Hi everyone, I was just writing an article on dealing with scare cards. It's not an easy topic to address but I was doing some thinking and came to a strange place. I'm not just looking for free advice, I thought this would be an interesting discussion. I get lost when scare cards hit and I have never really sat down and thought it all out. (Writing articles has been one of the best things I've ever done for my game. If only I actually played more...)

First of all this is assuming you are playing from out of position.

My position is that you should bet again on scare cards more often than you should check. This means betting your set again on a flush turn, betting your KK again on an A turn. This isn't a hard and fast rule of course because your opponents, betting patterns, and boards will make a big difference.

My reasoning is:
- you make it harder for them to bluff (which isn't a good enough reason alone to bet)
- for value against weaker hands
- to simply not check every single time you hit a scare card.

Ok no major problems so far. Next I go on to say that if you want to continue betting scare cards and get value for your hand you should also be semi-bluffing the flop at times with other hands. So when the turn brings a third heart your opponent won't know if you are scared of the heart or if it just completed your hand.

At first I thought this was enough mixing it up to throw your opponents off. But actually you are still only betting strong hands on scare cards.

Now I got to the confusing place. I'm not sure if it's even worth taking the time to write about but oh well. I figure that if you are against a smart opponent he will eventually figure out that you are only betting strong hands on the turn he can play pretty optimally against you.

I'm wondering if this means you should also be 2nd barreling scare cards. I mean you raise AK pf, whiff the flop, the turn brings a flush card and you bet again. It's pretty risky against weak opponents but against decent opponents I don't see why not trying this occasionally. Decent opponents won't be purely drawing as often, they would have raised a set or something for protection more often than not, and they are aware that you semi-bluff draws on the flop. Sure you should be doing everything sometimes, but in the context of dealing with scare cards, is this taking it too far?

I mean I'm just talking about scare cards, and in doing so I go off and talk about semi-bluffs, then I go off and talk about 2 barrel bluffing scare cards. Each one of these things don't happen that often and I'm expecting you to take extra actions just to tie it all together?

One argument to this whole post I see already is that small stakes opponents don't pay attention enough for you to worry about this. That's partially true but we want to practice ourselves for moving up in stakes, we want to expand our thinking, and last, even weak opponents are aware of the most common lines. If you mix it up just a little bit you will be taking actions against those opponents that don't fit into their neat little categorized list of recognizable lines. Even if they don't specifically realize you are doing it, I think there is some sort of game theory advantage to mixing it up occasionally.

What do you think?