Postflop Pitfalls: Key Mistakes Every Beginner Player Makes

Most beginners in poker face similar challenges when it comes to postflop play. Significant strategic flaws can severely hinder your progress and drastically reduce your win rate at micro stakes.

In this article, we will examine the key mistakes that are typical for beginners, which cause them to stagnate at the micro stakes, either breaking even or losing.

Table of Contents:

- Check-Calling on the Turn with a Draw

- Illogical Bluffs

- Frequent Showdowns

- Missing Value with Medium-Strength Hands

Check-Calling on the Turn with a Draw

One of the most common mistakes among beginners is check-calling on the turn with draw hands. This is a typical passive play that players overuse, hoping to “hit” their draw on the river and complete a strong hand like a straight or flush. However, this strategy rarely proves successful, especially when out of position.

On the flop, check-calling with a draw can be a reasonable decision. First, after check-calling the flop, you leave yourself room for maneuver on the turn: your opponent might check back, giving you a free card to cheaply realize your hand’s potential.

Second, if your opponent continues betting on the turn, you can apply a check-raise semi-bluff to put pressure on their medium-strength hands and win the pot without showdown.

But on the turn, the situation changes. Check-calling with a draw on the turn, hoping to hit on the river, is a bad idea because the odds of completing your draw are too low.

This means that in most cases, you will be left with an incomplete hand. In the end, you’ll repeatedly give up the pot. And in those rare situations when you do hit your hand, playing out of position, it will be challenging to get value from it.

Therefore, it’s better to avoid check-calling on the turn with weak draws. Instead, it’s more reasonable to either check-fold or check-raise if you’re confident your opponent will fold to your aggression.

We’ve defended our big blind by calling against an open raise from a regular player on the Button. On the flop, in response to a continuation bet, we check-call with a flush draw and backdoor straight draw. On the turn, we check again, and the opponent fires a second barrel.

A second check-call on the turn, hoping to hit a heart on the river, would be a weak play. To make the best decision, let’s study the opponent’s statistics in their popup:

First, we see that this player opens from the Button 53% of the time, indicating a very wide range. Second, their WTSD (Went to Showdown) is only 12%, suggesting that the opponent tends to fold to aggression and is likely to give up with medium-strength hands.

Given these factors, on the turn we have a good spot for a semi-bluff check-raise with the plan to bluff the river if we miss. This will force the opponent to fold their bluffs with hands stronger than ours and apply pressure on all their hands weaker than trips.

If we were playing against an opponent with a tighter range who frequently goes to showdown, I would prefer to give up on the turn and check-fold.

Illogical Bluffs

Many beginners know that aggression is a key element of a successful poker strategy. Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean you should bluff at every opportunity. Illogical bluffs are a classic beginner mistake and can be costly.

At micro stakes, most opponents are reluctant to fold since they aren’t risking large sums of money. Therefore, for your bluff to work, it must be logical and believable.

Before bluffing, ask yourself: what hand are you trying to represent? If you truly had this hand, would you play it the same way?

Effective bluffs are typically made when the runout strengthens your range or completes a potential draw. Avoid illogical bluffs, especially in situations where you passively played a draw and suddenly decide to show aggression on a blank river card. In such cases, experienced opponents often put you on a missed draw and will call you down with a single pair.

Preflop, a player from the Early Position opened with a raise, and we called with pocket sixes on the Middle Position. On the flop and turn, holding a set, we just called the opponent’s continuation bets, disguising the strength of our hand.

On the river, the opponent checked, and we made a value bet.

Our line looks illogical. We played passively throughout the hand, so with a bet on a relatively blank river, we’re not representing a strong hand. As expected, the opponent, with a WTSD stat of 31%, called us down with the top pair, and we won a solid pot.

I chose this hand to illustrate that opponents rarely fold when an obvious draw from the flop doesn’t complete. If, instead of a set on the river, I had a missed flush draw, I wouldn’t have attempted a bluff in this situation.

Frequent Showdowns

Another serious mistake beginners make is striving too often to see showdowns with mediocre hands.

The reasons may vary: some have seen hero calls made by famous pros, while others think their opponents are always bluffing.

In fact, insisting on seeing every showdown can lead to losses, especially at micro stakes.

Micro stakes players mostly play passively. They don’t like to fold but don’t bluff often either. Therefore, at these stakes, your primary source of profit should come from value betting with your strong hands rather than from bluff-catching.

If your opponent shows aggression on the river, with a medium-strength hand, you should seriously consider folding, especially if their line suggests they have a very strong hand.

In Hand2Note 4 multi-player reports, I filtered out the top players in my database who demonstrated a win rate of at least 5bb/100 over a sample of at least 10,000 hands:

Take note that their WTSD stat is only 25%. Review your own stats. If your WTSD is noticeably higher, you’re probably calling too often and should reconsider your approach, folding more frequently when facing aggression.

Missing Value with Medium-Strength Hands

Making a big bet with the nuts is easy, but what separates a truly successful player from an average regular is the ability to find situations for thin value bets. Many beginners fail to extract maximum value from their medium-strength hands.

Thin value bets are especially effective against “calling stations” - players prone to frequently going to showdown with weak hands. Evaluate your opponent’s WTSD stat: the higher it is, the wider your value betting range should be.

In Hand2Note 4 reports, I filtered out all situations where I made a bet on the river with a middle pair:

By comparing the Action Profit of betting and checking, we see that betting, on average, nets me 1bb more in each such situation. Although the difference may seem small in a single hand, over time, well-timed thin value bets will add significant value to your win rate.

Typical postflop mistakes lead to significant long-term losses, and it’s essential to eliminate them from your game as quickly as possible.

For those who want to improve in poker and successfully move up from micro stakes, Hand2Note 4 offers excellent tools for analyzing opponents’ statistics and identifying their weaknesses. This will help you build more effective strategies and climb the stakes faster, achieving consistent success.