The Poker Chronicles

This is talking about limit I might add, as evidenced by his earlier statement referring to the large pot odds you are usually receiving on the river. If his statement were referring to no-limit poker, where your odds are often much smaller on the river (often in the 3:1-2:1 range) it would make sense but in limit poker it is downright idiotic. Even though I am not much of a fan of his writing either I think Mike Caro said it best with his quote "If you average a big profit by calling you aren’t calling enough" in Super System 2.

It seems a rather elementary exercise in logical deduction to realize which of the two is correct. Large pot odds on the river mean a call doesn’t have to work out very often to be the correct play. If you are winning 75% of the times you call on the river chances are you are throwing away a number of winning hands and you must always remember that if even a small percentage of the hands you fold would have been winners then you are making a mistake, possibly a very large one. Caro hit the nail on the head with that statement and the true understanding of it is a large part of what separates the players who can beat $10/$20 games from the players who can beat $30/$60 games.

I think much of Krieger's error stems from the following statement: At this point, you’ve either made the hand you were hoping to make or you didn’t — and if you made it, you ought to bet. After all, if you’re building a hand but are unwilling to bet if you complete it, why are you attempting to make that hand in the first place?Sklansky tells you why actually. There are two reasons to bet the river, to make a better hand fold (and we are talking about made hands and value betting here so let's ignore that one for the moment) and/or to make a worse hand call you. So therefore it stands to reason that if you built the hand you were hoping to but are fairly confident that nobody with a worse one will call you then you shouldn’t bet. Often on the river you find yourself with a hand that is probably good but you realize that a bet will force out opponents with worse hands but get called by opponents with better ones. In that situation the check-call (or maybe check-raise) is a powerful weapon.

For instance suppose you have a good middle pair and an opponent calls you on the flop and turn. You suspect he has either a good draw or a better hand like a weak top pair that he is afraid to raise. On the river all the draws miss and the board is basically unchanged. Here betting would be foolish. Your opponent will simply fold if his draw missed and call if he has a weak top pair. If you check however and he has something like a flush or straight draw with two small cards he might decide that he has a shot of winning with a bet and that that is the only chance he has so he might go ahead and bluff at the pot.

Now you call. Sometimes he will just have a weak top pair, in which case you lose the same amount you would have had you bet and he called. Sometimes he will have a bluff and you gain a big bet. And maybe sometimes he has a monster and slowplayed it a bit too far and you saved yourself from the sticky situation of getting raised on the river.

Hands of that nature (where a bet will cause an inferior hand to fold and a better one to call or raise) come up all the time in limit hold'em, and I would guess in any limit poker game, and are a part of the reason why you should be doing a lot of river calling. Add that in with players' natural propensities for bluffing and we find that you should be calling left and right on the river with made hands, no matter how weak, especially when heads up.

Lou, and whoever wrote to him that inspired such a column, is making a huge error in assuming that there is a problem just because they are losing the majority of times they call a bet on the river. True, a bet saved is a bet earned, and sometimes the pot odds don’t justify a call even if you have a good hand, but a pot lost is a lot of bets lost and therefore if a high percentage of your river calls are succeeding you need to be calling more. Understanding the importance of a pot versus one bet and basing every decision you make around it is much of what propels one above the lower limits.