When beginning the dive into the intricacies of postflop tournament poker, many players start in the wrong place. In fact, they almost do things backwards – they look at individual hands, representing very specific sets of circumstances, and try to use them to extrapolate their approach.
A more productive way to do things is to start with the situations that occur the most often, which is where this article comes in. It’s simply not that important to spend hours and hours studying a certain type of spot that comes up once every 10,000 hands, if you haven’t put the effort into studying the situations that come up 100 times as often. Here are three of the most common, and thus most important, types of postflop scenarios to get your head around before you take a deep dive.
EP or MP raise, flat-called by MP or LP
The reasons why this is a common and important scenario should be fairly obvious. The earlier our position when opening, the more players left to act behind us, and thus the more likely it is that we’ll get flat-called, and have to play the pot out of position postflop.
It stands to reason that the most important aspect of any postflop hand – at least, at its starting point, before the flop is dealt – is to understand the preflop ranges of the players in question. Obviously as our opponent’s position gets later and their stack size gets deeper, the width of their range likely increases – someone flatting UTG+1 on 30bb should set off alarm bells, while someone flatting on the button on 100bb doesn’t necessarily constitute anything about which you should be worried.
The key to playing these spots more effectively, though, is understanding your own preflop range, and how it affects the spot. When you open UTG and get flatted by the button, that’s a totally different spot to when you open in the hijack or cutoff and the button flats. The latter spots should be played much less aggressively in general out of position, since your range contains a much lower proportion of strong hands. C-betting frequencies should be lower, and check-raising the flop should always be considered as an option.
LP raise, called by SB or BB
Again, it should be obvious why this is so common – we’ll be raising a lot in the cutoff and on the button, maybe close to 50% of hands at some times, and the players in the blinds are likely to call our raise with high frequencies – we’ll generally get called by one or both blinds anywhere between 40% and 70% of the time, meaning that this particular situation could occur in anywhere up to around 35% of all instances where it folds to us in late position.
It’s tempting to assume that these spots should be really easy, since our opponents are going to have wide and weak ranges for the most part, but the key is to recognize that this is also true of ourselves. The wider we open in late position, the weaker our range across all possible flops. As a result, it’s much harder for us to show significant aggression, since we risk going way overboard and losing more when we don’t get a fold than we win when we do.
Understanding how to build good c-betting and checking back ranges in these spots is important, and the same goes for recognizing the distribution of hands in your opponent’s range, and their propensity to get sticky with bluff-catchers. It’s worth noting also that there will usually be a huge gap between the average small blind flatting range, and the average big blind flatting range.
Defending the BB versus an open-raise
Now, we come to the flip side of the situation described above. The spot where we’re the one calling in the big blind. Studying up on blind defense ranges and developing appropriate frequencies is pivotal to allowing yourself to actually play these OOP spots more effectively, and understanding how to build flop check-raising ranges, turn leading ranges, and bluff-catching strategies are all crucial factors in minimizing your big blind losses.
It’s necessary to recognize the strength and significance of your opponent’s opening range, also – it almost goes without saying that defending the same range versus a 12% UTG open as you would versus a 60% button open would be suicide. Likewise, defending the same range at 100bb stacks as you would at 30bb would also be a mistake – stack depth has a massive impact on postflop dynamics, and thus on how easy or difficult it is to play a particular hand OOP.
Adapting to new situations
Finally, we must always consider the relationships between these fundamental situations, and more unique ones that come up every now and again. The situation of raising the cutoff and getting called by the button, or raising blind vs blind, or defending versus a SB 3-bet are all variations on these themes.
By developing a strong foundational awareness of these key situations and getting comfortable playing them profitably against a wide variety of opponents, you give yourself a foundation from which you can build. Without a solid foundation, your postflop performance may remain unstable for some time.