This chapter is one of the most important of the book and I would like to observe a few things:
“Betting with a probable best hand is called making a value bet. There are multiple other reasons to bet, such as betting as a bluff with the aim of getting a better hand to fold.”
The chapter/day 7 dictates the principle of poker and why we do play it: to value bet, which means betting with the best hand to get called for a worse/dominated hand. At micro stakes, e.g, many players are addicted to any aces. So we suppose one of these players is sitting in the Big Blind and we raise 2.5x sitting in the BTN holding AQo: Villain in the Big Blind calls and the flop comes TA6, and we know villain likes to play any ace. BB checks and we could/should make a value bet, because if he has any ace, he’s going to call at least two streets of value. Some will even put up all-in, or donk bet flop/turn/river owning dominated aces, in this case we should bet/raise for value.
Now the opposite of value betting is quite tricky, because we do bet in order to make best hands to fold. To achieve this level we must know our opponent, know his probable range of hands and a bit of meta-thinking.
Many players will cry out that “villain should’ve folded in a situation like this or that”, when villain hero calls our
bluff. But there are players that simply cannot be bluffed out of the pot, because they don’t comprehend some poker fundamentals and are only looking to the absolute value of their hands.
It is good to try to bluff more experienced players instead of beginners, because these players are capable of leaving TPTK, Two Pair, Sets in a coordinated board, straights when there are three or more cards of the same suit on the board, and to fold flushes, when there are doubled cards on the board. Some players are capable of folding even full-houses, in this situation/versus this kind of disciplined regulars, we can bet for bluff when we are able to represent and tell a coherent story from the preflop action until the turn or river.
So we must master range reading and opponent reading in order to bet either for bluff or value:
“The decision about whether or not you can value bet normally depends on your ability to put your opponent on a range. If you have the nuts, then you can of course always value bet. If you have the nut low -- the worst possible hand -- then you probably shouldn’t value bet!”