In cash-game poker one of the key skills that will affect your bottom line is how much money you make with your winning hands. Seems obvious, right? In general terms the greater your skill level the more you’ll make with your good hands. One of the ways you can improve this is by value-betting thinner than other players. This doesn’t mean you have to closely monitor your calorie intake or suck your cheeks in as you bet. It means you have to be more aware of when your hand is best and be more prepared to bet with marginal holdings.
Let’s define our terms – a value bet is a bet made to extract value from your hand, in other words to be called by a hand worse than yours. The ‘thinness’ of the value bet describes the relative strength of your hand to that of your opponent’s and the likelihood of getting called.
For example, if you hold A-A on an A-J-9-2-4 rainbow board you have the second nuts (to 3-5) and almost every player in the world would bet and hope to get called. This would be a very clear value bet. However, if you held the same hand but the Four on the river brought a third heart and your opponent had been calling you on every street, making a value bet now would be more marginal or ‘thinner’. Not only might the river flush card have cost you the pot but critically it makes it much harder for you to get paid, as your villain may now fold paired Aces and two-pair fearing the flush or better.
Value-bet or check?
When deciding to make a value bet with a marginal holding you should be evaluating your opponent’s range of hands and whether he will call with enough of that range to make your bet profitable. It may sound confusing but it’s not. Just think how often you’ll realistically get called by a hand that’s not beating you. Of course making these bets is highly player-dependent so it’s vital that you adjust how often you value-bet against thinking players and with how marginal a hand. Against calling stations or players that can make hero calls you can value-bet much more ‘thinly’.
It’s critical to develop this skill in terms of the long game otherwise you’ll find yourself leaving a lot of money on the table.
Thin value on the river
A lot of opportunities to get 'thin' value from marginal hands occur on the river, where the pot is at its most inflated. Missing bets here can cost you a ton of money – money that should have been yours!
Making thin value bets profitably is something that will only come with experience, so it’s important to start trying them out. The exciting thing is that this is a source of money I can almost guarantee you’re not exploiting enough at the moment.
To get started you should look for players you feel will be easy to value-bet very thinly – calling stations, in other words. Players who passively call down very loosely are our friends as winning poker players and we shouldn’t let them off for their sins –they should be punished!
Let’s say you raise in position with A-K and are called by one such lovely donator. The flop is a beautiful K-8-3 rainbow, which is a spot where you should be dead set on getting three streets of value. Even if the turn comes a 6 and the river a 7, completing a backdoor straight and flush, it would be a mortal sin to check behind on the river and let him show his losing pair of tens or weak King for free.
Cerebral shift
It’s important to change your impulse from checking to betting. For example, let’s say you hold Q-Q on a baby board like 9-8-4-3-9 and your weak opponent has checked the river to you. It can be easy to be spooked by the Nine on the river but if your opponent would have called with a hand like A-8 or T-T and would have bet out with a Nine, as many would, you’ll have often left money on the table. Most opponents will never check-raise bluff the river so you should usually be betting rather than checking here.
Your thin value bets may also take the form of thin value raises. The same criteria apply to thin value raises as to thin value bets. You must assess the situation, quantify your opponent’s range and figure out whether he will often call a raise on the river with worse.
Here’s a hand played by Daniel Negreanu where he makes a thin value raise on the river where others may have made the mistake of calling and leaving money on the table (the action starts at 1'22").
The dangers of thin value-betting
Thin value-betting is the mark of a strong player, but be careful you don’t get carried away. There is very real danger of ‘value-owning’ yourself, i.e. betting when you’ll only be called by a worse hand. It’s probably true that most people playing in low-to-medium stakes commit the mistake of not betting often enough. However, there is a fine line between making a correct value bet and spewing money, and to stop yourself doing that you have to recognise spots where you will only be called by better hands.
Let’s say you’re playing a decent but straightforward opponent. You’ve reached the river with As-Qs on a Qd-7s-6d-Kc-4d board where the river completed a flush. You’ve bet the flop and turn and are now checked to on the river. Mostly this is a spot where you can’t get paid. You may well have the best hand, as your opponent may have called two streets with a weaker Queen, a pocket pair or a missed draw, but it’s now rare that he’ll call you for another sizeable bet with a worse hand. Unless you have some really specific history and dynamics with this player, a bet here would be turning your hand into a bluff. Now it may be appropriate to make the play to bluff your opponent off a King but that would be a bluff, not a value bet.
When is check-calling more profitable?
There are also some situations where it’s better to check-call if you’re first to act than to value-bet. These are situations where it’s far more likely your opponent will make a mistake of value-betting with worse than you or, more commonly, be induced into bluffing. If you were holding Qd-Jh on a 6c-7c-Qh-2d-Ks board (notice the flush draw on the flop). On the river all the draws have missed and if your opponent held a strong made hand it seems likely he would have raised at some point to protect it against danger cards. Here it seems difficult to get paid by worse hands, and as a large part of your opponent’s range in this spot is busted draws, value-betting will probably make you less money than check-calling.
Getting thin value bets right is difficult and each situation is unique. The key is to realise that you can probably value-bet more than you currently are. Get into that mindset of extracting as many chips as possible, especially from weaker opponents, and you should see a significant rise in your win-rate.