How To Play Straight Turns After Check-Raising the Flop (Advanced Strategy)
In case you’ve missed the first article of the series, I am teaching you how to play after you’ve check-raised the flop. I chose a board that allows for a wide variety of turn runouts and use it as a canvas to explore the concepts that shape optimal turn strategy. While boards vary, the ideas we cover will apply to the vast majority of situations.
Part one focused on flush-completing turns. If you’ve already read it, I highly recommend revisiting it when you have time—it’ll deepen your understanding and help you internalize the concepts more effectively.
Now, we’re moving on to the next chapter: how to play when the turn brings in a straight.
Let’s dive in.
Quick Recap of the Action
The scenario we are working with is that the Button open-raised, and you defended from the Big Blind.
The flop came Js 8s 2d. The Button fires a 75% pot continuation bet, and you responded with a 3.5x check-raise. He called.
Diving Deep into the Straight-Completing Runouts
We have 12 turns that complete straights: 7x, 9x, Tx, and Qx (each with three suits).
Here’s how the equity distribution looks:
And what the overall strategy looks like on each of them:
Straight-completing turns rank as the second-best runouts for your range in terms of equity, trailing only flush-completing turns.
However, the betting strategies on these runouts differ significantly. For example, 7x turns show the lowest betting frequency, while Qx turns have the highest.
On 7x turns, we lean toward a more polarized approach: betting less often but using larger sizes on average. In contrast, Qx turns call for a more merged strategy, with higher betting frequency and smaller average sizes.
Let’s break down each of these turns in detail and run some advanced analysis.
The Turn 7h
The 7h turn completes open-ended straight draws for both players, hands that appear frequently in each range due to their strong equity on the flop. As a result, this runout creates a symmetrical nut distribution at equilibrium, which you can see in the range distribution data below:
This lack of nut advantage, combined with your positional disadvantage, forces a more defensive approach compared to other straight-completing turns. The goal is to protect your equity and ensure your gutshots can still realize their potential.
If you don’t adopt this strategy, the Button could start range-betting with a small size and effectively strip away the equity your gutshots hold on the turn.
To counter that, you should mix in some slowplays with your two-pair-or-better hands, around 20% of the time.
So, in the end, here’s how your strategy should look on the 7x turns:
- Mostly fast play your two-pair-or-better hands
- Mix top pairs between betting and checking, especially since you should’ve check-raised the flop with some small frequency of hands like AJ and QJ
- Bluff with your weaker pairs, which usually come with a draw
- Barrel most of your flush draws and combo draws
- Give up with most gutshots, they rarely have enough going for them here
The idea is to turn your checking range into a trap. You’ll be check-raising very aggressively against the Button’s stab, using your high-equity hands and draws, while simply giving up with your gutshots.
The Turn 9h and Th
I’ve grouped these two turns together because they play out with very similar dynamics.
Both complete gutshot straight draws and generate a lot of middle-pair-plus-draw combinations. These hands, along with the gutshots themselves, are key to understanding the range-versus-range interaction in this spot.
Gutshot-completing turns are significantly better for your range than your opponent’s, thanks to the nut asymmetry they create.
A large portion of your check-raise bluffs came from gutshots, while your opponent folded roughly 50% of theirs on the flop. That’s largely due to your use of a large c-bet size, which gave them poor pot odds to continue.
Now, with these gutshot-completing turns, your range holds a massive advantage. Take a look at the range compositions below, starting with the 9h:
Now we’ll follow that up with the Th:
In the images below, you’ll see that you hold a 2:1 nut advantage on these turns. That gives you the green light to play aggressively and capitalize on your equity edge.
As mentioned earlier, a major portion of your range consists of pair-plus-draw hands.
The key concept to understand here is this: your pair+draw hands should be played very aggressively, and I’ll explain exactly why in the sections that follow.
You shouldn’t go for showdown value with them, because they don’t have that much showdown value to begin with.
The vast majority of your opponent’s flop bet-calling range consists of made hands, mostly top pairs. So when you hit a second pair with something like Q9 or QT, you’re rarely ahead at showdown. That’s because:
- Your opponent will often have a stronger hand
- And when they don’t, they’ll frequently bluff you off anyway
So, checking these hands doesn’t generate much expected value (EV).
Now let’s look at what betting achieves in theory on the Th turn:
A 75% pot bet will fold out many of the Button’s top pairs that were ahead of you, like QT, allowing you to avoid a split. It also forces folds from a lot of strong flush draws that had solid equity against your hand.
Looking at the Button’s calling range below, you’ll see that you still get called by plenty of weaker hands, like T9, nut flush draws, and combo draws.
With all of this in mind, it’s easy to see why the solver opts to play these hands so aggressively:
Keep in mind that the solver’s counter strategy as the in-position player is extremely aggressive. It includes jamming all-in 16% of the time on the 9h turn and 21% of the time on the Th turn.
Here’s a look at those strategies, starting with 9h:
Next up is IP’s strategy on the Th turn:
What I want you to notice in the images above is that the solver doesn’t shove all-in very often with straights. Instead, it prefers to jam two-pairs and sets for value, while using hands like QQ, QJ, J9/JT/T9 (depending on the turn), and bluffs like Ts7s or 9s7s.
I’ve been playing high-level poker for a long time, and I can’t recall seeing anyone play this way. In practice, most players are far more risk-averse than the solver in these spots.
So, that’s all well and good, but how do you exploit that?
Easy: you bluff more aggressively. Your bluffs will realize their equity better than the solver predicts, since it’s balancing against a much tougher opponent: itself.
Let’s run a quick node-lock to show how most players actually respond to a turn barrel, and how your strategy should adjust as a result. I won’t touch the folding frequency—just the raising frequency.
Here’s the mock strategy I built for the Th turn:
I adjusted the in-position player’s strategy to raise more often with straights, but less often with thinner value hands like two-pairs and sets, as well as fewer pair+draw and combo-draw bluffs. This brought the overall raising frequency down from 21% to 12%.
Here’s how the solver adapts to exploit that tendency:
The solver responds by fast-playing everything. Its expected value jumps by 31bb/100, just from the reduction in the Button’s raising frequency. That doesn’t even account for potential over-folds, over-calls, or missed river exploits.
Now, let’s move on to the final turn I’ll break down in this article.
The Turn Qh
The Qh turn introduces a different dynamic than the others: it completes open-enders while also creating a new hand class (Queen top pairs) that now beats much of the Button’s flop bet-calling range.
This newly formed, somewhat strong category of hands is why we see a high-frequency, small-sized betting strategy on this turn.
Most of these hands come with either a gutshot or a flush draw, giving them roughly 56–67% equity in the pot. I’d call these “good hands”; not monsters, but hands that are often worth something, just not a lot.
When you’re out of position, you don’t have the luxury of checking and seeing the river for free. The player with position controls that decision, and also controls how expensive the next card will be.
Your way to fight back is to, at the very least, try to set the price yourself. You’re essentially saying, “My hand is worth about a block bet here.”
That move creates an extra layer of resistance that the Button now has to deal with. Instead of checking and letting him dictate the terms, you take his weapon and turn it back on him.
Now, a common rookie mistake is recognizing these underlying concepts, but only applying the block bet strategy when you have a hand like top pair. That makes your approach extremely transparent and easy to exploit.
The solver avoids this by building a much more balanced strategy:
The solver always considers its entire range, as well as the opponent’s, when building a strategy. It doesn’t try to optimize for individual hands, because doing so leads to highly exploitable play.
To see why this matters, just think about how easy it is to exploit a player who always bets big with strong hands and small with weak ones.
Now, to be clear: the solver never sacrifices EV for one hand just to help others. If you check the EV function in any solver, you’ll see that the chosen line always has the highest expected value available. After billions of iterations, the solver consistently finds that these seemingly deceptive, balanced strategies perform best, especially against an all-knowing opponent.
Now, back to the barreling strategy. We see an overall betting frequency of 85%. If you recall from the first part of the series, we encountered a similar situation on flush-completing turns.
My advice for the Qx turns is the same: range bet for 33% pot.
This adjustment is subtle enough to go unnoticed, making it highly resilient, and it still generates the same expected value as the full GTO strategy.
Wrapping Up
That’s it for part two of the series! Stay tuned for part three, where we’ll break down overcard turns, blank turns, and pairing turns.
If you enjoyed this kind of advanced strategy content, or if you have any technical questions, drop a message in the comment section below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I had a blast writing this one, and I’m looking forward to reading your feedback.
Till next time, good luck, grinders!
If you’d like to know more about advanced cash game strategies, read: Should You Play Like a Nit Preflop?
