Utilizing Blockers Effectively in Poker

Save for Later

In the past year or two, there’s been an evolution in poker theory. Where previous logic would have dictated that the highest-EV hands for us to have in a given situation are simply the ones that are the strongest in terms of raw equity or have the highest degree of showdown value, there’s a new consideration that has recently entered the equation – the value of blockers.

Most people are accustomed to thinking of blockers with respect to how they affect preflop play – for example, people seem to be fairly aware these days that Ace-blocker hands are good for 3-bet and 4-bet bluffing, since they reduce the frequencies with which our opponents can have AA, AK or AQ. However, many players have yet to recognise the extent to which blockers can become a key component of postflop play in many spots.

Bluffcatching and the evolution of bluffcatching theory

Several years ago, it would have been commonplace to hear someone express their analysis of a river spot purely in terms of which hands might be profitable to call a river bet with, based on their analysis of their opponent’s range. They might have said, “we’re getting 2 to 1 pot odds, so we should call with all hands that win more than 33% of the time”. This is still true, obviously, if we’re thinking about it in exploitative analysis terms, but there are another couple of levels on top of that.
What if we don’t know our opponent’s range with a great degree of certainty? Well, maybe two or three years ago, people started addressing that question too. They’d talk about ‘minimum defense frequencies’, or in other words, they’d be talking about calling with enough hands that we prevent villain from auto-profiting with their bluffs – in other words, calling with the top X% of our range and folding the rest. This is basic game theory, and it works up to a point, but there’s a problem – the problem lies in how we determine what constitutes the ‘top X%’ of our range.

Previously, most people would simply have defined this as being the hands which are the strongest in absolute terms. These days, however, it becomes necessary to consider that a hand that is stronger in absolute terms might be weaker in relation to the opponent’s betting range, if it contains specific cards that reduce the frequency with which the opponent can be bluffing. Thus, a hand with one or even two blockers to the opponent’s most likely bluffs (e.g. JhJx on KhTh4x8x4x, blocking QJ, AJ, J9 and flush draws) can actually have significantly less EV as a bluffcatcher than a hand with lesser absolute value which unblocks villain’s bluffs (e.g. Ts7s on the above board).

Maximising the EV of your bluffs

This concept works the other way around, too. When we’re bluffing, if our hand contains cards which block our opponent’s most likely calling hands, we may find it preferable to bluff with a hand that contains some degree of showdown value (e.g. Ace-high hands or weak pairs with decent kickers) if the value of our blockers is such that it makes bluffing preferable to checking down. Suits matter, too – put one of these spots through a GTO calculator and it might tell you that certain combinations of cards that have the same absolute value should be played in entirely different ways! We could be raising the river if we have a heart and a club, calling if we have a spade and a diamond, and folding if we have two clubs.

Similarly, we should be aware that in situations where we ourselves are bluffing with a drawing hand, the presence of certain cards in our own hand (e.g. QJ on the board used above) serves to block some of the villain’s most likely draws, shifting their range somewhat towards value and making it slightly less likely that we’re going to get a fold. In the above example, however, this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, since QJ also blocks KQ and KJ, some of villain’s most likely calling-down hands. This might make QJ a good candidate for firing two or three barrels on the above board – villain’s range is specifically weighted towards weaker value hands that will likely call one or two streets and then fold on a second or third.

Choosing your hands for big river bluffs

One thing many people struggle with in MTTs is being able to identify good spots to make those big river bluffs, the ones that take down huge pots and boost your stack by 50%. Those check-raises that make your opponent hate you and put them in a really tough spot. Almost nobody is good at picking those spots, and the reason often is because people aren’t good at recognising what’s a good time to pull the trigger. They get scared, and tell themselves, “nah, he probably just has it this time, I’ll bluff next time”.

In many of these instances, the best time to pull the trigger on a big river bluff is when you contain a blocker to the nuts. For example, if you hold the Ah on a three-heart board and your opponent fires a river bet, you know for a fact that the top part of their range is cut off, so they’re naturally going to be weaker than usual. If it seems reasonable in that spot that you would often play the nuts in that same way, possessing the nut flush blocker could be a great spot for a bluff, even if you also have a pair that could give you some showdown value and might make you want to call instead. Turning your hand into a bluff in that spot might be so profitable it vastly outweighs the possibility of just calling and trying to bluffcatch.

The rare advantage of certainty

The most important thing to keep in mind about using blockers is that the reason they’re so important is because they give us something we can’t really have in many other spots in poker – certainty about our opponent’s range. When we have the nut flush blocker, we know, with absolute conviction, that our opponent doesn’t have the nuts. This makes a world of difference, and it should drastically increase our confidence in bluffing, since any spot where we know anything about our opponent’s range is a great spot for us!

That certainty is something that doesn’t come easily in poker. You owe it to your own game to make the best possible use of it. If, up to this point, you’ve been approaching your bluffing and bluffcatching strategies from the simplistic perspective of analysing hands in terms of their showdown value, it’s time to step it up a notch.