Frustrated From Getting Check-Raised? This May Be Why

Hey!

Getting check-raised can be one of the most frustrating things you can encounter in poker. Especially when you don't have a good hand, facing a check-raise is often the last thing you want to deal with.

On the flip side, knowing how and when to make a good check-raise yourself can put you in a great position to win more pots. It also allows you to control the action and where the pot is going.

That's why in this newsletter issue, we'll take a look at what are the boards you should check-raise the most. We'll also get into the reason behind it, so that you can apply the same logic for any other situation in which your opponent might deviate from theory.

So let's get into it.

What Are The Most Frequently Check-Raised Flops?

To answer this, we have to narrow down the question first, otherwise it wouldn't fit this email.

Instead of covering every spot possible in poker, we'll focus on the most common situation in most poker games. A Button open raise vs. a Big Blind call.

Now, we open GTO Wizard, navigate to the spot and use their awesome feature which is called Reports. With Reports, you can look at all 1755 strategically different flops and see the distribution of bets, raises, calls and folds among them.

If we navigate to the Button, we see their overall distrubution of cbets over all 1755 flops. And we can see that the most used sizing overall is 33%. So let's select that and see how our reaction in the BB would look like.

Reacting to the 33% cbet, our response in the BB would be a call more than half of the time. One third of the time we are folding and the remaining 14% we are check-raising.

From these reports, we can also see how often different sizes are picked. Here, the choices are check-raising 50% pot or 100% pot. And the smaller sizing, 50% pot, is used almost exactly twice as often as the bigger sizing.

Alright, so far, so good. But which boards are check-raised the most?

Well, for that, we can simply look at the bottom of the reports page. There, we see a visualization of the calling, folding and raising distributions across every board.

The red marks the raising frequencies. And what we'll notice is that there are some bumps. Those indicate higher raising frequencies.

If we navigate the cursor over these bumps, we'll see a trend. All of these bumps are happening on flops where the board is paired. To be exact, the top card is paired.

Which means we have an answer to our question of which flops are check-raised the most - it's flops where the highest card is paired.

But why?

Asking why is the most important question in poker. Why? Because knowing the reason for a play prepares you for situations you haven't seen or studied before.

If you know the underlying principle that is at place, you can apply it to other situations, because you know how spots work, instead of just having memorized an isolated situation.

To find the reason why paired flops are check-raised the most, we'll look at our opponent's cbetting strategy. So we'll navigate back to the node before and look at the distribution of cbets across all flops for that node.

And what we see is...

...again, bumps for those flops that have a paired top card. Which tells us what?

It tells us that these are the flops that the Button would be cbetting most often.

So the conclusion we can draw is that because of the wider cbetting range, we also want to check-raise a wider range on paired boards.

And if we look closely, we see that both actions have one thing in common. Both as the cbetter as well as as the check-raiser, going for a high frequency of aggressive actions - betting or raising - occurs because of one premise: our opponent has to fold a big part of their range against our action.

The BTN can cbet a lot on paired boards because on those, the BB has less hands that connect with the board. Which means that the BB's originally weaker range (because he just called from the BB) hasn't had a chance to improve against the already strong opening range of the BTN.

Therefore, the BTN can expect a lot of folds when he cbets. And is therefore incentivized to cbet a lot.

On this JJ3r flop for example, they would have to fold 36% of their range, even though they are getting 4:1 odds when faced with a 1/3 pot bet.

To make up for this, they want to check-raise a lot: almost 25% of hands would be good enough to check-raise. A lot of them would of course be trips. And they are accompanied by small pocket pairs which profit from denying equity to higher overcards.

But alongside these, we can also see a lot of Q- and even T- and 9-high hands with only a backdoor flush draw. As well as 6-high hands which have additional equity from being able to turn a straight draw.

At the same time, the BB can expect a lot of folds when they check-raise the BTN cbet. Why? Because of the same reason as before: the BTN's cbetting range is wide and will therefore include a buch of hands that cannot continue against a check-raise. And by check-raising, the BB takes down the pot immediately and prevents them from realizing their equity with these hands.

On the same JJ3r flop, the BTN would have to fold 38% against a check-raise, so a big portion of their range. Which makes check raising attractive for the BB.

But since we just saw that the BB's check raising range should include quite a lot of weak hands as well, the BTN is able to - and even forced to - defend pure K highs and hands like 64s with a backdoor flush draw themselves.

So the next time you're facing a check-raise on a paired board, think twice before you throw away your unconnected hands. Against a supposedly wide check-raising range, you might have more room to continue with weaker hands than you think.

Summed up, we can take away 2 things + 1 bonus intake:

1. Check-raises (should) occur most on paired boards. Which means you should be able to use them yourself, but also be prepared to face them when you're the cbetter.

2. One reason for a high frequency of check-raises is a large amount of folds you can expect. And when your opponent is cbetting a lot (as they should), you can and should check-raise them a lot.

3. Point 2. can of course also be applied to situations where cbetting a lot is not the GTO play, but your opponent does so anyway! So whenever you notice that your opponent is cbetting a lot, it's time to widen your check-raising range and and punish them for their aggressive play.

Hope you could take away something you can integrate into your own game and help you be more aware of check-raising dynamics.

That’s it for this time, looking forward to seeing you in the next one!

Victor

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