Learning to respond appropriately to continuation bets from your opponents is a key part of the strategy that will form the early stages of your poker learning. Many people start out either folding way too often to c-bets, or not folding anywhere near enough – they rarely bluff-raise the flop, they rarely play draws aggressively, and they either never even consider folding a pair, or they fold everything but top pair or better.
I’m sure most of you – since you’re already reading a poker training site – don’t fall into this category, which is a very good thing. However, there’s also a pretty good likelihood that a lot of you have a ‘Fold to C-bet’ stat somewhere outside the desirable range of 40-50%, and a ‘Flop Check-Raise’ stat outside the desirable 5-10% range. This means you might be (not necessarily, but likely) making some mistakes in how you defend the flop, and leaving some gaps open for your opponents to exploit.
In order to start defending one’s range on the flop more effectively – by which we mostly mean, protecting oneself against exploitation or preventing one’s opponent from automatically printing money with their c-bets – we have to be aware of several important factors. There are obviously additional aspects to bear in mind, and adaptation versus specific opponents is necessary when we have a solid read, but in general these are the concepts that will help you more easily protect yourself on the flop.
Understand Minimum Defense Frequencies (MDF)
Game-Theoretically Optimal (GTO) play is a concept many players are only recently becoming familiar with, but even without analyzing specific situations in detail, GTO analysis can tell us a lot about how to prevent ourselves from being exploited by our opponents. One of our primary goals in GTO play is to prevent our opponents from being able to bet 100% of their range profitably in any situation – we don’t want to be folding so much that they don’t even have to think twice about betting.
In order to calculate the minimum frequency with which we have to be defending our range (Minimum Defense Frequency/MDF) in order to prevent our opponent from profiting automatically, we can use a simple calculation. It’s the reverse of a calculation you might have seen before – if we make certain bet, we can figure out how often our opponent has to fold in order for that bet to be profitable even if we have no equity when called. We take the bet we’re making, divide it by the pot that will be returned to our stack after villain folds, and we get the frequency.
This means if we bet half-pot, we risk 0.5x pot to win an eventual pot of 1.5x the current pot, so we do 0.5/1.5, and we get 33%. This is our Auto-Profit Threshold (APT) – if villain folds more often than this, we can bet 100% of our range profitably. What we want to do when defending our range is prevent villain from auto-profiting, so we flip the equation around – if villain’s APT is 33% because they bet half-pot, then it means our MDF is 67%. If villain bets full-pot their APT is 50%, which means our MDF is 50%.
This sounds like a complex concept but it’s actually fairly simple – all it means is that we have to call or raise more often against a small bet than against a big one. We can also help ourselves out by defending more aggressively – if we give ourselves the chance to make our opponent fold after betting by making a raise, then we can afford to defend a little less often since we now have two ways to win the pot. In spots where we have no raising range, we have to call more, and in spots where we’re raising a lot, we can afford to fold a little more to compensate.
Locate the range advantage
The concept of range advantage is pivotal to any postflop situation – we want to be in as many spots as possible where our equity is greater than our opponent’s. In many ways, high equity generates high EV – while there isn’t a direct correlation that can be drawn, we would have to make a lot of mistakes in order to turn a 60/40 flop range advantage into an unprofitable spot, for example.
Figuring out which player has the range advantage is just a matter of understanding preflop ranges to a better degree. Generally, the player who has the wider preflop range will be more likely to be at a disadvantage, especially if that range is capped (i.e. if they would always be 3-betting their strongest hands). For example, a player opening UTG and getting called by the big blind will almost always have a huge range advantage, perhaps as big as 70/30 on some boards, while a player opening the button and getting called by a tight flatting range in the small blind might actually find themselves a 55/45 dog on a lot of flops.
If you know which player has the range advantage in a hand, you can make an accurate estimate of how aggressively you should be defending your range – if your equity is greater, you can defend more often and more aggressively, but if your equity is low then it’s going to be necessary to fold more frequently. After all, the last thing we want to do is to be doing a lot of calling with a wide range when that wide range is way behind most of our opponent’s hands.
Adapt to the board texture
The key to understanding our appropriate responses once we’ve figured out who has the range advantage is to recognize the significance of board texture. On more static boards, not only is the range advantage more likely to go to the preflop raiser, but there are likely to be fewer opportunities for the preflop caller to defend their range by raising, since there are few good bluffing spots on boards with no draws.
This means that unless the preflop caller is at a very significant range disadvantage, it benefits the caller to defend their range on the flop mostly by calling and planning to make a move on later streets, rather than raising in a spot where they don’t represent many value hands and their bluffs have little equity.
Conversely, on a more dynamic board with more draws, it makes sense for the preflop caller to make use of the fact that the range equities are likely to be much closer together by applying pressure to the preflop raiser’s range by raising a lot, while reducing their calling frequency to cater to the fact that there are so many turn cards that change the board dramatically. This approach is contrary to how many weaker players tend to play these boards – they do a lot of calling with their draws and tend to raise with an unbalanced range of value hands.
Always look for an exploit
Finally, while our efforts to defend our range on the flop against unknown or more competent villains should be largely dependent on bet sizing, our estimated range advantage or disadvantage, and the nature of the board, we can definitely make some good reads on our opponents’ tendencies after playing some hands with them.
We may decide that our opponent is prone to c-betting too frequently and giving up on future streets, in which case we might opt for a strategy of over-defending our range on the flop and planning to bluff the river with almost everything after the turn checks through, or perhaps we might try to put maximum pressure on our opponent’s c-betting range by raising a lot instead of defending more passively on some board types.
Whatever the scenario, being aware that there does exist a hypothetical frequency with which we should be defending our range in order to prevent our opponents from exploiting us is key to playing the flop more effectively as the preflop caller, even if we can’t calculate that exact frequency in-game. These general principles will be a good start – if you want a deeper dive, you’ll have to start doing your own GTO analyses, and as most pros will attest, that’s where the real fun begins.
Gunz4Hire
nice article matt!