Leak file
You c-bet too much. Good players have already noticed.
5 min read
Somewhere around 2010, "always c-bet" was decent advice. Pools were passive, floats were rare, and two thirds of a pot bought the pot. That advice is now a leak with a decade of compound interest.
If you c-bet more than 75% of flops, two things are true. First, your betting range on most boards is so wide it is mostly air, and anyone who calls once and bets when you check the turn takes the pot from you at a profit. Second, and worse, your checks are now pure surrender. You have sorted your range face-up: bet means "whatever I raised with," check means "give up."
Boards that love your bets
C-bet freely on boards that hit the preflop raiser's range and miss the caller's:
Ace-high dry boards. A72 rainbow smashes your range and bricks theirs. Bet small, around a third of pot, with almost everything. Small and often beats big and rarely here.
King-high dry boards. Same logic, slightly less extreme.
Paired low boards. 664 hits nobody, but you have all the overpairs and they do not.
Boards that punish your bets
Middle connected boards. 876 with two suits hits the big blind caller's range far harder than yours. Your AK is a check here, not a bet. Betting "to see where you are" tells you nothing and builds a pot your hand does not want.
Low boards after a blind defense. 542 against a big blind who defends wide: they have all the twos, fours, fives, and the straight draws. Check back your overcards, keep the pot small, and let them bluff into your delayed strength.
What checking actually buys you
The goal of checking more is not caution. It is making both of your lines dangerous. When your check range contains real hands, the auto-stab on the turn stops working against you, and your opponents have to play honestly on later streets. When your c-bet range is tighter on the boards that favor them, your bets get respect on the boards that favor you.
A useful target: c-bet around 55% to 65% overall, with the frequency swinging hard by texture, near 90% on A72, near 30% on 876 two-tone. If your number is flat across all boards, the number itself is the tell.