The Continuation Bet

I have a week off work next week and plan to spend the entire week playing single table tournaments on either Poker Stars or Party Poker. I am using Poker Academy in single table tournament mode to practice with the bots at the highest setting and from what I have seen at the lower stakes tournaments the Poker Academy bots are a lot stiffer competition. My plan is to start of playing the $6 sit n goes then if I am able to win a couple of these then move up to the $11 sit n goes then perhaps evaluate the situation from there.

Most of last night I spent reading about continuation bets although I thought I already incorporated continuation bets in my game I have never really known what the correct bet size would be and when to make the bet and when not to make the bet, If I'm completely honest I would say that most of my continuation bets were bluffs as I was betting to much. Harrington describes the continuation bet in his book and I now see why these bets are so important, for example in the past because I was the aggressor preflop and the flop completely missed me I would sometimes just check and every now and again make a continuation bet of about what ever figure came into my head at the time, which is not the most mathematical approach to the game and certainly not good Poker, because of my reluctance to make a continuation bet when I missed the flop, when the flop did hit me I often found myself slow playing the hand, consequently I was allowing my opponents to draw out on me and also loosing the pots I could win when I made my continuation bet and everybody else folds because the flop misses them.

For me the most important aspect of the continuation bet is the having a better idea of where you stand as far as your opponents hand strength and whether or not they are on a draw, this then gives you valuable information on how to proceed with the hand. I remember reading in Doyle Brunsons "Super System" that you always want to be the aggressor this is because by being the aggressor you put your opponent on a back foot and he is always guessing about what strength of your hand is, I think this is where the continuation bet comes in. When you bet or raise before the flop and then bet again after the flop your opponent is never really sure if the flop hit you or not.

I find it funny how by reading Harrington's book it has allowed me to understand something that I a read earlier and previously not fully understood it all seems so obvious now. I suppose this is what happens when you take information from different sources I found this happened a lot when I was studying for IT Certifications, and I don't think it is because one book is better than the other or one author is better than the other I think it's because the greater understanding you have of a subject matter the easier it is to learn new information.