We’re At The River. Our Hand Can’t Win. Now What?

While this can be a very tricky spot to navigate, especially in larger pots, there are plenty of theoretical concepts we can call upon to help us with this kind of decision. Let’s explore a few of the most important things we should be keeping in mind when we arrive at the river with a potential bluffing candidate.

We could think about bluffing here, given that we only have Ace-high, and we can put a lot of pressure on a hand like JTs or T9s, which would be a pure bluff-catcher here. However, before we bluff with this hand (and remember, in theory, bluffing the river is usually a 0EV proposition unless we have some very important blockers), we should make sure to evaluate whether it’s possible we can actually win at showdown because:

If we know that checking makes money, then making a theoretically break-even bluff on the river is actually a bad play.

As you can see here, any combo of AKo that reaches the river in this line wins 21%–30% of the pot by checking, given that we beat all of villain’s missed flush draws and combo draws. So, even though bluff-shoving would be winning around 15% of the pot at the bare minimum here, that’s not enough to justify actually making the play.

If we’re going to make sure we have enough bluffs here to keep villain indifferent, which is what we should be doing in theory, then there’s no reason to take a hand that can sometimes win at showdown and use it as a bluff. We may as well use hands that never win at showdown instead, and this way we’re not giving up whatever percentage of the pot we might be winning if we check.

By contrast, here’s a look at the EV of betting vs checking when we have 98s—clearly, this is a big difference. While minor card removalCard removal
Card removal describes the effect of one player’s hole cards altering the frequencies and possible combinations of another player. factors related to the turn being the Q♥ do make 9♦8♦ a better bluff than 9♥8♥ here, we’re bluffing 9♥8♥ 100% of the time, even though it’s only winning 8.6% of the pot by doing so. This is specifically because we’re only making 2% of the pot if we check since it’s so difficult for the villain to ever have worse than 9-high.

Of course, there are plenty of spots where even Ace-high has no showdown value at all, based on the nature of the board texture and the opponent’s range for continuing beyond the turn; in those spots, bluffing the river with Ace-high will usually be a much more reasonable proposition. But you’d be surprised how many errors players will make by bluffing with hands that simply don’t need to bluff in order to sometimes be able to win.

Blockers and Unblockers

A lot is made of the significance of blockers within poker strategy, and in many cases, they’re not as meaningful as you might think, but bluffing the river is one instance where it is important to be mindful of each individual hand’s blocking and unblocking properties.

As a rule of thumb, if we’re planning to bluff the river, we want our hand to do two things:

In these spots, our bluff is significantly less likely to get through. The best way to explore these spots with GTO Wizard is by using the “Blockers” tab in the analysis section of a sim. The first clues can be found in the “Hands” tab however. Let’s go back to our previous example so I can show you what I mean.

Here are all of our AKo combos from the spot we were looking at before. The blocker scores are represented in the top-left of each rectangle, next to the hands themselves. The left number is the value removal, while the right one is the trash removal.

Value Removal Score

When using these scores to guide us, it’s important to note that since value removal only really refers to the top portion of our opponent’s range and not their bluff-catchers, most of our bluffing candidates in many spots will have relatively low value removal scores. Even a 2 or a 3 can be a significant factor in some scenarios. All the AKo combos have a 1 in this particular spot because they don’t block any two pairs, sets, or straights.

Trash Removal Score

However, the trash removal scores are going to vary significantly, depending on certain hands’ interaction with all the weakest combos in our opponent’s range. In this particular spot, a combo like A♦K♠ doesn’t block any of the weakest hands in villain’s range, which are mostly missed flush draws, so it has a 1 for trash removal; something like A♣K♥, though, has a 6 for trash removal, because the A♣ blocks all the missed nut flush draws.

When In-Game

We can’t necessarily expect ourselves to calculate these removal scores in a precise way in-game, but looking at the scores in the sims we study away from the tables helps us to acknowledge why a certain hand might be choosing whether or not to bluff in a specific spot. This process cultivates the intuition that we rely upon when sitting at a table where it’s brain vs brain.

Frequencies

Our final theoretical concern in these spots is our overall bluffing frequency. While we won’t always be up against opponents who are capable of recognizing whether we’re over-bluffing or under-bluffing, we do have to be mindful of:

If we automatically bluff the river with every possible bluffing candidate, we’re likely going to end up over-bluffing, which may actually be a short-term benefit in many spots, but could leave us open to a very obvious counterexploit by any competent and attentive opponent at the table—they simply stop folding their bluff-catchers. Conversely, if we don’t bluff the river even with our best candidates, those competent opponents can make the inverse adjustment relatively easily; folding to our river-bets more often.

Conclusion

In short, we can follow one fairly simple maxim:

If you arrive at the river and can’t easily identify any better bluffing candidates or weaker showdown value hands in your range than your current hand, your current hand will probably serve decently well as a bluff.

This will help you moderate your bluffing frequencies to some degree and make it less likely you’re going to end up with literally no bluffs at all in any specific scenario.

Hopefully, this article has given you a sense of how to make your decisions in these spots with no information about your opponent – I’ll be following this one up with an article about exploitative bluffing choices against opponents whose weaknesses we know fairly well, so look out for that one further down the line.