Static and Dynamic Board Textures in Poker

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Skim through any poker literature from the last ten years and you’ll probably hear the words ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ more than you would expect. The reason for this is, of course, that these terms have become commonplace in describing board textures (more specifically, flop textures) in No Limit Hold’em, to the point where people have begun using them without really knowing exactly what they mean.

Contextually, they’re often used to describe whether a particular board hits a certain player’s preflop range or not, but they’re also often used to describe whether a board contains a lot of draws – this differentiation can be confusing. What if a board hits a player’s range hard, but doesn’t contain many draws? Is it wet or dry? Hard to tell.

However, thanks to Will Tipton’s fantastic Expert Heads-Up No Limit Hold’em books, a must-read for every advanced poker player, we can avoid this confusion fairly simply by using different terminologies. The terms ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’, as applied within the two books, fit perfectly for this purpose, and with a little experimentation using GTO calculators, we can determine with a reasonable degree of accuracy how these factors should usually affect our play.

What constitutes a static board?

A static board, in simple terms, is a board where hand equities are very unlikely to change when the next card arrives. If you asked most people “what’s the dryest flop in NLHE?”, they would probably say “deuce-deuce-deuce”, but this is an example of why ‘static’ is a more useful term than ‘dry’.

The most static flop in NLHE is actually Ace-Ace-Ace – on the 2-2-2 board, even a hand like 9-8 suited can improve to beat pocket sixes, or King-Jack can improve to beat Ace-Queen, etc. On the A-A-A flop, anyone with the Ace has 100% equity guaranteed, and even KK has almost 100% equity against anything but the Ace (it can chop with another Kx hand if the fourth Ace comes, or it can lose to running quads).

In short, on a static board, equities are slightly more polarized. For example, on an A-9-3 rainbow flop, hands can be loosely divided into two categories – equal to or better than Ace-deuce, or worse than Ace-deuce. The equity of Ace-deuce versus an opponent’s range is likely to be significantly better than the next best hand, KK.

This is because of one determining factor – the high card on the board. The higher the top card on the board, the more static a board is likely to be, because it’s significantly more difficult for unpaired hands to improve to top pair, and thus the equities of unpaired hands are less likely to change. A J-7-2 rainbow flop is significantly less static than K-7-2 – in fact, with no gutshots or draws at all, K-7-2 rainbow is probably the most static unpaired flop you’ll find.

What constitutes a dynamic board?

Dynamic boards, fairly obviously, are the opposite of static ones. Dynamic boards are the ones where the hand equities are very likely to change on the next card. If we reverse the principles we established for static boards, we can infer that the lower the top card on the board, the more dynamic it is. We can also assume that boards containing a lot of draws are very dynamic – whether the draws hit or miss on the turn, hand equities change a lot.

What’s the most dynamic board in NLHE? It’s 4-3-2 monotone, since even the blankest possible turn card is an overcard that can give someone a good top pair. Even 8-7 of spades can improve to top pair on 4-3-2 all diamonds, while any Ace, five or six will bring a straight, any diamond brings a flush, and any 4, 3 or 2 will pair the board. Two black Kings on a 4-3-2 diamond flop is going to feel anywhere from slightly uncomfortable to very unhappy on any of roughly 27 different turn cards.

Dynamic boards tend to correspond reasonably closely with the kinds of boards that people often describe as ‘wet’, but the reason for this is that people tend to frequently call preflop with hands that make a lot of straights and flushes, and therefore their ranges tend to hit dynamic boards very strongly.

This means dynamic boards often give a range advantage to the preflop caller – particularly the ones containing cards between a 7 and a Jack. The lower-card, more extremely dynamic flops tend to veer back in favour of the preflop raiser, because it’s harder for the caller to make two-pair, set or straight hands on these boards.

Playing each texture accordingly

NB: The conclusions in the following paragraphs have been derived from over 100 hours of work with Simple Postflop, a postflop GTO calculator with the power to run very complex flop, turn and river scenarios.

With these principles in mind, we can start setting out a few principles regarding our approach on each different type of board. On static boards, there are a few things we can say with reasonable confidence – it’s usually harder for us to represent a bluff when we raise versus our opponent’s bet, since there are often very few draws for us to be bluffing with. Simultaneously, it’s very difficult for us to represent a wide variety of value hands, since we’re usually ‘repping very thin’, and our value range will contain only a few specific combinations of hands.

With this in mind, and bearing in mind that we can more comfortably slowplay big hands on static boards in the knowledge that it’s very hard for a bad card to come on a future street, our strategy on static boards should involve a lot of betting and calling on the flop and turn, but not too much raising or folding. We’ll then get to the river with a range of hands which is fairly clearly divided into value hands, bluffs, and bluff-catchers, and our river decisions will be reasonably straightforward.

Conversely, on dynamic boards, doing a lot of betting and calling is going to get us into spots where we’re bluffing ineffectively, and playing a guessing game on a bad turn or river card more often than we’d like. With that in mind, dynamic boards dictate a style that involves more checking, raising and folding, in order to put ourselves in spots where we’re either putting pressure on our opponent’s range and giving ourselves a chance to get them to fold hands with a reasonably amount of equity, giving ourselves the opportunity to get stacks in on an earlier street and avoid being forced to fold out some of our equity, or simply folding and recognising that future streets are going to dictate that the spot is simply not favourable to us.

Many people are far too preoccupied with how to get value from their two black Aces or a similar one-pair on that T-9-8 all-red flop, when they should be thinking in terms of minimising the damage done during the part of the hand where their hand has only ~50% equity against their opponent’s range, and maximising the value they get when the later streets do run out in their favour and their equity jumps up above 65-70%.

On the other hand, flopping the nuts with a black Queen-Jack on that flop and allowing your opponent to catch up to a flush or a full house on the turn because you decided to slow-play can be a devastating mistake, so knowing the difference between having 65% and 50% can be crucial. Equities on dynamic flops are rarely anywhere lower than 30% or higher than 70%, so you’re not often that far ahead with a one pair hand until you get to the turn or river.

When the board is somewhere in the middle

Most flops and boards, of course, are somewhere in between a static and dynamic – they might be a K-T-3 with two diamonds, or a Q-9-6 rainbow, or a T-5-4 monotone. In these cases, we have to use our understanding of the principles outlined above, alongside our reads on our opponents and our estimation of their ranges, to decide on the extent to which we might be able to add nuances to our play.

We might decide to check-raise a very static flop against an opponent who c-bets too much, or slowplay the nut flush against a player who will never give us credit for a strong hand on a blank turn. But for the most part, we should remember that the principles of equity and range distribution hold true no matter what the situation, and that understanding static and dynamic flop textures is a crucial part of achieving a tight grip on No-Limit Hold’em fundamentals. Make an effort to shift your thinking towards the blueprint first suggested to us by Will Tipton’s books, and you’ll find your postflop play steps up a notch or two very quickly.