Value bet
A value bet is a bet made with a hand you expect to be best, sized so that a worse hand can still convince itself to call.
The test is not whether your hand is strong, it is whether worse hands call. A bet that only gets called by better hands loses money however good the cards look, and a bet that gets called by many worse ones makes money even with a modest hand.
That is what thin value means: betting a hand that is only just ahead, because the range that calls is still mostly weaker. A great deal of the money in a winning game comes from those bets, and they are the ones most often checked back out of caution.
an example
your cards
board
You have top pair with a strong kicker on a river that changed nothing. Any weaker queen, and a stubborn eight, can call a bet of half the pot. That is the reason to bet: not because the hand is unbeatable, but because worse hands pay.
This example is made up. The real one is in your own hand history: find value bet in your own hands and see how often it came up and what it cost you.
related terms
Bluff
A bluff is a bet or raise made with a hand that is unlikely to win at a showdown, so all of its profit comes from the ch ...
River
The river is the fifth and final community card, after which no more cards come and one last round of betting decides th ...
Range
A range is the whole set of hands a player could hold in a given situation, rather than a guess at the one hand they act ...
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Knowing the word is not the same as seeing it.
Forty hands against a bot, no account, and your own hand history at the end.