Playing postflop is one of the biggest weak spots for no limit holdem cash game players, and the solution is often to work out postflop lines in advance of play at the table. This article takes an in-depth look at postflop betting, and comes up with a happy medium between taking down the pots when we don't have much of a hand, and winning the big pots when we have a great hand.
The bread-and-butter move of a smart, aggressive NLHE player is the standard continuation bet. If you are the preflop raiser (and as a reasonably tight, aggressive player you will often be), and get a call, then most times you will be following up with a standard bet on the flop of half the pot or more (typically 2/3 to 3/4 of the pot). Even if the flop missed you, it possibly missed your opponent as well, and with a hand worthy of a call, but not a reraise, preflop, their hand may not be as good as yours anyway. When you are making a continuation bet without a made hand, you are faced with a dilemma: you want to bet enough to get your opponent to fold, but you want to bet small enough that if you later give up on the hand, your loss is minimized.
There's an additional problem with the size of the continuation bet. That is when you actually flop a monster. If you are making your continuation bets (with missed flops) small, but betting larger with some sort of made hand, eventually opponents will be picking up bet size tells on you. Then, when you flop a monster hand, you will be forced to bet smaller to increase the likelihood you will get action. This is fine, but it violates the basic postflop rule of no limit holdem: play big pots with big hands.
Let's look at a basic postflop sequence. Assume an opponent who will not bet or raise, but has enough of a hand to call you down, including pot sized bets on the turn and river. The opponent will always fold to a larger-than-pot bet.
You raise from late position and get a call from the small blind. The pot is 9 BB, and both you and the big blind have at least 96 BB left. If your previous betting patterns mean you bet half pot (call it 5 BB) to get a call, the progression of bets is:
* (9 BB) Flop, bet (5 BB) and call.
* (19 BB) Turn, bet (19 BB) and call.
* (57 BB) River, bet (57 BB) and call.
You bet a total of 81 big blinds postflop, but you left 15 BB behind in your opponent's stack. That is a significant decrease in your win rate if you're regularly leaving that much on the table. The problem is, then, to find some sort of perfect bet size for the flop that will let us maximize our returns from big hands, while reducing our exposure when we're taking advantage of aggression and position by making a continuation bet.
We're not considering two situations here:
1) Your opponent has nothing and folds to your flop bet. This is unfortunate, but it's reality. We're setting ourselves up for the future, because one of the times it happens, your opponent will also have a big hand, and you will be stacking them.
2) Your opponent has a very good second-best hand. In those cases, you generally won't have to worry about getting all the money in; your opponent will be almost as eager as you are. Your biggest concern is that you and your opponent will slowplay each other into a relatively tiny pot.
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