Floating The Flop

This article will look at the strategy of floating the flop in Texas Holdem. It’s an important play to include in your poker arsenal as it enables you to win a lot of small pots which you otherwise wouldn’t have.

The common scenario in poker where the strategy of floating the flop occurs is when you call a bet on the flop when you expect that you don’t have the best hand with the plan of winning the pot on a later street.

Typically you will want to consider floating with a hand like AK/AQ when it misses the flop to try and hit one of your outs on the turn, because if you do get lucky then in all likelihood you will have the winning hand.

In order to float the flop successfully then a few conditions need to be met. You want to be sure that the player which you are considering floating is not always double barreling. If they are an aggressive player which is capable of double barreling a lot, then you don’t want to be floating this type of player because it will be impossible to steal the pot.

So let’s talk about the type of player that you do want to float against, which is the TAGfish. You see, when players first get started playing poker, they learn about the importance of continuation betting, but they take this concept too far and continuation bet too often only to give up on the turn. These players are very straight forward with how they play, if they don’t have a hand, they will make the standard continuation bet and check back the turn.

This is the type of player you want to be floating the flop when you have position in the hand, because even when you don’t have a hand yourself you can represent a hand by making a bet on the turn when it gets checked to you. The check raise on the turn is not a common play, so you don’t have to be too worried about that happening.

If you use poker tracking software like Poker Tracker or Holdem Manager, then you can easily identify the flop and turn betting frequency by analysing the flop cbet % and turn cbet %. If there is a huge gap between the flop cbet % and turn cbet % then you know the player is playing straight forwardly on the turn.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to get too carried away with floating the flop. You want to do it when you have decent equity to improve the hand, or when you can expect your opponent to give up on the turn and you can represent a hand, like when there is a flush draw on the flop and you call the flop bet, another flush card hits on the turn, and you represent making the flush, even though you don’t necessarily have a hand.

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