The all important forgotten street of NLHE...the turn

Preflop play in NLHE with 100bb stax is pretty simple these days...everyone seems to have a decent grasp of an optimal preflop strategy.  The flop and effective usage of c-bets are also pretty easy to figure out...provided you have a good understand of board texture/villain's ranges/tendencies/postion.  The turn is where you likely will encounter most of your toughest decisions.  You need to choose a path as to whether to continue to the river and a potential showdown, or whether to pitch your hand right there.  If you do chose the path towards the river - how will you get there?  Btw - for those of you who are already experts on the turn and don't give a rat's ass on what I have to say about the turn...feel free and skip ahead to Bruechips solid writeup on the river.

You have just raised two black queens from EP in a NL200 game with 100bb stax and get a lone caller from the button.  Flop is J74ss.  You cbet 75% pot and get called.  Turn is a Ks - now what? Do you continue betting in hopes of getting value from 56, QJ, JT?  Could the villain have made a frush with spades?  Are you now pwnd hard and up against KJ?  How does he play his draws?  Does he call EP raises with speculative hands like sooted connectors or his is ranged weighted more towards pocket pairs?  Does your villain have the propensity to float flops with weakish hands and attempt to steal the pot on a later street by leveraging their position?  You really need to ask yourself all these questions and more when deciding whether to check or bet the turn.  If you bet - are you folding to a raise?  If you check - are you folding, calling, or check raising (as a bluff or for value?).  

The reason players freeze up and play the turn so badly is that not nearly as many hands go to the flop and the turn has the potential to change the entire board texture.  Who here has every been the victim of a "backdoor flush"?  Um yes please...I get pwnd by them many a time.   It's much more disguised than the standard frush draw on the flop that ends up hitting on the river.  I recently played a hand where I 3b a CO raiser OTB with 8Tdd.  He donked a Kh7h3d and I raised small.  He donked again when the sicko 9d peels on the turn...I shove and he calls it off with TT and I bricked out.  My equity on the turn went up more than 4 fold compared to my flop equity when I binked a the best non pair card possible in the deck.  

I will try and post some more thoughts about the turn later this week...

-BRACKCHIPS

I think there are other reasons the turn is difficult...first, with 100 bb stacks or less it's often the point of no return in a raised pot. That is, by the time you have raised pre-flop, bet the flop and bet the turn, you'll be getting great odds to stack off to a raise or a river bet. Second, to really play the turn correctly, you have to think about lots of combinations of cards and actions, AND you have to combine analysis of betting on earlier streets (pre-frop and frop) with analysis of what both you and your opponent are GOING to do on different types of river cards. 

However returns to playing the turn correctly are huge. Hand values do not run as close as they do on the frop (e.g., a made hand is now a much bigger favorite than on the frop when there are still two cards to come), and bets are bigger, since pots are bigger after the first two rounds of betting. Of course this is even more true of the river, since equity at that point is either 0 or 100 (unless you've got some ghey spritpot situation), and pots are as big as they're going to get. But by the time the river comes you'll usually have a pretty decent idea of your opponent's range, and you don't have to factor any future rounds of betting into your decision on the best play.

-BRUECHIPS