The Continuation Bet | Bet Size and Bet Tendencies
The long established reasoning in the poker community has been to size your continuation bet in proportion to the pot size such that you offer yourself good odds on the bet. Meaning you want to bet as small as possible in order to give yourself an overlay against your opponent. However, you don’t want to bet too little to give your opponent odds to draw or improve. Poker players reason, if they bet between one-half and two-thirds the pot size they maximize the value of their continuation bet, by giving themselves the greatest overlay possible on this bet without giving their opponents too good odds to continue. The goal is to find the balance. This means if you are betting between one-half and two-thirds pot your continuation bets are going to show more profit right? Not at all!
This is a shortsighted and generally stupid way of looking at why we continuation bet after every flop. Instead of focusing our logic on the hands we end up playing versus opponents we focus it on how we can maximize our value given how likely they are to have missed and then fold the flop. Continuation bets are not a bet that can be examined in a vacuum.
When we continuation bet (one of the known poker betting patterns) we cannot just consider the profitability of the bet based on the percentage of the time our opponents fold instead we must also consider what happens when they continue. The hands that our opponents continue in are far more important then the ones they fold, they contain more money, more decisions, and are a larger part of your profit. Instead, we must consider a broader perspective using continuation bets as a piece to the larger puzzle. We want to put our opponents in tough spots when they continue after the flop instead of maximizing our "missed flop" value. We want the later streets of each hand to be easier and higher EV for us because those streets give us far more expected value then the continuation bet.
To put it succinctly the goal of a continuation bet is to maximize the EV of the entire hand, and that often means betting more then 2/3rds pot and sometimes even just continuation betting larger then the pot. The most important factor to consider when making your continuation bets is that they be of similar size in similar situations. Your goal on the flop in your own raised pots is to keep your hand disguised from your opponent as long as possible. The more disguised your hand, the more mistakes and misreads your opponents make. Your continuation bet size cannot give off information on your hand in anyway. So what are some factors that we can consider that will change our continuation bet size?
Flop texture is far and away what I will look at right away when considering my continuation bet. Larger bets are for "wetter" boards and smaller bets are for “drier” boards. You want to charge more on boards with more draws, and allow more hands to call on boards where you have more equity versus an opponents calling range. Meaning, on drier boards opponents have less outs, less equity and bigger bets force opponents to define their hand earlier on.
Another important factor to consider when making a continuation bet is the size of your stack and your opponents. If you are the preflop raiser, it is often your goal to have the option to triple barrel your opponent (bet flop, turn, and river where he would call all three) whether bluffing or value betting for their entire stack. You want to be able to size your river bets in larger proportions of your opponents stack. Instead of value betting most of their stack, your river bets should be a push.
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