So thus far I have discussed the starting hand requirements by position and the best strategy for entering the pot. I also discussed how to evaluate the strength of your hand on the flop. So how should you proceed from there?
Well as you no doubt guessed, I think you should be continuation betting (cbetting) much of the time in order to
keep up the aggression. I would recommend that you make a cbet about 75% of the time in fact.
Cbetting should be a big part of your game. If you follow the advice listed earlier about raising preflop a lot, then you are going to go to the flop as the aggressor most of the time. You should follow that up most of the time with some more aggression. You don’t want to give your opponent any reason to believe that you are weak or that he can have any control in the hand.
Cbetting is such a powerful tool because it simply works. In HEM you can check your cbet success rate in the “reports” tab. These are my results over that same 700k hand sample at NL2 that I have been referring to throughout this book.
So as you can see, even at NL2 they do fold a decent amount of the time. Without doing any sort of complex math we can quickly determine that if we made a pot sized cbet 100% of the time, then we would be right around breakeven. Half of the time they would fold and forfeit the pot to us, and half of the time they would call or raise.
However, it is not advisable that you bet the size of the pot every single time. That is complete overkill in many spots as a much smaller bet will yield the same result; getting them to fold. Sometimes you will only need to bet as little as 50% of the pot or so in order to take it down.
Also, just because our cbet gets called or raised does not mean that we will lose the pot every single time. We are playing “tight” and aggressive here after all. This means that our range will be strong a fair amount of the time. There is a reason why we raised preflop and we will still win the pot plenty of times just on the strength of our hand. So for all of these reasons, cbetting is a very powerful tool.
