2/4 HU NL against fishy opponent

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2/4 HU NL against fishy opponent

HU. Fishy players limps button. This opponent can play atrociously and play decent -- it all depends on how he is running.

Button limps. We raise KhTs from BB to 16, button calls.

Flop is T56cch we bet 20, button calls. Pot is 72

Turn is 7h, we check, he bets 36, we call. Pot is 144.

River is 7s, we check, he bets 144. We…?

My analysis:

From an MDF perspective, we have to defend 50% of our range against a potsize bet.

As played on turn, our range of hands w/ SD value headed into river is:

AA-JJ, AT, KT, QT, JT, T9s, 87s, 97s.

This represents:

24 combos of AA-JJ
51 combos of Tx
4 combos of 7x

For a total of 69 combos

How do we construct our calling range on the river?

  1. We want to call with all combos of 7x (4 combos)
  2. We want to call with combos of Tx where we don’t block clubs or hearts

TXd/s would be 4 combos per kicker rank so 20 combos total

  1. Overpairs with no club no heart

1 combo (i.e AdAs) per over pair rank so 4 combos total

Total combos: 4+20+4 = 28 which is somewhat short of the 34.5 combos we need to call with.

Absent reads, what do y’all think is the correct decision here? Unfortunately reads are tough against this opponent because they can play completely differently depending on they’re current state (tilted, drunk, etc.)

6 Comments

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Jeff_ 7 years, 2 months ago

A little bit off with analysis of MDF(GTO, whatever) vs fishy player.
How he is reacting to cbets? Overall all draw missed and I'm not big fan of this situation but in heads up we are calling this vs his size without info to get info and play better after all.
Mostly my decision will be based on his limping tendencies and reaction to continuation bet.

Kalupso 7 years, 2 months ago

You beat some merged value bets and all overcards missed. I'm calling this if villain is somewhat aggressive and not fit or fold on flops.

BigFiszh 7 years, 2 months ago

The discussion about "WTF - GTO vs. fish?!" is off. It's completely irrelevant if this guy is "fishy" (what does that even mean?) or not - as long as we have no clue what he's doing. And if we don't know - OPs analysis is completely fine (and I agree with it as far as I've seen).

ADD: I'm pretty averse against this "fish" debate, there are no fish - or at least there's not one category of fish, if one insists of using that word. I'd actually suggest to anybody to just erase that term from his wording, it will make the analysis / thought process way more precise.

Kalupso 7 years, 2 months ago

I'm not against studying GTO EV or strategy against players just playing their hands and emotions, but combo analysis is not really GTO/equilibrium study. You lose so much when you just focus on what combos to call with and that is what I think is not ideal here.

Focusing on reads against these unknown not regular players are much more important than being balanced in terms of not folding too much. I tend to just use overall aggression frequency stats together with bet sizes and hands at showdown to profile weaker players in the first 50 hands.

BigFiszh 7 years, 2 months ago

Completely agree with you - but OP did not provide any further information, hence I wanted to point out that a "baseline" analysis against an "unknown" is perfectly fine. I even dare to say that false reads (i.e. expecting somebody to overbluff just because we marked him as a fish - when actually he is a bad player for calling too much not for bluffing) might be worse than "GTO" play.

Obviously that does not mean that we should not try hard to gain some reads we can use against him.

Called_It 7 years, 2 months ago

Agree with GTO being a bad way to approach this.

Would not fold this without a reason to. Like if you actually saw him potting something less than a 7 in spots like this, and there's not much in between your hand and that anyways. Or if he just hardly bluffs. Otherwise it will just be bluff heavy vs most weaker players.

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