A blocker bet, sometimes called a blocking bet, is a small, out of position bet that is designed to prevent your opponent from making a large bet. These are not to be confused with thin value bets, which can sometimes look like a blocker bet, but thin value bets can be made in any position and by definition only involve made hands.

Why do people make blocker bets?

Blocker bets can be an effective way of paying less to see another card or get to showdown. If you expect your opponent to bet 65-85% of the pot size but you have a hand that would like to continue, you may be able to make a smaller bet and save yourself a decent amount and still be able to see the next card. Your opponent needs to have a range weighted away from strong hands or you will get raised too often and then you will pay without getting to see another card.

How big is a blocker bet?

There’s no set size, but it has to be large enough that it won’t automatically get raised but smaller than the betsize that you would expect your opponent to make. I’d say between 25-50% of the pot size is pretty standard.

What kind of hands do people make blocker bets with?

Weak hands that would like to continue or see showdown but can’t continue in the face of a large bet are probably the most common in practice. Medium strength draws are the other prime candidate for blocker bets.

What are the downsides of making blocker bets?

Mostly that your small betsizing will betray the strength of your hand or allow you to be pushed out of the hand by an assertive opponent. A blocker bet will be extremely effective against weak opponents who will let you dictate almost every action in the hand. Blocker bets are overused by beginners, who are afraid to make bolder decisions and make a strong thin value bet or turn a draw into a semi-bluff.

This is a very basic concept that is mostly used to clearly convey the situation when recalling a hand of poker. The effective stack size is the smaller stack size between two players.

Example:

John has €145 on the table.

Tim has €105 on the table.

They are in the hand together and all other players have folded.

The fact that John has an extra €40 is irrelevant to the hand. His extra money gives him no advantage and cannot be put into play under any circumstances. (However, advanced players will know that there are times when the number of chips a player has will affect the decisions he makes.) If you were talking about the hand with a friend and wanted to communicate the stack sizes to the hand you would say “The effective stack size is €105.” This is clear and concise. If you don’t understand effective stacksizes, you might end up saying “John has €145 and Tim has €105.” This increases the cognitive load on the listener as well as introducing the potential for them to only remember one of the numbers and get the effective stack size wrong.

It’s not frames per second or first person shooter, FPS stands for fancy play syndrome. Fancy play syndrome is a term that refers to the mistake of taking an otherwise simple hand and playing it in an overly complicated way.

How do I avoid fancy play syndrome?

There is a fine line between brilliant play and fancy play syndrome, but there is a very general way to avoid it at low levels, where playing standard tight aggressive poker is still very profitable.

• If you have a strong hand, bet and try to get the money in unless you have reason to believe your opponent will bet or your hand eliminates possibilities of your opponent having a hand that he is able to continue with (such as flopping a set of aces)
• Make your bluffs with equity, at least some overcards, if not a flush or straight draw.
• Avoid making hero call downs for lots of money
• Make your decisions both pre and post flop based off of hand strength. No need to three bet that 52s.

In the long term, you’ll have to outgrow these simplifications, but the general trend for successful poker players is that they start off as very loose and passive losing players, then play too tight, followed by opening up their game and playing slightly too loose, and ultimately settling in a middle ground. This usually means playing about 20-25% of hands in a six max no limit hold’em game.

A thin value bet is a bet that is designed to get your opponent to call too frequently (as opposed to fold too frequently) but your hand is not very strong and is in fact worse than many of your opponents likely holdings.

When is it best to make thin value bets?

While there are exceptions, the river tends to be the best place to make a thin value bet. Marginally good hands are very vulnerable to being drawn out on, so they are better candidates for pot control on earlier streets.

How big should thin value bets be?

The expected value of a given betsize is determined by a simple math formula (although some of the variables you input will always be educated guesses).  There is legitimate concern that you could give away the strength of your hand if you are making different betsizes with slightly good hands than you would with a very strong hand. The fear is less that your opponent will stop calling with worse hands, and more that your opponent will stop calling with worse hands and start bluff raising you.

Are blocker bets and thin value bets the same thing?

Nope, in both we have a hand that is of marginal value, but among other things, blocker bets are small relative to pot size and are made out of position.

What happens if someone raises my thin value bets?

If a clever opponent starts raising your thin value bets, he may have legitimately trapped you with a good hand or he may be bluffing at your perceived weakness. I would default to folding and maybe not betting so thin next time. Calling or reraising (if there is enough money behind) can be a reasonable response, but at lower stakes this is not necessary to play winning poker and will likely result in fancy play syndrome instead of controlled aggression.

A value bet in poker is when a player with a strong hand is making a bet with the hopes of getting called by another player with a worse hand. This contrasts with other types of bets, such as bluffs and blocking bets.  A specific variant of the value bet is the thin value bet. It sounds simple, and is very simple, but is much more valuable than you might think. Knowing what types of bets exist in poker, and why they are made will lead you to one of the most important questions in poker: “Why am I making this bet?”

If you have already headed to the next logical question, “How do I know my opponent is likely to have a worse hand than me?” you should read my post on ranges in poker. At the bottom of that post is an example of a the process to determine your opponents’ range. Much of that skill will come from playing a lot of poker and consciously thinking about what trends you are seeing in the collective play of your opponents.

P.S. Today’s post was super basic, but I am trying to make this very accommodating to new poker players. The “pain” caused by a more experienced player having to spend 5 second scanning a post to see that it isn’t relevant to his needs is far smaller than the “pain” of a complete novice being surrounded with terms and concepts that he doesn’t understand and feeling overwhelmed. This will be part of a series on very specific types of bets and what that means for you, an aspiring poker player.

Slowplaying is defined is the act of diguising a very strong hand by playing as if it were a much weaker hand. This is achieved by taking a more passive approach to the hand, letting other players dictate the flow of the hand.

Slowplaying too much is a common pitfall of beginner poker players. Rather than to simply tell you to stop doing that and be more aggressive, I’ll explain the motivation for slowplaying and a natural outgrowth of that explanation is the reasoning behind using the slowplay sparingly.

Goals of Slowplaying

1. Disguise the strength of your hand
2. Wait for your opponent to make a second best hand
3. Induce bluffs from your opponent

Disguising your hand is a basic goal in poker, but against many (less aggressive) opponents it makes more sense to represent a bluff, not medium strength or completely worthless hand. How often do you or anyone else at a small stakes game flat call the flop, check through the turn and then raise a blank river as a bluff? Almost never. Once you make that river raise, your hand isn’t very disguised at all, and you have very little to show for the part of the hand where it was disguised. If you just raise the flop in the first place, you are mixing up your play by taking a line that could credibly be a strong hand or a weak hand.

Letting your opponent catch up to you is also a good idea in theory. After all, if you have the nuts, letting more cards out will increase the probability that your opponent will make a hand that’s almost as good as yours, right? Not quite. You have flopped a full house on a board with a flush draw. Let’s say that your opponent is drawing to the flush and you have the option of either betting or checking back the flop. He will make his flush ~20% of the time and you stand a good chance of taking his whole stack. But what if he has a low flush and doesn’t stack off? What if he is unwilling to put lots of money in on a paired board? He will likely call a flop bet anyway, so you get money from his uncompleted flush draws and from when he completes the flush. Plus, you get money from all the hands that aren’t draws, and even though you think you are letting your opponent catch up, you may be letting the board get scarier for middle strength hands.

However, if we adjust that situation to where you have bet the flop on a board with a flush draw, received a call and now have the option to either check back or bet on a non-flush turn card, the argument for slowplaying is way more compelling. Now your opponent might fold all of his flush draws

Inducing a bluff at the pot also has value in some situations. The problem is that against players who aren’t very good at hand reading and aren’t very aggressive (I’m describing most microstakes players) is that at best you will get a one small bet out of the play. Most players are just going to take a stab at the pot and when they see that you didn’t fold they will give up on the hand. You are especially unlikely to induce bluffs if there has been a reraise preflop or if there was action on the flop and you are looking to induce bluffs.

My next post (tomorrow, if the hurricane smiles kindly on the power grid) will have a hand that should be played differently against different types of players, and guess what?  One of the correct options will be slowplaying!