When I was trying to learn GTO poker, I was most often confused as to what I should be doing on turns. I never knew if I should bet my marginal value hands and if I did, what size I should choose. I recently ran across a piece of advice that suggested most turn bets should be polarized. This means that I should choose a large size with my best value hands and draws while checking the hands in the middle. I can see the merits of this approach in tougher games, but when I applied it in my passive small stakes tournaments, I got less than desirable results. What I learned is that turn polarization isn’t necessary in these games. Here are some of the reasons why this advice is good in tougher games, but not in softer ones.
One of the benefits of checking marginal value hands on the turn in tougher games is that these hands have a hard time getting called by worse when you choose a proper size. If the turn checks through, they go up in relative strength which makes them easier to bet for value on the river.
For example, let’s say you open JTo from the button, get called by both blinds, and see a flop of J93 rainbow. You bet, get two calls, and the turn is a 6 that puts a flush draw on the board. This is a board that is very wet and dynamic. In a tough game, theory suggests that if you want to bet this sort of board, you should use a large size of say two-thirds pot which may make it harder to get called by worse when you hold a hand like JTo. For this reason, you should choose the big size and only bet with hands like KJ plus and good draws. If you check back, the river pairs the 6, and they check to you for a third time, this hand goes up in relative value and you can now bet it on the river.
This all makes sense to me, but in softer games, I’ve found that I can absolutely get called by worse on the turn if I choose a smaller size of around half pot because my more passive opponents will call with hands they shouldn’t like J8o, J7s, A9o, 97o, etc. In fact, I’d argue that I can often get three streets of value from these players. That is unheard of in tougher games, but it’s possible in softer games if I deviate from GTO strategy and depolarize my turn betting range.
Another reason for checking marginal value hands on the turn in tougher games is that these hands make great bluff catchers on the river. Again, this makes sense in more aggressive games, but not so much in passive ones.
Let’s say we do check back the turn with JTo in the J936 example from before. If the river is a 6, you have a great bluff catcher vs. hands your opponents could have like QT, KT, T8, 87, and busted flush draws. That’s a lot of combos. The problem here is that many of the players in passive games do not bluff with these hands often enough to justify getting their strong value hands like AJ, KJ, QJ, J9, and 33 paid off. That too is a lot of combos.
Even worse, these players also do not bet thinly enough for value, so they are less likely to show you J8 or A9 when you check back turn and call a river bet in this spot. In my opinion, it makes much more sense to bet the turn yourself for a size of around one-third to one-half pot that gets called by these worse hands while limiting the damage when they have better.
An additional argument GTO players make for not betting this turn is that using this hand as a bluff catcher strengthens your river range which protects your weaker showdown value hands like Ace-high. This is like a lion giving up a chance at a meal in order to protect himself from a gazelle. As stated above, these passive players aren’t bluffing or value betting the river thinly enough to threaten your Ace-high hands, so there is no need to forego a thin value bet on the turn in order to protect them on the river.
Lastly, my favorite GTO argument as to why this hand should be checked on the turn is that doing so allows you to more credibly bluff the river. Basically, if you use all your value betting hands on the turn, then you won’t have any left to use on the river after having checked back the turn. Since you have so few river value bets available to you, your river betting range is weighted heavily towards bluffs.
This line of thought misses an essential truth of these games: You shouldn’t be sacrificing a turn value bet vs. a calling station in order to manufacture a credible river bluff vs. said calling station. It’s easy to see why looking for reasons to bluff these passive players is a fool's errand.
The problem with this is that they are not paying much attention to how your range is constructed. They are just looking at their cards. If they have a hand they want to call with, they call regardless of your value to bluff ratio on the river. They make their decisions based more on board texture than how they’ve seen you play in the past. In fact, many of them haven’t seen you play in the last orbit, much less the last few hundred hands because they were too busy seeing their Twitter feeds or the bottom of a Cheetos bag to fall for your Jedi mind tricks.
Turn polarization is a tool that GTO players use to protect themselves from other GTO players. Not only is it unnecessary in passive small stakes tournaments, it actually hurts your winrate in these games because it results in you missing value bets on the turn against people who would have gladly paid you off and results in you paying off people on the river who are rarely betting with worse. If you have a marginal value hand, you should usually bet it. That non-GTO piece of advice has been the crux of my success in these games over the past five years.
