The Best Spot To Add Overbetting To Your Poker Game

If you’ve been following the poker strategy landscape, or watched much high stakes poker, you likely know about the hottest trend that’s swept the poker world over the past couple of years: overbetting.

An overbet—which refers to a bet that’s larger than the size of the pot—has been the weapon of choice for professional players in recent times, sparked by its use in poker solver study tools. But it can be confusing to use at times and often leads to suboptimal (read: bad) betting patterns by inexperienced poker players.

To avoid that, let’s take a look at one of the simplest and most effective spots to add overbetting to your game by analyzing it as both a value bet and a bluff.

The Capped Range Overbet

In poker, a capped range refers to a situation where your opponent has signaled, through their prior action, that their hand strength is limited, meaning that they’re unlikely to have a strong hand. These situations make good opportunities for an overbet because you know exactly where your opponent is at, hand-strength wise and can use your bet sizing to manipulate them to the results you want (aka call or fold). Let’s look at a couple of examples.

The Capped Range Value Overbet

You are in the big blind and look down at A9s. The action folds around to a player in middle position who raises 3x the big blind. You call the extra 2 bigs and head to the flop, which comes 942ss. After you check to your opponent, they fire a standard continuation bet. Although you could choose to check-raise your top pair, because you know your opponent leans toward the aggressive side, you elect to just call, keeping your opponent’s bluffing range as wide as possible. The turn is an offsuit 8 and after you check, your opponent checks behind. Generally speaking, by checking back this non-threatening turn, your opponent has capped their rang—if they had a strong overpair, set, two pairs or often even a flush draw or strong straight-draw like JT or T7s, they would almost certainly have continued betting. When the river brings an offsuit 6, it is likely you now have the best hand unless your opponent has exactly 66 or maybe a hand like 86s (which not every player will open from mp).

Knowing that, we now have the perfect opportunity to overbet and extract max value from our opponent’s one pair hands (55, 77, A2, A4, A8, A6) and disbelieving ace-high hands like AK and AQ that may convince themselves you are bluffing with a busted flush draw.

However, in order to get these light calls, your opponent needs to believe you have the ability to make the same bet as a bluff (aka being balanced), so let’s look at a similar bluffing hand we can overbet with.

The Capped Range Overbet Bluff

You are once again in the big blind with 78s, and the cutoff raises to 3x. You call, and the flop comes 964 rainbow, giving you an open-ended straight draw. When your opponent makes their standard cbet, you can certainly make an argument for check-raising, but this time you once again choose to just call and follow it up by checking again on the offsuit 2 turn.

As before, if your opponent checks back this innocuous turn, they have likely capped their range since they would have almost certainly continued bettering their strongest hands. When the river brings another 2, the stage is set for our overbet bluff. Overbetting here, to say 1.5x the pot, applies maximum pressure to their capped range, making it difficult for them to call and realize whatever equity they have.

But But But

I can hear the reply guys in the comments already: but first you said the value overbet was to get a light call from weaker holdings and then you said the overbet bluff was to get a fold from weaker holdings! How can they be both??

The answer is that the beauty of the overbet makes it so that it can simultaneously target two opposite goals, depending on the spot. The key is to properly analyze each specific situation—the opponent, your image, the stack sizes, the stage of the tournament—and use that information to assess whether now would be a good time to bring out the big guns.

If you do that consistently, focusing on hands where your opponent has a capped range, you’ll be much more likely to maximize your value in spots when you’re ahead and your fold equity when you’re behind.

Good luck!