Strategy

C-betting Out of Position on Dry Boards – How to Devise the Best Strategy?

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January 16, 2025 · 5 minutes

C-betting Out of Position on Dry Boards

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You should be c-betting significantly less often when you are out of position and frame your entire strategy differently.

The main reason for this is that the range of hands of the defending player has a much different structure than that of a player defending from the big blind. 

When you open from the cutoff and get called by the button, which is the scenario we’ll use throughout this lesson, the player on the button is supposed to call with only 10% of their entire range. This is a very narrow scope of hands, which heavily dictates your c-betting strategy on dry boards.

Before we dive into specific tips and examples, here are a few key takeaways to guide you through this lesson:

  • Ace-high boards favor the in-position caller, and you should be doing a lot of checking
  • Dry boards with a high card favor the opener, and you should bet frequently, using big sizing
  • Small and disconnected boards are best played as flop checks over 90% of the time

As mentioned, we’ll be using a cutoff vs. button scenario, with 100 big blinds effective stacks. This strategy is applicable to cash games and the early stages of tournaments.

Tip #1 – Check Your Entire Range on Ace-High Boards

Checking on an ace-high board might seem counterintuitive at first glance, but it makes total sense when you examine the numbers. To understand why checking ace-high disjointed boards is the best play over 90% (93%, to be exact), you first need to know what the button calling range looks like against your cutoff open. 

If you look at the solver output, you’ll notice that hands containing an ace make up a big part of the overall range.

c-betting oop a-high dry boards

If we exclude the strongest hands that are pure or predominantly 3-bets, we are left with a range mainly consisting of suited aces, along with a few other hands, such as mid or small pocket pairs and a few broadway combos.

Knowing this, continuation betting on these types of boards doesn’t achieve much. We would be betting into a strong range that absolutely dominates the flop, with different top pair combinations and potential sets using one of the other two cards.

If we look at a board like A94, we only c-bet a small fraction of the time with our stronger top pairs and a few slivers of other hands, such as middle and bottom pairs and hands featuring backdoor straight and flush draws.

c-betting a-high dry boards oop

The bottom line is that there is no need to get fancy on these types of textures. After you check and face a bet, you can continue based on the strength of your hand, calling with hands that connect with the flop and just folding the rest.

oop c-betting strategy after checking

If your opponent bets after you check, you now have both strong and weak hands in your range, making it much easier to adopt a balanced approach than betting yourself on the flop.

In these situations, you should call with most of the hands you decide to continue only raising bottom sets and some combos of the AK hands. To break down the range:

  • Call 55% 
  • Raise 9% 
  • Fold 36% 

This way, you control the size of the pot, protect yourself from getting raised, induce some bluffs, and balance your play. A simple yet effective strategy to play on ace-high boards.

Tip 2 – Bet Big on High-Card Flops

Our OOP c-betting strategy changes a lot on disconnected flops containing a high card that’s not an ace. If you refer back to the button calling range chart, it becomes quite clear why this is the case.

You’ll notice that your IP opponent is supposed to have very few hands containing high cards, which means that the flop like K62 significantly favors your range.

oop c-betting strategy high card boards

PeakGTO does not have a pure checking range in these scenarios. We c-bet 60% of the time and check 40%, but you’ll notice that it is a mixed strategy across the board, with the same hands betting some of the time and checking the rest.

Hands that gravitate towards betting are the ones containing a top pair and suited broadway combos that can pick up equity on different turns when called.

It is also interesting to note that the big sizing of 69% of the pot is used almost uniformly. Since we have a big range advantage on these boards, utilizing a large continuation bet makes sense to discourage floats and maximize your fold equity with bluffs, making it easier to play the hand out of position.

Tip #3 – Protect Your Range on Small Flops by Checking

The third type of board we’ll examine in this context is one consisting of low and disconnected cards, such as 953.

This is the kind of texture that fully favors the IP caller, which is why the solver suggests checking 94% of the time. The small c-betting percentage comprises mainly strong hands (top pair or better) and rare bluffs with hands that have a bit of backdoor potential.

On these textures, the button player will have more strong hands and draws, so you can expect to get called a lot, which will bloat the pot and make your play on future streets complicated while being out of position. 

By checking, you keep the pot smaller and protect your range, allowing you to make a check call and even a check-raise with a healthy portion of your range if your opponent decides to bet.

c-bet oop strategy after checking

The one adjustment you need to make on lower boards is to adopt a much more aggressive check-raising strategy. On top of raising the strongest overpairs and some top-pair combinations, you actually end up upping it up with multiple draws and overcard combos with runner-runner flush potential.

This is how your entire range distribution looks:

  • Call 45%
  • Raise 23%
  • Fold 32%

As you can see from this example, you should still call most of your hands and float many showdown value holdings, such as underpairs and ace-highs.

The bottom line is that you should be doing a lot of checking out of position on ace-high and small disconnected boards, while keeping the pressure on high-card flops without an ace. 

In these scenarios, the best thing to do is to keep things simple and make decisions primarily based on perceived ranges.

Article by
Tadas played poker professionally for over a decade and founded mypokercoaching.com to offer training resources to players. During the years, he became one of the leading experts in the poker niche and wrote countless guides for mypokercoaching and other leading online publications. Now he concentrates on building an iBetMedia agency and helping other gambling brands reach their targeted customers. You can connect with Tadas via his LinkedIn profile.

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