Backing Up

by: Lou Krieger©

“Most of the time I call a bet on the river, I lose,” I was told by someone who decided to chat me up at a local casino and ask a few poker questions in the process. “I know I’m stubborn,” he said, “but I just don’t like to let go of a hand when I go that far with it. Besides, if my opponent bets and he’s bluffing, I’ve lost the entire pot if I fold, but it only costs me one additional bet to call his hand.”

It’s true that if you have to make an error on the river, calling is the error of choice, since the price of a call is only one additional bet while the cost of releasing the winning hand in the face of a river wager can be ten bets or more, depending on the size of the pot. Because of the potential cost it’s a huge error instead of a small, incremental one. But that doesn’t mean that a bet on the river should always be called. Sometimes it pays to toss your hand away in the face of an opponent’s wager.

I realized there was more to his question than deciding when to call a bet on the river, and that’s when I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that I usually win when I call on the river, and that there are very few occasions over the course of a session when I call on the river and lose. Something else was at play here.

Finally I realized that all of us aren’t going to the river with equal hands, and the circumstances where we find ourselves confronting a bet on the river are very different. Our hero, who seemed to be the caller more often than not, and losing much of the time he did call a bet on the river, must not only be making a mistake on the river, he was probably making a mistake on the turn too.

My mind flashed back to my last session. In four-plus hours of playing I recalled calling twice on the river with hands that lost. The rest of the time I was either the bettor on the river and won without a call, won when I was called by an opponent or the hands were checked down at the end. I also threw my hand away when I was on a flush draw that never materialized and couldn’t even beat a decent bluff, or I wasn’t contesting the river at all.

The river plays itself much of the time. At least it does for me. Either I’ve made two pair or a set or better, completed my flush or straight draw, think my top pair with big kicker is good enough to win if I bet and I’m called, or I have a hand that’s a candidate for checking down at the end. While there are some occasions when I’m heads up with A-K and try to bluff an opponent who calls with something like second or third pair, those are the exceptions.

Much of the time decisions on the river are are not all that tough. Your hand has either realized its potential or it’s failed to do so. In any event, it no longer has any potential and you can neither bet nor call because you think or hope your hand will improve on some future betting round. At this point you’ve either made the hand you were hoping to make or you didn’t — and if you made it, you ought to bet. After all, if you’re building a hand that you’re unwilling to bet when you complete it, why were you attempting to make that hand in the first place? There’s no payoff for sticking around in hopes of building second or third best hands. You want to draw to hands that will win the pot, not lose it.

The river isn’t the key to any of this. Whenever a mistake is made on the river there’s a good chance that it’s merely compounding a mistake made on an earlier betting round. Remember our hero, the guy who’s calling and losing with regularity on the river? The river’s probably not his problem at all. Maybe it’s the turn, and if he looks back at many of the hands he’s played, he’ll probably see that he shouldn’t have played them on the turn either.

And if he made an error on the turn, perhaps he shouldn’t have called a bet on the flop. And yes, he probably had a hand that didn’t warrant a play before the flop either. The answers can be as varied as the player and his cards, but if you’re finding yourself calling and losing too often on the river, you need to examine the way your hand played out and decide if you should have been involved with your hand on the turn. But don’t stop there. Go back to the flop and even the start of the hand.

My guess is that you’re making mistakes on one or more of these betting rounds that lead you down a wrong road. Then you find yourself at the river, confronted by an opponent’s wager, and you decide to call in order to avoid the catastrophic dilemma of calling with a hand you almost certainly know will be the lesser of the two, or you toss it away and never really know if you folded with the best of it. But the river is not your problem. It only seems to be the problem because the river is where the results are revealed, and there’s nowhere to go from there but the next hand, when the truth of the matter is that the river is only the last visible symptom of an issue that developed far earlier.

It’s like a 40-year smoker dying from emphysema. Dealing with emphysema doesn’t leave you a lot of options. But if you could go back in time and stop smoking, you’d probably never get emphysema in the first place.

Look at the hands you’re losing with and look backwards with an eye to deciding where you should have gotten off the train. Maybe you should have exited at the turn, or quite possibly a whole lot earlier than that.

In poker the best starting hand becomes the winning hand more often than not, and calling with hands that build second or third pair, or low percentage hands like small gapped connectors are hands that frequently put you on the road to ruin. When you do win with them, no one usually suspects you have such beauties in your hand, but in limit hold’em they don’t win often enough to provide a long term positive expected value. Save those hands, if you must, for no-limit games, where you can see the flop for one bet with lots of opponents in the pot before you, and you’re getting nearly infinite implied odds. If you do that and can manage your impulses so you can release these hands whenever they don’t flop an absolutely miraculous hand for you — which will be the vast majority of the time — then you can play them.

But if you’re losing too frequently at the river, just try backing up and you’ll probably find that your real error occurred a lot earlier in the hand.