Many players begin their tournament poker career by playing the majority of their games in Sit-N-Gos or turbo tournaments, where stacks are short and postflop play is rare after the first few levels. As each of us progresses up the poker ladder, however, it’s very common that we’ll find ourselves playing tournaments with better structures and deeper stacks, where our postflop ability starts to account for a good portion of our edge.
When considering our postflop edge as a whole, it stands to reason that most of that edge comes from the hands where we are the preflop raiser (or at least, the last preflop aggressor), since that’s where our range is strongest. In addition, we also gain a greater edge by making better decisions in the spots where the pots are bigger – in other words, the turn and river.
Thus, we can surmise that making better decisions in double-barrel and triple-barrel spots is an important area of study – we can pick up a substantial bump in our winrate in these spots from just a small improvement in our theoretical awareness.
Identifying board textures
First and foremost, we need to know what kinds of boards benefit our range as the preflop raiser. These boards are often going to be the best ones for firing multiple barrels, as they’ll be the ones where our opponents are simply not able to have very many strong hands. However, we should be wary of the fact that from time to time our opponents will have trouble folding top pair on these boards – some opponents just aren’t willing to give us credit for an overpair if the top card is a Queen or higher. Thus, we should be looking for somewhat static, rainbow boards that are mostly low or middle cards – something like a J6334, a TT296 or a T5247 would be good candidates.
In addition to the more static boards, we also want to be firing multiple barrels in situations where our opponent’s calling range versus our flop bet is very capped – this means situations where we would expect them to raise all their strong hands on the flop. If our opponent check-calls out of position on a very dynamic board with lots of draws, we can probably assume they rarely have better than one pair in a lot of instances. If this is the case, it’s a good opportunity to pick that spot for applying some pressure.
Selecting the right hands
One of the most common mistakes made by low-stakes players is to effectively choose their two-barrelling and three-barrelling hands at random. When they find what they believe is a spot where their opponent might be folding fairly often, they bet – this isn’t a problem in and of itself, but it ignores one of the most important realities of making any bet on the flop or turn in any No-Limit Hold’em hand. I’m referring to the fact that the EV of any given bet on an earlier street is a function of the opportunities which will arise on later streets after the bet gets called.
What this means is that there’s a big difference between barrelling the turn with a gutshot, or barrelling the turn with two random undercards to the board – even though we might only hit our gutshot 8% of the time on the river, that’s better than winning 0% of the time, and since we are likely to win a larger pot in the event that we do make a big hand by hitting our gutshot on the river, there’s a significant difference in EV between a hand that can make the nuts and a hand that can’t make anything.
We can extrapolate this concept to the flop, too – a hand with a backdoor flush draw is a much better hand with which to bet the flop than a hand that has very few outs to improve, for example. Since giving ourselves good opportunities to barrel the turn starts with the flop, this means that our flop c-betting ranges should be constructed from hands that will have the opportunity to frequently barrel the turn – if our flop betting range includes a lot of hands with backdoor equity, it’s going to be much easier to construct our turn betting ranges such that they work well on any potential turn and river combination.
Bet sizing progression
The next part of our strategy in this area revolves around bet sizing. The general gist here is that the more polarized your range becomes, the bigger your bet sizing should get – this is backed up by many aspects of game-theory optimal play. Thus, while this does depend on the nature of the board to an extent, we will almost always want our turn bet to be a bigger proportion of the pot than our flop bet. At the very least, even if we decide to split our range and bet smaller with some hands and bigger with others, there should be at least some part of our range with which we’re betting reasonably big on the turn – somewhere in the 55-70% of pot region is usually appropriate. It helps us get value, bluff frequently, and set up a big river bet.
Following on from this, since our range for three-barrelling the river will usually be very polarized, we will want to go very big with our river sizing in most three-barrel spots. This allows us to have a greater number of bluffs in our range, increasing the frequency with which we have the opportunity to three-barrel without making us more exploitable, while also allowing us to get much more value from our value hands.
If we reach the point where our value range is guaranteed to beat villain’s range while our bluffs are guaranteed to lose – i.e., our range is perfectly polarized – then it’s mathematically provable that an all-in bet sizing is best, regardless of the pot size. That’s not to say we always want to choose this option – our tournament life does count for something – but it’s useful information nonetheless. We can construct perfectly viable strategies for shoving all-in for 3x the pot in a variety of situations, for example, especially if we’re in a situation where if we did bet smaller, there would be no chance of our opponent bluff-raising us due to their playing style.
Pulling the trigger
Finally, a crucial component of being able to fire multi-barrel bluffs effectively is having the confidence to pull the trigger. It’s very common for low-stakes players to build up their three-barrel confidence progressively – they start out by finding good spots to c-bet, and then give up the turn and river too much. Then they learn to barrel the turn effectively, but they keep giving up the river. Eventually they start figuring out good spots to barrel the river, and that’s where everything clicks. Once you’re able to fire that third barrel fearlessly, the previous streets get easier.
A big part of this is not being afraid to put a big portion of your stack on the line for the sake of a bluff. Many low-stakes players are particularly concerned with attempting to go deep in tournaments without doing this unless they have a strong hand – they’re preoccupied with ‘lowering variance’. In reality, playing too tight in these spots increases variance, because you’re unable to win large pots without showdown, and you’re just waiting to make a hand. Learning to pull the trigger on a more frequent basis without fearing the outcome will be a big part of your poker development.
