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Following on from our last strategy article, which covered tournament c-betting strategy when in position and on dry flops, today’s lesson will move on to wet textures.
We’ll use the same setup, focusing primarily on 40 big-blind effective stacks, but also addressing other stack sizes (25 and 60 big blinds).
Today’s article will cover continuation betting strategy when playing in position (raising from the button and getting called by the big blind) on different representative types of wet flops.
As always, before we dive into specific examples, here are a few main takeaways to guide you through the lesson:
- We are c-betting ace-high wet flops at a 100% frequency using a mix of big and small bets
- On high-card wet flops, we are c-betting around 70%, with 25% of the pot sizing used most frequently
- When it comes to low-card wet flops, we are c-betting only around half the time, balancing between 60% and 25% of the pot sizing
Tip #1: Always C-Bet Ace-High Wet Boards
When it comes to ace-high dynamic flops in poker, we’ll be betting these textures at a pretty much 100% frequency when playing 40 big blinds deep.
Let’s look at the flop of A♥9♦8♦:
For all practical purposes, we don’t have any checks in our range in these spots, and we’ll always be firing a continuation bet. The only real decision is about the sizing, and, as you can see, we’ll be dividing our strategy pretty evenly between big (60%) and small (25% of the pot) bets.
It is worth noting that we are also using the really big (100% of the pot) sizing around 12% of the time. This option is largely reserved for the following situations:
- Strong top pair hands (AK through AT, betting pot about one third of the time)
- Gutshots like J7s and 65s (using big sizing about one third of the time)
- Bottom pair plus backdoor combos like 87s and 86s – about 25% of the time
Our strategy with 60 big blinds remains fairly unchanged in these spots. We are checking back a bit more (around 5% of the time), primarily with hands like KK and QQ, which have a decent showdown value. That said, even with these hands, c-betting still remains by far a preferred option.
At 25 big blinds effective, we are once again c-betting pretty much always, but the biggest adjustment is that we are using 60% of the pot sizing almost uniformly.
Tip #2: Continue Around 70% on King High Dynamic Flops
King-high wet boards aren’t as favorable to the button raiser as the ace-high ones, but we’ll still be continuation betting on these textures at a very high frequency of almost 70%.
Let’s look at an example of a K♥7♣6♣ flop:
As you can see, we are c-betting around 67% of the time in these spots, and our bet sizing strategy is split fairly evenly between:
- 100% of the pot – at around 14% frequency
- 67% of the pot – at around 22.5%
- 25% of the pot – around 31%
So, the small bet size is the preferred one in these spots, but the other two sizes are used fairly frequently as well.
While the strategy is largely mixed across the board, there is a selection of hands that utilize only the small sizing when c-betting, and these are primarily strong ace-highs, such as AQ, AJ, AT, A9, and A8.
Not surprisingly, our 60 big blinds strategy doesn’t change much. The most important adjustment is that the preference when it comes to sizing moves towards the 67% of the pot, which becomes our most utilized c-bet size (due to deeper stacks). Other than this, our range selection for betting and checking back remains almost unchanged.
At the effective stack depth of 25 big blinds, our c-betting frequency drops to 60%, and we are only utilizing two sizes: 25% and 60% of the pot. Because stacks are shallow, the pot-sized bet is no longer a sensible option.
We are also doing more checking back with hands that have the potential to improve but have no showdown value at the moment.
Tip #3: C-Bet Only About 50% on Low Connected Flops
Wet flops containing low cards represent the type of texture that favors the player defending in the big blind. For that reason, at 40 big blinds, the defending player will even have a small leading range on these boards.
When they do check to us, we’ll have to continue very cautiously, c-betting only about half the time, and checking back the rest, as we can see on the example of the 8♠7♠5♦ flop.
As you can see, the only hands we are c-betting at a 100% frequency in these spots are
- Overpairs
- Two pair combos
- Sets
- Straights
- Top pair + straight draw
In these cases, we are using the big, 67% of the pot sizing almost always as these are strong hand that we want to extract value from and/or protect against various draws.
Hands that we are c-betting more than half the time are mostly hands containing overcards and/or draws, such as AK, KJ, K9, K6, QT, Q9, etc.
Many other hands that contain a middle or a bottom pair and some kind of a draw prefer to check back in this situation, c-betting at only a very low frequency to protect their equity and try to get to a showdown cheaply.
The strategy doesn’t change much when we are playing 60 big blinds deep. Our check-back frequency increases slightly to 55%, but our c-betting strategy remains very similar to the one used at 40 big blinds.
What’s quite interesting is that at 25 big blinds, we are actually c-betting at a frequency of 51%, so there is a slight increase in frequency. However, our preferred sizing shifts significantly towards 25% of the pot.
