One of the biggest leaks a lot of players have – even many winning players – is not value-betting often enough or thinly enough with marginal hands. A lot of these opportunities occur on the river, where the pot is at its most inflated. Missing bets here can cost you a tonne 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 1:45).