The goal of today’s article, as the title suggests, is to develop effective strategies to use when facing a large bet size on a flop.
Many players struggle to give up and make tight (and not-so-tight) folds on different flops, even when their opponent decides to use a big continuation bet.
There are quite a few spots where the population tendency is to over-defend against bigger bets, so we’ll try to pinpoint what those spots are, how to recognize them, and how to pick the best course of action.
Main Things to Consider When Facing a Big Bet
There are a few important things to keep in mind when you are facing a big continuation bet on the flop, and some of these aspects are often neglected, leading to wrong decisions.
Generally speaking, larger sizes equate to more polar ranges, so it is really important to think about how your hand equity changes against a more polar range compared to a more linear one.
- Recognize the value/EV of hands and how resilient they are against tighter ranges and/or bigger sizing. In a nutshell, when facing bigger bets, we need to be able to compare different hand classes and figure out what’s worth more: a bottom pair or an ace high, a gutshot or a bottom pair. As bet sizes increase, you can get rid of hands that are worth less and are less resilient.
- Understand how the bettor's range interacts with the flop and how this changes EV of different hand classes.
- Define other important things to think about in these spots.
The first hands that we’ll want to fold in these scenarios are often high card hands and hands containing only backdoor flush draw. Facing bigger bets, we want to have more direct equity against likely value hands.
Low Card vs. High Card Flops
There are two main types of flops we can look at in the context of facing big continuation bets. Low and high card flops interact differently with the original raiser’s ranges, which dictates our GTO strategy.
For example, on a flop like K♦8♣6♦, big bets are heavily skewed towards top pair+ types of holdings. Thus, our high-card hands and weak gutshots are crushed, as we have no overcards, meaning no or very little direct equity.
On the other hand, on a board like 9♥6♦4♥, we can continue with hands like T8, which contains a gutshot and an overcard, and even K♣J♥, as we have two overcards to most 9x and TT holdings, which make up a large portion of the big bet range.
With these things in mind, here are a few major pointers to keep in mind when facing a big flop c-bet:
- We’ll be defending a lot with hands containing two overcards.
- Double backdoor flush draws are often crushed and are hard to realize equity with.
- Strategy with gutshot draws will depend on pair outs.
- Pocket pairs are often crushed as they only have two outs.
- With just one weak pair on the board, you’ll need some additional equity to continue, like a backdoor straight or flush draw.
Putting the Plan to Action
Let’s now look at an example hand that showcases some of the points discussed above. We are playing 60 big blinds deep, facing a raise from UTG+1. We have 10♥7♥ in the big blind and decide to defend against a standard 2x open.
The flop comes K♦8♣6♦, and after we check, they fire a big bet of 400 into the pot of 550.
With all the aspects we talked about in mind, this hand is an easy fold. We don’t have any overcards to the king, no backdoor flush draw, and our pair outs aren’t likely to be good. So, we only have a naked gutshot draw.
Let’s now look at some other hands on the same flop to try and figure out how to proceed facing a bet:
- Hands containing a 6 (a bottom pair) – we’ll be continuing with a lot of these hands since most of them will have some sort of a straight or a backdoor flush draw to go along, giving us enough equity.
- Hands containing an 8 – these hands aren’t much different from 6x hands, so we can continue a lot as long as we have some backdoor equity to fall back onto.
- A hand like Ts9s – this is a pure fold, as we only have an extra overcard to the eight, which isn’t too relevant in this scenario. The opponent’s value range contains a lot of Kx, so having an additional card over the eight isn’t really important.
- Ad9h – this is one type of hand that people often overinvest with. We only have one overcard and a backdoor flush draw. This means that our direct equity isn’t very good, and after facing a big flop bet, the opponent will barrel the turn at a high frequency. So, we can fold this hand pretty easily.
The most important takeaway here is that, when facing big continuation bets out of position, we need a fair amount of direct equity to continue. Without it, we should be folding a lot, especially on boards that we know coordinate well with the bettor’s hand range.
