What is a CBet in Poker & When to CBet (Quick Guide)

• CBet theory predates solvers, equity calculators, and even online poker. It’s a fundamental concept to be mastered by profit-driven players.
• There’s a mathematical and game-theory approach to CBetting. It’s based on the easily understood risk and reward ratios of pot-odds and MDF.
• The more we play, the more information we gather on our opponents and use it to make exploitative CBets maximizing EV.
• Professionals use multi-tabling software like Jurojin Poker to increase their volume and learn about their player-pool quickly. Jurojin deploys your bet sizes, calculates pot-odds and so much more. Download it for free!

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CBet in poker refers to continuation betting. When you make the first bet on the flop after being the last person to raise pre-flop, you make a flop CBet. They’re a crucial weapon in a professional’s arsenal as they build on the strength shown pre-flop.

By picking efficient CBet sizes in conjunction with that theoretical knowledge and analysis of our player pool, we form a profit-maximizing strategy.

Eager to learn more? You’ve come to the right place! Keep scrolling.

The “C” in CBet stands for continuation. Specifically, when the preflop aggressor continues betting on the flop, that flop bet is the continuation bet, or CBet.

CBets in poker can happen in or out of position. As long as the last person to raise the pot pre-flop is the first to bet on the flop, then poker players can define that post-flop bet as a CBet. There are no CBets in limped pots since there is no preflop raiser, aka PFR.

Cbets provide more opportunities to get stacks in unlike checking, so they’re deployed to maximize value. They also work great as bluffs since players miss flops more often than hit. Professionals use positional, range, and nut advantages to CBet bluff often.

Comparing a pre-flop raiser’s range to their defender’s on differing categories of flops measures who wins when and how much of a preflop-caller’s cards cannot stand up to further pressure.

Let’s keep going to cover the risks and rewards of CBets as well as their strategic importance!

The upside of CBets in poker is the same as any other bet placed. We can get value when we have strong hands and are called, or we can win the pot uncontested by forcing folds, that is, bluff!

That’s the reason CBets were the first piece of poker strategy discussed by professionals even before the poker boom in the early 2000s.

The idea behind continuation bets is to take advantage of the initiative... your bet will usually win the pot when nobody has a hand.

- Daniel Negreanu

Essentially, the last person to bet pre-flop says they have the strongest hand. Post-flop, people miss more often than not, so when the person who had the strongest hand pre-flop continues betting, players tend to give them credit and overfold!

We’ll dive deeper into the math behind this below as we discuss pot-odds, minimum defense frequencies, and ranges in relation to CBets, but first we must cover the risks of CBetting!

We face the downside of CBets when we place too many out of position or with little equity or nut-advantage. Being the first to act means revealing some information about our holdings without gaining any on our opponent.

Most players, even bad ones, understand it’s hard to hit flops. Therefore, when they see us CBet out of position often, they will not give us credit. They’ll leverage their positional advantage and give us grief down the road.

Even in position, CBets in poker can backfire on unfavorable flops. Those are ones where our range lacks an advantage. We’ll cover this in more detail later, but betting when we can’t rep a strong hand gets costly.

When we bet the flop opposed to checking, we increase the odds of all the money going in on later streets. CBets in poker foster all-in situations. Therefore, CBetting weak hands endangers our entire stack!

Now, let’s look at examples of CBets and test ourselves by guessing if they’re good or bad before we get answers in the strategy section!

Let’s look at examples of CBets in poker. We can also ponder when the bet makes sense and when it does not!

With 100bb effective stacks in a 6max cash game, action folds to button who raises 2.5bb.  Small-blind folds and big-blind calls.

Pot Size = 5.5bb & Flop =

rainbow. BB checks, and BTN bets 1.7bb 📢

Since BTN was the pre-flop aggressor who made the last raise pre-flop and they are the first to put in a bet on the flop, that flop bet counts as a CBet.

With 100bb effective stacks in a 9max cash game, under-the-gun opens to 2.5bb and gets called only by the button.

Pot Size = 6.5bb & Flop =

all spades. UTG bets 5bb 📢

UTG’s flop bet qualifies as a CBet since UTG was the last to raise pre-flop and makes the first bet on the flop.

With 100bb effective stacks in a 6max cash game, Cut-off opens to 2.5bb, folds to small-blind who raises to 11bb 🔊, folds back to CO who re-raises to 23bb 📢, and SB calls.

Pot Size = 47bb & Flop =

. SB checks, and CO bets 11bb 🔊

Although this was a 4bet flop pre-flop, the same rules apply. CO makes a flop CBet since CO was the last to raise pre-flop and the first to bet on the flop.

Hopefully, we understand what a CBet is by this point. Moreover, which of these CBets seemed good to you and which seemed bad? Notice anything about their sizes? Keep reading to learn CBet strategies to know when to do it!

👉 Players looking for a visual aid to keep up with the action throughout the hand use Jurojin’s Actions Line HUD.

The primary reason to bet is always for value. Unless stacks are extremely shallow, you should always place CBets in poker when you have a hand that wants to play for everything, like two-pair or better. Also, you should always CBet if your opponent folds too much!

CBets follow the same principles as all bets. We want worse hands to call and better hands to fold! The first part is easy, but calibrating CBets for the majority of cases where we have air takes thought and planning.

When you’re unsure if your opponent is on the nittier side and will overfold, here are some guidelines that’ll ensure you can apply aggression safely:

• You’re in-position in a heads-up pot! Above all, we want to be last to act. Our opponent will find it difficult to bluff-catch out of position. Also, being heads up means our bluffs only need to get through one player, not more!
• We have an equity advantage. Equity calculator work off the table helps here. On most flops, an RFI range will have more equity or greater odds than that of a caller. However, low-connected flops, especially of the same suit, favor our opponent.

Examine the two ranges for an explanation. An RFI range has less suited connectors and gappers compared to a defensive range. Furthermore, defensive ranges tend to have more suited combos which makes it easier to spike a flush.

Monotone flops and those like 654 or 764 are ones to exercise caution when it comes to CBet bluffing. Even our standards for value should increase. Getting stacks in with an overpair might not feel too good so throwing in a check for pot-control would be prudent.

Let’s analyze a few spots:

• We have a nut advantage. This usually goes hand in hand with an equity advantage, but not always. A nut advantage means your range has more top tier hands like strong two-pair and better.

  Consider a single raised pot between HJ and BB. On an AAK flop, HJ has way more nutted hands because they have AA, KK, and AK in their range. BB has none of those since they’d raise preflop with those combinations, not call.

  On a 764 flop, however, BB would have the equity advantage since they’re more likely to have a hand like 85 or 53. They might even have more sets if HJ does not open all of their low pocket-pairs!

• Our opponent has little to draw to. Our CBet bluffs will succeed more on boards that offer little hope to our villain. Flops of differing suits and with little connectivity like K72 rainbow offer no potential compared to something like a two-tone J98 flop.

One of the most important things when it comes to this kind of spot is actually having a decent ability to place your opponent on a proper range… Then know how that range hits the board and think about how it is going to react to your bet.

- James “SplitSuit” Sweeney

In short, go nuts when you’re heads-up, in position, and the flop gives your range much more to work with than your opponents.

Based on this, can you figure out which CBets in the examples were good and bad? We’ll explain as we cover some GTO theory that’ll let you craft a CBet strategy like professionals!

So far, we’ve discussed starting ranges and how those affect range and nut advantages on the flop. Now, let’s delve into pot odds and minimum defense frequencies to understand how simple risk & reward math influences CBets in poker!

Every time we place a bet, we give ourselves pot-odds just like we give them to our opponent, as well as a minimum defense frequency (MDF). These risk & reward ratios calculate the expected value, or EV, of each decision a player makes.

While pot-odds spit out a minimum equity or odds of victory a player needs to profitably risk chips, MDF provides a minimum percentage of a player’s range that must continue to a bet to prevent over-folding. We control the pot-odds and MDF we give through our bet-sizing.

The larger our bet, the more equity is required to continue, and the more often our opponent can correctly fold. Once professionals began using solvers, they saw that GTO solutions often deploy small CBet sizes because of this fact.

When crafting your own CBet strategy, consider that a small bet, say just 30% of the pot, requires your opponent to continue with 77% of their range. When we look at almost any flop, we’ll find that it’s hard for 77% of a starting range to make a good connection.

MDF = (pot size)/(pot size + bet).  100/(100+30) = 77%

Therefore, in practice, people tend to overfold to small bets since it’s hard to call so much with weaker hands! When you’re in extreme situations with low SPR such as 4 bet pots, you can even begin deploying bets as small as 20% thereby risking less on your bluffs.

A great starting point for crafting your own CBet strategy would then be to identify flops that benefit you when you’re in position and begin betting your whole range for a small size. Notice how, in the CBet example section, we left out the specific hole-cards?

That’s because you can bet your whole range in those situations! In both examples one and three, we’re in a position with an advantage so we can CBet small always! In example two, we’re out of position on a bad flop, so that was a poor CBet if we did it in-game.

If you want to go with a bigger bet size on the flop, you want your hands to be more polarized. You don’t want to go a large bet size with a middling hand.

- Doug Polk

Now, larger bet sizes can be used, and here are rough heuristic pros often deploy. With range advantage, we can bet often. With range and nut advantage we can bet often and for a large size! Furthermore, professionals deviate from the GTO as often as possible to profit from exploitation.

The way to do this is to get as many reps in as possible to understand your player pool. Even regs do not play like solvers and after you’ve gathered thousands of hands, you’ll see it too. Professional players will review how their opponents react to CBets in their hand-history database.

Programs like poker tracker and hand2note allow pros to identify how their CBets perform on a variety of flop textures with just a few clicks of a mouse. There’s one more secret pros use and it’ll help you quickly build your own database; multi-tabling software.

That’s right, programs like Jurojin Poker make playing many tables simple and effortless, which lets you study your player-pool at an expedited rate and develop a CBet strategy tailored specifically to your site!

Keep reading to learn how you can use Jurojin poker for free to CBet like a pro and maximize poker profits.

The first way Jurojin Poker assists your multi-tabling is through table management and table tiling. Imagine the second you log in, you can begin opening up all the tables you want and they automatically go in the exact, neat order you want on your monitor!

On top of that, Jurojin can identify active tables where you actually have cards to play and bring them to your attention, while all the inactive ones remain out of your focus until they need to be! Now, this is just the start.

So much needless math and mechanics must occur on your active tables for you to deploy your strategy, and Jurojin can do them. For example, we’ve discussed using small CBet sizes, yet poker clients usually have dull presets like ½ pot.

Well, Jurojin provides up to 8 preset bet-sizes which you set yourself. Now, betting 1/4 or 1/3 pot can happen with the click of a button and you don’t even need to do any math to figure out that amount! It’s the only way to properly deploy CBets in poker without thinking.

Furthermore, we know a +EV strategy depends on knowing our pot-odds and minimum defense frequencies. Jurojin provides those in real time HUDs, so you never have to sit and calculate how much equity you need or how often you can fold profitably!

These features and more are absolutely free to try (perhaps even use at the lower stakes) right now! If you want to make money playing poker, you need multi-tabling software like Jurojin. Download it now to experiment immediately!

In closing, CBets in poker are made when the preflop aggressor continues the aggression by being first to bet on the flop. They can happen in or out of position and in modern games tend to be almost expected when the flop benefits the in-position player.

We begin crafting our CBet strategy based on these theoretical concepts and refine it for maximum profits by tailoring it to our specific opponents. We learn how they play and deviate from optimal by maximizing our hands played with multi-tabling software like Jurojin Poker.

Download Jurojin for free immediately. Discover how many tables you can play at once and crush your competition!