5 Things You Should Be Doing BvB (But Probably Aren’t)
In poker, particularly online, where blind-versus-blind (BVB) situations arise frequently, developing a strong BVB strategy is essential to maintaining a healthy win rate.
In this article, I am going to break down five core strategies that you should implement to set yourself apart from the field.
Let’s dive into it!
Core Strategy #1 – 3-Betting Aggressively Against Steals
Stealing the blinds is the core incentive behind poker strategies. If there were no forced bets preflop (posting the Big Blind and the Small Blind), then the optimal strategy would be something akin to waiting for Aces and hoping that someone is foolish enough to put money into the pot with a weaker hand. That would make for a terribly uninteresting game.
When you are in the Small Blind, only one guy is standing between you and taking down the blinds. This makes the optimal strategy for open-raising a highly aggressive one, especially because you’ve already invested half a big blind.
When you’re on the other side of it, however, you should be fighting tooth and nail for your investment. Your opponent is attempting to steal with a loose range, so your response should be to defend with a loose range yourself.
Now, when it comes to defending, I am not talking only about calling, which is like blocking a sword attack with your shield. When I am talking about defending, I mean both:
- Blocking with your shield (calling) and
- Counter-attacking with your own sword (3-betting)
3-betting is paramount for optimal defense because it doesn’t allow the opponent free attempts at denying your equity. Your opponent must understand that attacking (trying to deny your equity in the pot) comes with a decently sized risk/cost, and that cost is getting their own equity denied.
Should you not do this properly, the Small Blind could easily expand their raising range way beyond the theoretical equilibrium and thus increase their win-rate considerably.
An optimal 3-betting strategy in this spot is a loose one, and that has everything to do with the opponent’s looseness, which makes more hands in your range become value-worthy. With more value hands, more bluffs are required to create a balanced 3-betting range.
In the end, the resulting 3-betting range should be comprised of 19% of all starting hands.
Core Strategy #2 – Polarized 3-Betting
If you left the previous section wondering why there was no visual representation of that range, it was because I wanted to touch on the topic of range composition first.
While I advocate for a 3-bet-only linear defending strategy from every position outside of the Big Blind when faced with open-raises, this shifts completely when it comes to defending the Big Blind. This becomes even more accentuated against the Small Blind.
So why is linear the optimal response in one situation and highly sub-optimal in this one?
It has everything to do with the fact that when there are players who have not yet acted (uncapped), your strategy has a very large impact on their strategy. If you were to attempt to create a polarized 3-betting strategy from, say, the Cutoff against a Lojack raise, that would:
- Create an incentive to cold-call and to 4-bet more aggressively against your re-raise (as it is, relatively speaking, a weaker range)
- Create an incentive to squeeze much more aggressively against your capped cold-calling range
Ultimately, both these strategic adjustments end up hurting your equity realization.
When you are in the Big Blind, however, there are no players that have yet to act, so there’s no need to protect your calling range from squeezes.
This means that you now have the opportunity to expand your defending range by 3-betting with hands that would otherwise not be able to call, ultimately increasing your overall equity realization (and inextricably minimizing your opponent’s).
In the end, this is what a theoretically impregnable defense strategy looks like when faced with a Small Blind open-raise:
(Image taken from Lucid Poker)
You have a top region of hands (99+, AQ), a medium region (suited connectors, suited broadways, A5s-A4s, AJo, and KQo), and the bluff region (A2o, A3o, A6o, K7o, K8o, T8o, T3s, T5s, J2s, etc.), which will fold against a 4-bet from the Small Blind.
Core Strategy #3 – Mindfully Protecting Your Checking Range on Low Boards (as Small Blind)
Low boards are notoriously bad for your range. Not because you don’t have the range advantage (because you often do), but rather because you have a ton of non-made hands with decent equity, but simply too many compared to your value range.
Since betting all of your value hands and balancing them with an unexploitable amount of bluffs leaves a bunch of your non-made hands unprotected, and since these hands still have a good amount of equity (they will have at least an overcard to the board), the Big Blind could exploit this strategy by range-betting, denying the equity of those hands 100% of the time without any counter-play available on your end.
It then becomes higher EV to start checking with your better hands so that you may trap the Big Blind’s over-aggressiveness.
If you start always trapping, the Big Blind could exploit you by checking back with all but his strongest hands and some bluffs, effectively realizing equity for free all the time.
All of this back-and-forth leads to an equilibrium point where both players are handcuffed from being too aggressive or too trappy.
On low boards, this equilibrium point is one that has the Small Blind c-betting at low frequencies. This strategy includes a lot of trapping, but also some betting to prevent too frequent free equity realization.
The key point that I want you to understand is that when you look at a board such as 9c 7c 3d, and you hold:
- Ah 9s
- Kd 9h
- Ts Th
- Qd Qc
Your thought process is not: “I have a good hand, I should bet now”.
Rather, go one level above that and think: “This board is not favorable for my range, the equilibrium strategy would check at a high frequency with my hand. Let me think about how likely it is that my opponent is going to over- or undershoot his aggression frequency and how he may mis-construct his betting range.”
And then, if you cannot come up with an answer that has a high degree of certainty, you can either mix between betting and checking, or simply go with the action that you feel like you can execute better down the game tree.
It may feel safe to always take the beaten path, but as you progress through the stakes, your biases towards one line or the other will be exposed more and more frequently against better competition.
For reference, here’s how the solver would approach this c-betting scenario:
Core Strategy #4 – Simplify Your Strategy On Certain Textures
Mixing between lines definitely has its place in your execution, but it should be done as little as possible, especially as more information is exchanged in the duration of the hand.
Having said that, even when there hasn’t been a lot of information exchange (like on the flop), you can still opt to eliminate mixing from your strategy if that:
- Massively simplifies your cognitive load
- Doesn’t create major exploitative avenues for your opponent, or the exploitative strategy is not easy to implement for people (think high raising frequencies with weak and medium hands)
- Puts the opponent in a tough spot or takes advantage of a common leak found in the population
This is a recommendation that I have for boards where the game theory optimal strategy is already a somewhat aggressive one, where you should now start range-betting for a small size.
The boards that I suggest simplifying follow these templates:
- Non Ace-high, double broadway, rainbow, with disconnected bottom cards – think boards such as Kd Jh 6c, Ks Td 5c, Qs Jc 4d
- Non Ace-high, single broadway, rainbow, with disconnected top cards – think boards such as Kd 8s 5d, Qs 7d 4h, Jh 6c 4s
- High paired, rainbow boards – think Jd Js 6h, Qs Qd 8c, Ks Kh 5c, Ad Ac 8h
Simplifying to range-betting on these textures only leads to a maximum expected value (EV) loss of ~0.5% of the pot*. That is an insignificant amount of EV to put at risk for two reasons:
- The counter-strategy necessary to take advantage of this deviation is highly unintuitive, as it goes against the normal human biases (folding less and raising more with weaker hands)
- The amount and size of the exploitative opportunities that are to be found on the turn and especially on the river.
* This implies an unexploitable strategy on the flop against the raise, as well as on the turn and river.
Core Strategy #5 – Expanding Your Value Range With Creative Bet Sizing
Let’s take a look at the following scenario:
You open-raised from the Small Blind with Kh 8d, the Big Blind called, the flop came Kc Jd 6h, you c-bet 33% pot, your opponent called, and the turn is the Qd.
Your hand was very strong on the flop, but the Qd turn brought in two straights: the AT and the T9 (both present in suited and offsuited forms in Big Blind’s range). Your hand has decreased significantly in value. Definitely not strong enough to bet your typical 75% pot size.
So, is checking really the only option?
It’s not.
Block-betting is a superpower when out of position. It allows you to expand both your value and bluffing range, minimizing your opponent’s equity realization while creating difficult, bias-pressuring, defense strategies for your opponent.
Here’s what the solver chooses as the optimal strategy in this spot for your hand:
What do you achieve by betting small here?
You get to value bet against Big Blind’s many weaker top pairs, Qx, 6x, open-enders, flush draws, etc. You also get to deny a bit of equity from hands such as gutshots (which should be mixing between calling and folding) and pocket pairs (which still have about 4-5% equity against your hand).
Not only that, but you create a situation for Big Blind where he has to be very careful as to how often he raises his straights and how carefully he balances that raising range. In practice, you will find that your opponents will always raise with the nuts but will tend to call too often with hands that should be raising as a bluff, in which case you manage to escape with a minimal loss on the turn while getting your equity denied less frequently by worse hands.
That’s a damn good deal. I like to call this play info-betting.
Here is how I define it:
An info-bet is a bet that performs in a mathematically sound way* that also creates a massive informational exchange about the opponent’s range.
This is a practical (rather than a theoretical) concept as it exploits the intuitive response of us humans. A machine will cloak its strategy with sufficient deception, as it doesn’t have any biases; rather, it’s an EV calculator.
* Meaning it either extracts enough value (in the case of made hands) or denies enough equity (in the case of semi-bluffs)
Now, is this exploitable? Absolutely not! That’s because you will put all of your stronger hands in this bet size too. Take a look:
So why is it optimal to bet so small with hands such as AT, T9, KK, etc.? It’s because this is No Limit Hold’em. This means that you can re-raise to any size should you face a raise on the turn, and you can bet any size, should you face only a call on the turn.
You can effectively get your whole stack in with just one bet (or raise). Not saying that this is the optimal play with these hands, but having it in your pocket is all that matters. You are not handcuffed by the betting structure when it comes to extracting maximum value.
Wrapping Up
By understanding and implementing these 5 core strategies, you will be ahead of the field. Now go into the solver. Fire up the drills. Drill until the patterns become instinctive.
Get smart, stay sharp.
Dan – out.
To learn more about how to use creative bet sizing, read: The River Block Bet: Why Small Bets Can Be Your Biggest Edge.
