You’re NOT Playing A high Boards Well

Let’s get straight to the content because I’ll talk a lot of numbers on this one. But it’ll be for your benefit. Let’s talk about A high boards. 

A high boards are the most important boards in NLHE. Reason for this is that they are the most frequent – 21.7% of all possible flops are A high flops, with K high boards coming in second with an 18.3% share of all boards. 

You’d think then that professionals would priotize the study of these boards, and then consequently their performance on them would be high, at least relatively to their performance on the remaining textures. Right?

Well, unfortunately that’s not what can be observed when you study population tendencies. If you compare GTO stats to the stats of midstakes regulars when it comes to A high boards, you will find many leaks, such as:

• Too much cbetting in IP. Solver cbets 60% of the time when aggregating all A high boards – midstakes regs cbet 70%;

• Too little cbetting OOP in SRP. Solver cbets around 66% of the time combining all A high boards SB vs BB – regs only 59%;

• Too much folding OOP vs Cbets. Solver folds 59% facing a 1.2x flop cbet on A high boards – regs fold 65%;

• Too much folding IP in 3bet pots. Solver folds 27% to a 30% flop cbet from OOP – regs fold 33%.

I could go on here. The list is BIG.

With these numbers, I’m not necessarily implying that your goal should be to try and reach solver frequencies in these boards. Perhaps some of these deviations relative to GTO are actually good adjustments of the population against itself. Maybe overfolding vs big bets on A high boards is actually the best play in the long run because most people will lack bluffs when they make such play. 

On the other hand, some of these tendencies might be getting naturally exploited by the player pool. For instance, overfolding vs small cbets in 3bet pots on A high boards is in fact a problem, since most people tend to cbet way too much in those spots, betting their entire range for 33% sizing. If someone is betting too much while you are folding too much, guess what: you are losing some money to them. 

My first tip for you this week is: prioritize studying the boards that matter most to your winrate. Don’t bother spending your time browsing sims for monotone textures, or low connected boards. Strategy might be tricky in those textures, but they don’t happen often enough to be worthy of your precious time. 

High card boards (J+), rainbow and two tone, represent 64% (!) of the possible flops in the game. If you focus your study time in the situations that matter the most, you will be maximizing the efficiency of your studies and your capacity to turn your lab hours into more winrate. 

Now, for tip number 2, I want to encourage you to reverse engineer the typical leaks most people (you included) have on A high boards and turn them into exploits you can apply against your opponents. The 2 major tendencies that can be observed by the reg population on A high boards are: 1) less bluffs compared to other textures; and 2) more folds compared to other textures. 

In this context, again we observe the population doing a good adjustment against itself – perhaps most people (correctly) project their own inability to bluff enough on A high boards on their opponents, and then end up overfolding when facing aggression. What do you have to do then, to capitalize on this tendency?

Well, you know where I’m going with this. You have watched my content before. This is not news to you. 

You gotta pull the trigger. Blast off. Fire those barrels. Put them to the test. Click the bet button.

Now, the trick here is that bluffing on A high boards is sometimes quite unintuitive, specially in the more disconnected textures. This is another important component of A high boards – there are more combinations of disconnected A high boards than any other high card, simply because there are more possible combinations of cards that are far apart from each other.

In disconnected A high textures, you are very often forced to bluff with some pretty naked, airball hands, for a lot of money. I’m talking overbetting the pot with J5 of clubs on As9d2c6h BTN vs BB. That’s actually a GTO thing, I’m not making this up.

Now, remember how these boards are the most common? You can’t afford to misplay the most common boards.

Also, realize that your preflop opening ranges are usually very Ax heavy. A BTN’s RFI range for instance contains 32% of Ax combinations. What I’m trying to say is that you will very often have a value hand you want to get value from on A high boards, and those boards come up a lot. However, as of right now, you are probably not bluffing enough on those, and you are getting (correctly) exploited by a population that overfolds vs aggression.

You don’t want to underbluff the most common textures in the game, while your range contains tons of value hands looking to get called, while your opponents exploit you by overfolding. You MUST find the appropriate bluffs in these situations, otherwise your strategy is leaking money.

I hope I was able to delivery the message here. Prioritize studying those A high boards, and make sure you learn to find the bluffs no one else at your limits are finding. Then make money vs the overfolding population. 

I In the topic of bluffing more, I separated these 2 videos from my channel that I think will inspire you to find the aggressive action more often. Take a look:

I CAN’T STOP OVERBLUFFING | HH Compilation

How To Turn A Pair Into A Bluff

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See you again next week. Until then, keep it simple.

Saulo