The Calling Bias (This one I posted on my CR blog a while ago)

No Limit Hold'em cash game players have a fundamental bias towards calling over folding. We can hypothesize reasons to explain it: not wanting to be bluffed, fear of folding the best hand, or trying too hard to win pots; but, all that's important is that we recognize this bias. Since most players err on the side of continuing too far in hands instead of folding too early facing aggression, our overall postflop strategy against those players should be centered around getting value from our good hands.

This bias can be demonstrated in a simple way. Say we call AJ in the big blind preflop facing a button steal, and we call flop and turn bets. The final board is AQ3rT6. This is a board our opponent can viably try to 3-barrel bluff to get us off of hands like QK, Axs, and AJ, but he also has a relatively wide value range. Say he bets 2/3 pot, so we are getting 5:2 odds on calling. We happen to know our opponent is bluffing or value betting a worse hand exactly 2/7 times. Is it better to call or fold here in terms of our general strategy? I guarantee with this knowledge 95% of players would snap call on the river.

They will cite reasons like "If I don't call in a situation like this, then my opponent will be able to bluff more often against me in the future." However, the opposite logic is also true, "If I call in a situation like this, my opponent will be able to make more money off of his good hands." In reality our villain is a lot more likely to be bluffing less than 2/7 of the time than they are to be bluffing more than 2/7 of the time.

The truth is that regulars at SSNL in most situations don't bluff frequently enough to make bluff catching profitable or even break even. The reason why is because they have adapted to the fact that most players call too much, whether they have consciously realized it or not.

This is why our general mindset as the preflop aggressor should be to get the most value from our good hands and only bluff when our opponent has a lot of weak holdings in their range. Facing aggression from an aggressive player, our strategy should be to avoid spots where we are likely to end up with a bluff catcher (i.e. 88 on a J high board) by either folding, raising early in the hand, or calling planning to turn our hand into a bluff facing further aggression.