If we bet the river we have to fold to a raise, but there is so much that we still are ahead of, and if we are not valuebetting here we are betting a to thin range imo.

I prefer check call on the river

the perfect action would be check call river.

No draws missed so check calling doesn't make that much sense to me. I think there's probably a bunch of A2-A4s A7-AT & AJ-AK invillains button flatting range that probably can't find a fold on the river, there are also some under pairs that V called with twice but will probably fold to a river bet. Most nut hands would have raised at some point to get the money in by the river as your range looks a lot like strong Ax. Readless I would bet 60% pot and fold to a raise.

Range by river seem to include mostly hands villain will check behind but would still call a small bet, Ax, with a spattering of other pairs or nut/near nut hands. You are open to villain shoving but realistically how Many Mtt players are turning Ax into a bluff and as you said their are minimal if any missed draws. I think a bet fold will show most profit In long term.

Sure the straight comes in if we're only scared of a hand like 78s. I really don't think he has a straight here. I think this early and this deep a lot of bad players are flatting with any A here and AJ looks to be the nuts quite often. Any Ace ( esp suited), 55, and 66 take this exact line. I think ever other pair is folding to your flop cbet. Because that range is so narrow I also like betting 1/3ish pot and folding to a raise on river. Allows us to get value from worse and leaves us room to fold if needed.

Vs an average IP CC range AJ is not really going to be able to get 3 street of value, so size down or check at some point, preferably otflop imo.

but I really do feel like I have the best hand.

This is not really a great heuristic to be using in-game cuz its not quantative enough. Villain is allowed to have i.e. 87/55/66/AQ(AK) etc. etc.

On the flop I am betting smaller, around 42-44% off this stack depth on that board. Definitely bet smaller to get value from mid pairs or maybe even just check it to him some amount of the time (prefer to bet though given stack depths). There's so little in his range that we beat that can also call a flop bet here, so I am definitely cbetting smaller or checking it to villain sometimes to try and get some bluffs.

Agree on the turn not to be worried about 5x and its now also very unlikely that he has a set of fives. I feel like his range here is very mid pair heavy like 77-TT, and a very small amount of AT-AQs. The board is slightly more drawy although it's hard to think he turns a backdoor flush draw very often at all, if we check he will check back 77-TT sometimes, bet it sometimes, and probably bet his Ax but when we fire a second barrel and villain calls I feel like their range becomes quite narrow. I don't think he's flatting 78s here too often pre, but at this stack depth it probably isn't awful (correct me if I'm wrong I'm not 100% here). I struggle to think of anything we're beating on the river that we can get value from...78 got there, flopped sets got there, 77-TT is probably folding most of the time if they didn't fold turn. I feel like AK would have 3bet preflop often, AT-AQs may have flatted although I don't like flatting ATs here so villain dependent (if they're a bit fishy?). I feel like if you bet you're only getting called by worse, I probably wouldn't even bet small and would just check here.

For me, with no specific reads, it really depends on the buy-in of this tourney and what we know about the player pool in general. A $5 tourney on 888 is a lot different than an $11 one on stars.

I don't think we can safely assume villain never flats with AK and AQ on the button with 47bb effective. I personally flat both hands on the button around this stack depth vs many EP, and some MP, raises. I'm not really excited about playing for stacks but can't really fold to a 4-bet with the top of my range, so I like to take advantage of my guaranteed position. This also helps to balance all of the speculative hands in my flatting range.

I'm going to have fun and do some work in Equilab with this spot. I'll post my results here when I'm done.

I played around with Equilab some and I'm a little surprised by the results. This post will get pretty long I fear, but I hope someone can get something useful out of it. I definitely did.

Before I get into that, I want to address something:

I think I made a sizing mistake here. What should I be considering here? If he has an ace, I'm not worried that it beats me. Because he has so few hands that beat me, do I size smaller to get value out of his marginal hands that are drawing very thin right now?

Are you really saying that you want to bet smaller because he has less hands that beat you? Or do you mean he can't have many draws? Either way, I mainly try to consider four things for flop bet sizing (in order of importance): Board texture, reads on the villain, what I am trying to accomplish, and if I am in position or not.

In this hand you have a very dry Ace high board, a big reason for sizing small. You have no reads so we can ignore that. Your hand is way ahead of villain's range but the top of villain's range has you crushed, so what are you trying to accomplish? --> You want to extract value from marginal made hands, which tends to suggest sizing small. You are out of position: on a dry board this is another reason to keep the pot smaller.

So we seem to have a lot of reasons to bet smaller. I think about 35-45% with both value hands and air is about right. This lets us extract some value from marginal hands like 88, 76s or even 98s (GS+BDFD). It's okay keeping those hands around when we have air because they often won't be able to call a second barrel (and on dry boards we usually want two bullets ready unless the turn card is awful).

The difference between a bet of 90 (40%) and 150 may seem trivial but bets in NL grow exponentially by street. 225 + 2(90) = 405 in the pot on the turn. Turn sizing I tend to go bigger, but on this board there's not much reason too. Around 165 seems good to me. This would get us to the river with 735 in the middle and 1115 in the effective stacks, roughly 3 : 2 SPR.

This leaves you with more room to bet - fold the river which -spoiler alert- is the play that my Equilab analysis greatly favors.

Speaking of which, I'll start by assigning villain a button flatting range. Something like:

TT-22, AJs-A2s, AQ-A8, K9s+, KJ, Q9s+, QJ, J9s+, JT, 1-gaps 75s+, connectors 54s+.

This is pretty wide, but not unreasonable. We don't need to be too concerned about getting villain's range perfect, especially because we have no read on this villain. As I mentioned earlier I think villain will sometimes have AK/AQs/QQ/JJ in their button flatting range. To account for this I will include half of the combos of AKs (1), AQs(1), AK(3) and one third of the combos of QQ (2) and JJ (1).

Not accounting for blockers, villain has 286 possible starting hands (21.57%) Considering our hand and the flop cards that shrinks to 208 combos. If villain calls a 2/3 pot bet with any OESD and any middle pair or better there are 97 combos that reach the turn, namely:

49 Top pairs, 27 pocket pairs QQ-77, 6 middle pairs (86s/76s), 6 sets, 5 two pairs (2 A6s, 1 A5s, 2 65s), and only 4 OESD (87s). It's worth nothing that we beat 35 of the top pairs, lose to 9 and chop with 5. We should probably add a few more combos for floats like KQs or 98s w/ BDFD but I'm not going to bother with that in this example.

We don't want to assume our unknown villain is a fish, so after they call flop and turn I think it is wise to remove some of the weakest Aces from their range. We block all of the A high flush draws, so I'm going to proceed as if villain dumps any hand worse than A8. It might actually be wiser to go tighter but considering our assumptions about the player pool I think this is fine. Let's also assume his middle pocket pairs and all of his 6x get dumped too. Although the board pairs I think 8h7h is never folding, and we should probably keep 1 more combo of 87s too.

Once we see the river 4, we're looking at 52 combos: - 1 four of a kind, 6 full houses (66, A5s, 65s), 2 straights, 2 three-pairs (A6s), and 41 Aces.

That means we lose to 20 of villain's combos, chop with 5 of them, and beat the other 27. However, we should probably discount the nutted hands and A6s slightly because at least some of the time these will raise either the flop or turn. I think we can safely eliminate 1/3 or 3 of those combos. We now have 17 combos that beat us.

For a profitable value bet we need to be called by worse at least 50% of the time. If villain is getting this far with his weak Aces he is probably not folding them to a reasonable sized bet. I think we can safely count on 23 combos that we beat calling us. We can ignore the 5 chops so 23/(23+17) = 57.5% of the time we win when called, so a bet here is almost certainly +EV (again, this is only against random typical player in micro/low MTTs). As for sizing I would say sticking to roughly 40% (~380 as played, ~300 in my fictional example) is a good plan.

There's an even better reason for bet/fold being preferable to check/call. If we look at the breakdown of villain's range, most of the hands that we beat will check for a free showdown while most of the hands that beat us will be betting. Backdoor hearts is the only reasonable draw that bricked, so for check-call to be profitable, villain would need to be value-betting all of his weaker aces and/or getting to the river with a lot of weird holdings which he then decides to bluff with. Although we've all seen villains do both of these things many times, I don't think we want to plan our strategy assuming that unknown villains do this frequently. In the long run, check/fold might actually be preferable to check/call in similar spots.

* TL;DR *
I think Bet/Fold is by far the best play on this river. It sucks committing a big chunk of our stack to fold (you can mitigate this by adjusting your flop sizing), but we need to be hunting every scrap of value we can find and I don't think this spot is even very thin.

Yeah I agree that 23 worse combos calling is very optimistic. I didn't bother breaking down which hands call, I just discounted the numbers a bit for both outcomes when called, to reflect that I made a lot of assumptions throughout the analysis.

Agree 100% on sizing: 30-35% is probably the biggest we want to go, likely best for every street if we plan to three-barrel. As played we could even bet ~15% on the river. I don't think enough villains are bluff-raising small bets to worry about that, and we might even get thin value from a stubborn A2.

I had a bit of trouble analyzing this pot. I can't remember the last time I double barrel AJ OOP vs unknown on this kind of board. I'm mostly checking turn or sometimes flop and treating it like a strong-ish bluff-catcher after that, probably looking to call one reasonable sized bet on either turn or river. Probably making a 2/5 pot bet on river when villain checks back turn.

I got caught up with the assumptions OP and some comments made about villain's ranges, aside from the few adjustments I mentioned. Although I don't agree that only the worst players are calling with worse Aces, I think you are right about this being a losing bet as played. I often see call downs for three <1/2p bets in <$10 MTTs across multiple sites. Some players happily call their entire stack here with A8s... However, the average unknown, even in the weakest fields, is not calling enough weak aces to make a river bet profitable. We're more often value owning ourselves against AQ/A6/87 or getting raised by nutty hands.

Against known stations I think this line is fine but would advocate larger bets. I think we should never be in this river spot without reads because checking on an earlier street plays better.

I still think check-call is the worst possible line as played. Not enough missed draws to assume players at this stake will be bluffing often enough after we bet twice. I don't think sensible villains often bet for value with a hand worse than ours (many check back AK/AQ here - whether they should or not is up for debate). Long run you'll more than make up for the times you fold a winner by not paying off when beat. Check-fold and move on if you don't want to bet-fold.