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Playing the turn
Mastering the Turn - Part 1/2
Your hand
In case you already had a made hand on the flop, check whether or not the turn improved your situation. Maybe you hold a medium pocket-pair and now completed a set, perhaps you´re the proud owner of a two-pair. When you improve your hand in such a way, without making the board look more dangerously at all, you can feel pretty good about your hand. In such a situation, I wouldn´t recommend you trying to slow-play your opposition because this might not be profitable. In case your rivals also have a valuable hand, they´re probably going to pay you when you bet with a hand like three of a kind or two-pair, especially when those combinations are difficult to detect. Since I mentioned earlier that a lot of bad players don´t distinguish between the flop and the turn when it comes to chasing a draw, you have a great chance of getting paid by those guys if you´re betting. In case your opponents didn´t call your bet, you successfully protected your hand and win the pot right away.
When you´re betting don´t make the mistake of not putting enough money into the pot. I´ve seen it numerous times that inferior players held a great hand and decided to only bet the minimum, making a call way too easy for their opponents. If you assume that your rival is on a draw, bet the pot or just slightly less.
If you were on a draw yourself when you checked or called the flop, you have to consider very carefully if it makes sense to continue to pursue your hand if your situation didn´t improve. When you´re on a flush- or straight-draw and your magic card shows up on the turn, most of the time everything is peaches and cream for you. If your opponents are aggressive and you´re sitting in position, you have the chance of raising them and in case the other guys on the table flopped a strong hand themselves, there´s a decent chance they´re going to pay you out. However, when you´re still drawing to a certain hand, you have to start calculating your pot odds in order to determine whether or not it makes sense to stay in the pot.
When you´re looking at our chart regarding some of the most common probabilities in no-limit Hold’em, you´ll see that your chances of completing a flush diminish to round about 18 %, your chances of making a straight are approximately 16 % and in case the only potential draw you have to show for are two over-cards, the probability of hitting one of those accumulates to ca. 12 %. Now what am I planning to tell you by coming up with these numbers? There are situations when it makes sense to chase certain cards and there are situations when you´re certain to lose money in the long-term if you decide to do so. Most of the time, paying in order to see the river doesn´t make any economical sense and only leads you into the territory of negative estimated value. Please check our “Odds and outs at a glance”-chart and consider the following scenario:
If you´re on a flush-draw and one opponent bets the pot, you need at least three other opponents to call that bet, too (Assuming that you´re not calculating with implied odds). So when it makes sense for you to call such a bet on the flop, doing the same on the turn doesn´t.
Long story short, when you´re still on a draw and an opponent of yours seems to be holding a hand and bets, make sure you calculate your pot odds in order to determine whether or not it makes sense to stay in the pot. Sometimes, bad players get scared of a potential flush or straight themselves, leading them to bet way less than they should have. If something like that happens, this can be your chance of justifying a call in order to see the river.
Your opponents´ hands
Assessing your own situation is pretty simple, figuring out if your opponents improved their situation is when chips are won and lost. The first thing you can take a look at is whether or not one of your rivals being on a draw successfully hit one of his outs. Let´s assume the flop shows two suited cards and despite the fact that you raised big time on the flop, one or two opponents decided to stay in the pot by calling your raise. That might be a sign of at least one person being on some kind of draw. In case the third suited card arrives on the turn, you have to keep in mind that there´s a chance one of your rival completed a flush. The situation looks similar to someone being on a straight-draw, however determining that a player completed his straight is a little more difficult especially when there are one or two gaps between the connected cards.
Again, just because the turn brings up the third suited card or makes the board “scream” straight all over the place (KQJT) doesn´t necessarily mean that you´re already beaten if someone else also shows interest in the hand. However, you have to seriously take this possibility into consideration.
Read part 2/2
In the game of Texas Hold’em, the turn is the street where a lot of money can be made or lost. If one of your opponents decides to chase a flush- or open-ended straight-draw on the flop, he usually has the pot odds justifying that behavior assuming that he´s about to see both the turn and the river card. On the turn however, every player has to make a decision whether or not it still makes sense to pursue a certain hand. Since a lot of bad players and calling-stations playing on micro- and medium-levels don´t distinguish between the respective streets when it comes to playing a draw, the turn can turn out to be very profitable if you play your cards right.
