The continuation bet is a critical part of your overall poker strategy.

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During the poker boom, it didn’t take long for some of the top poker players to realise that if you bet the flop after raising preflop you would often take down the pot with little resistance from their passive opponents – the cbet was born.

In the years proceeding the boom, even the fish knew that if they cbet 100% of the time they made huge profits.

Unfortunately, times have changed and cbetting 100% of the time doesn’t work anymore. The strategies are now more nuanced but there is still a lot of money to be made.

The continuation bet is simply the player who made the aggressive action (bet or raise) on the previous street continuing that aggression on the next street with another bet – it doesn’t only apply to the flop.

For example, if you raised with AK preflop from early position, got called by the big blind, and then cbet on an A72 board that would be considered a cbet. Betting the flop after raising preflop is the most common continuation betting scenario.othr

Table Of Contents

When should you cbet?
Examples of cbetting in practice

The three reasons to bet

Before we continue, you need to understand what are the reasons we bet.

We bet for 3 reasons:

To get a player to call with a worse hand (value betting)
To get a player to fold a better hand (bluffing)
To get a player to fold when they have a significant chance of winning the pot

Understanding the first two points is critical to poker success. A huge mistake new players make is betting in situations where they are neither getting called by worse hands or folding out better hands – i.e. all of the better hands call, and all of the worse hands fold.

Before you bet (whether is be a cbet or any other type of bet) you should STOP, and think about what you are trying to accomplish with your bet.

Don’t be the guy who is clicking buttons (or throwing around chips if you play live) and not understanding why you are betting.

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For more information on this why you should be betting, see this article by SplitSuit.

Why the continuation bet?

Continuation betting is part of almost all poker players basic strategy but it may not be clear why they cbet so first up let’s explain why a continuation bet works.

When you raise preflop you are announcing to the table that you have a “strong hand” or at least a stronger range of hands than your opponent. To see what that means, let look at equilab imagine you raise from early position on a 6-max table with the top 15% of hands (if anyone is not familiar with equilab, check out this guide here):

Then our opponent calls us from the button with a range of the following:

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The exact ranges aren’t important and could be tighter/looser depending on the situation but what is important the difference in equity and nut advantage. Preflop, the UTG player has an equity advantage of 52% vs 47% as shown by equilab:

That means as it stands the UTG player has the stronger range and is more likely to win the pot – therefore should be more likely to bet on the flop/turn/river with their range of hands (depending on the board, however).

The additional factor is nut advantage: the UTG player has AA-QQ which the BTN player does not (as he would typically 3bet these hands preflop) which means that the UTG player will often have more strong hands on more flops than the BTN player.

It is difficult to hit flops – over 60% of the time you will not have a pair to continue with, so the player with the strongest range can bet and often take the pot down.

Opponents will typically give you the benefit of the doubt and fold a better hand than yours to your cbet.

This is the power of cbetting, the player who had the betting lead beforehand now will continue with the lead and will quite often win the pot and pick up the dead money in the middle.

So that’s the basics of why a cbet works, but you still shouldn’t cbet 100% of the time. Let’s discuss some of the factors you should consider before placing your continuation bet.

When should you cbet?

Here are the most important factors in deciding whether you should make a bet are:

If you are in or out of position
The number of players who are in the pot
The likelihood of your opponent folding (e.g. opponent type)
Board texture (we should be more likely to cbet on a dry board with fewer draws)
If we have equity in the hand
How likely they are to fold on future streets

So you can see a lot goes into determining whether you should cbet. Let’s explain each of these points in more detail.

Position

When playing poker you can either be in position or out of position – acting last or first compared to your opponent.

If you aren’t sure what that means I would recommend that you check out our strategy guide on position which explains poker position in more detail than we will in this article.

However, in summary, being in position gives you a huge advantage over your opponent as you have more information to act upon (because you act after your opponent).

It also makes it more difficult for our opponent to float us and take the pot away later with a bluff. Due to this information advantage and the difficulty our opponent will have bluffing on later streets, we can cbet more liberally in position.

Number of players in the pot

The greater the number of players in the pot, the stronger the hand required to continue. Top pair may be a great hand when we are heads up vs a single opponent – however against 5 opponents top pair is a mediocre hand that should be played very cautiously.

Similarly, when cbetting multiway, you should be very selective in the hands that you choose. The greater the number of players, the stronger your hand requirements and the less frequently you should be bluffing.

Multiway, you should only cbet “bluff” with hands with substantial equity such as monster flush and straight combo draws.

Opponent type

We won’t discuss the different types of opponents in detail in this section. If you want to learn more about opponent types you should check out our texas holdem strategy guide.

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But to surmise, there are 4 general categories you can categorize your opponent: Tight aggressive (TAg), Loose aggressive (LAg), tight passive and loose passive.

Here are some general guidelines you can follow:

You want to target your cbet bluffs towards opponents who are likely to fold (overfolding). Bluffing against fish who won’t fold any bad high card or backdoor draws is obviously a poor strategy, however, it’s a very common mistake.
You also want to target your thin value cbets towards opponents who are unlikely to fold (overcall). For example, if you have middle pair vs an opponent who won’t fold a backdoor draw, betting makes a lot of sense, right?

Poker When To Bet Strategy