build a big pot from there. Well, it is and it isn’t. I mean poker is a game of variables, right?
Personally I find that in a heads-up pot against a weak player, flat-calling when the donk leads on the flop works betting than giving him the shipping news, especially if the flop is relatively dry. This is because donk-leads are generally quite polarised into monsters – like sets or combo draws – and weak hands that will be slung into the muck at the first sight of your over-shove, in which case you should give your opponent a chance to make a good second-best hand.
The delayed value shove
Letting your opponent catch something on the turn or decide they want to bluff can be a good approach. The idea of the delayed value shove is that by the time you reach the turn or river you have manipulated the size of the pot so that a shove for the pot or more looks perfectly natural. Let’s use the example of flopping a set on a dry board. Imagine you raise to 300 from the cutoff preflop with effective stacks of 5,500 at 50/100 and pick up one caller from the small blind. You flop a set of Sixes on a Th-6d-2c board (pot 700 with 5,200 effective stacks). If checked to, many players would check behind, but if you want to get maximum value you should bet, somewhere around half to two-thirds of the pot. So let’s imagine you lead for 500 and get called (pot 1,700, effective stacks 4,700) and the turn is the Qs, completing a full rainbow. Again the small blind checks and you need to decide on your bet size. If you make a reasonable bet of 950 and get called, the pot will be 3,600 and the effective stacks before the river is dealt will be 3,750, making your river overbet look perfectly natural.
Read part II