Extracting Value

By Tony Guerrera

When you have a good hand, you want to make as much money as possible. Many people want to take a formulaic approach to poker, but alas, such a formulaic approach doesn’t exist if you wish to play poker at its highest level. When it comes to extracting value, no cookie-cutter approach exists, but understanding the relevant concepts and studying a few lines of play will put you well on your way towards optimizing your profits.

Know Your Opponents

The article here on Poker Helper entitled Positional River Play in No Limit Hold’em: Sizing Your Value Bets focuses on how to size your bets on the river when your opponents check to you. That article doesn’t give you a default fraction of the pot that you should bet every time. Instead, it describes the process of estimating an opponent’s calling distribution as a function of the size of your bet. The more you know about your opponent, the easier it will be to derive the bet that will make you the most money for whatever situation you encounter when your opponent checks to you on the river.

Of course, you’ll want to extract value from you hands in cases other than when you have position on an opponent who checks to you on the river; we need to generalize the theory of extracting value beyond this specific case. Beginning with what we know about this specific case, the real heart of extracting maximizing value is knowing your opponents. Knowing your opponents is really about knowing two things: their hand distributions and their action distributions. A player’s hand distribution is the set of all possible hole cards he may hold. A player’s action distribution is the set of all the possible lines of play he’ll employ.

Hand distributions and action distributions are intimately related for straightforward players. Straightforward players bet or call with good hands, and they get out of the way with bad hands. For creative, tricky players, the relationship between hand distributions and action distributions is weaker because they sometimes base their play off of circumstances that aren’t card-dependent. Players of this mold are capable of calling a preflop raise with 62o because he senses a possibility of taking the pot away from you postflop. When it comes to extracting value from your opponents, you need to have their betting patterns dialed in as a function of their hand distributions and their bluffing frequencies.

You Can Extract Value Passively or Aggressively

Extracting value is done through aggressive play or through passive play. The key is choosing the right approach for the right situation. When extracting value aggressively, you want to get called or played back at by hands that you have beaten over 50% of the time. Optimally, you’re looking for bets or raises that maximize your expected profit. Here’s an example of how to calculate your expected profit for a line of play.

Suppose line of play A yields you $100 profit 50% of the time, $0 profit 30% of the time, and $50 loss 20% of the time. The expected profit from this line of play is ($100)(.5) + ($0)(.3) + (-$50)(.2) = +$40.

Passively extracting value can be compared to slowplaying, but slowplaying is more appropriately thought of as a subset of passive play. When the term slowplaying is tossed around, it usually connotes something along the lines of playing passively in an effort to conceal the strength of your hand. If you play a hand like A5 passively on an A94 board against an aggressive opponent, you’re potentially optimizing your expected profits against an aggressive opponent, but you certainly aren’t trying to conceal the strength of a monster hand.

So far, we’ve assumed that making the most money on a hand entails getting your opponent to put the most money in as possible. However, that might not always be the case. Sometimes, the way to get the most value from a hand can be to take the pot down immediately. This condition holds when the possibility of your opponent catching is too costly. Typically, this consideration will come into play on the turn, when the pot might already be quite sizeable, and you’re at risk for yielding considerable implied odds on the river.

In Summary

To determine how to get the most value out of your hands, focus on your opponents’ hand distributions and action distributions, and keep the following in mind:

You potentially get more value by playing aggressively against passive opponents because their calling distributions are much wider than their betting distributions
You potentially get more value by playing passively against aggressive opponents because their betting distributions are much wider than their calling distributions

You shouldn’t always be aggressive against passive opponents, and you shouldn’t always be passive against aggressive opponents, but the above ideas should drive your play when extracting value.

Many players prefer aggressively extracting value because the decision-making process is straightforward against unimaginative opponents. Playing passively can result in you having to make some tricky decisions. But to be a top player, you can’t be afraid of making tough decisions. When it comes down to it, poker it all about playing the hand and action distribution match-ups. Provided that your reads on your opponents’ distributions are accurate, you’ll come out ahead in the long run. Ultimately, that’s what poker is all about. The key, as always, is using the right weapon for the right job and having a logically defined reason for every action you take.

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker By The Numbers

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