The Suck Bet. This is the phrase coined by Dan Harrington in his seminal no-limt holdem tournament books, Harrington on Holdem, Volumes 1-3, for the move used when you believe you have the best hand at the river, but you want to try to get your opponent to commit a bit more chips to the hand by calling your bet. You know if you move it allin, he is going to fold because his hand isn't that great. You also know that if you check, he will check behind, and you won't make any extra money out of the hand. Instead, you want to try to pick an amount of money to bet on the river that is large enough for you to make it worthwhile to make the bet in the first place, but small enough that your opponent will be willing to pay it off just to make sure you are in fact ahead. Curiously, in this sense the suck bet is simultaneously a trap bet and a value bet at the same time, in that you are trying to both bet low enough to trick your opponent into paying you to see your hand, but also trying to bet for value what you are fairly sure is the best hand right now.

I tend to have a fairly regular range in terms of the size of the suck bets I like to try to lay on people when I know I'm ahead. Of course, if I think someone will call an allin push from me, then that's what I'm doing, period. But, when I think I'm probably ahead, especially where I have already thrown in some slow-playage earlier in the hand to plant the idea in my opponent's mind that I might be bluffing or just weak in the hand, I usually try to target my suck bets at between 40-60% of the current pot size at the river. This is for two key reasons: First, around half the size of the curent pot is usually a sufficient enough size by the time the river hits that it will represent a significant addition to my stack if my opponent calls. I don't want to be dilly dallying with things like suck bets if I'm only going to add an extra 5% or something to the pot. And secondly, I like the 40-60% of the pot range for my suck bets because this is usually small enough that it entices many opponents to go ahead and pay me off, in situations where if I was moving allin, or even betting the full pot, they would reluctantly fold.

So, for example, at left you can see a situation where I have top pair top kicker with big slick at the river, on a board that contains no draws other than the unlikely QJ for the straight, a straight which would have required my opponent to have called my preflop raise with an easily-dominated hand preflop, so I'm not realistically worried there. With a current pot size of 750 chips, I want to get my opponent to pay me off here with what is probably either top pair lower kicker, or some other kind of board pair. So, as you can see, I hit the guy with a 450 chip bet. It is deceptively tricky because for only another 450 chips out of his 5500-chip stack, he can make sure I am ahead, and hopefully make a nice call to win another decent pot early. Here, he called my suck bet, and lost with his underpair to my TPTK.

The suck bet can also work against a river bet from your opponent, as seen here at left. Here, my opponent bet 720 chips into a 1380-chip pot at the river, and I went for the reraiso 1800. Sure I could have moved him allin here, but I figured I would have lost him with that strong move, so instead I went for just a bit more than a minraise. Just enough to make me happy when he calls, yet just little enough to get the call that I want from him. That's the idea with the suck bet -- like the end result of this particular hand, make the guy call you even while he is typing in "I'll call and pay you." The guy knows he's going to lose, but he just can't bring himself to fold whatever he's got in his hand for the size bet that I've thrown at him on the river.