You only have to "worry" about kj and maybe jj. He can never exploit you / make you commit a mistake if he has AK and you bet as big as possible on the river. Keep in mind that he can put you on a busted flushdraw, so take the size that polarizes your range, it roughly gets the same amount of calls or even more compared to "classic" valuebets and you get much more money.

It would be interesting to see how you got with CREV "Checking is better than betting by roughly 4.5-6bbs on the Jc river and betting ~2/3 PSB or $1,200 seems to maximize EV on the 3d river" (export the file and make available here)

Posting multiple 2-3 page long exported text blocks from CREV seems unreasonable. Is there a better way to do it? Perhaps link to another site hosting the text?

can you post the raising and 3betting ranges you used in CREV? I don't feel like opening that; might look at the hand on my own in CREV later today.

my default preflop would be to flat vs. UTG+1 8handed, but I think 3betting AKs sometimes is fine, especially if he's a loose opener.

about the rest of the hand, my intuition says you need to check AK somewhere here. the turn is probably where I'd be checking since I'll bet all of my bluffs on this flop.

I think you are mistaken in assuming he gets to the river with QQ-JJ all the time in this spot. it's one of the worst flops for him vs. your 3betting range that should be very small and largely made up of AA-KK,AK.

I just played around with CREV a bit and learned some things, but I'm still not 100% sure what my favorite plan is with AK for the hand. in my sim where I introduced a flop checking range, I wasn't getting the EV for the range or hand (AK) higher by checking flop with AK. so I guess I like firing away for a size similar to what you did most of the time.

I am rethinking my strategy for this spot preflop though. I'm thinking I like the idea of 3betting to 2.5-2.75x with a fairly linear range to discourage the 4 players with position on us and not having a flatting range. something like AA-TT,AKo-AQo,AKs-AJs,A5s-A2s,KQs,QJs,JTs,T9s.

do you have any thoughts on that? how do you play in your spot preflop and how confident are you about it?

I understand if you don't want to open a link on a forum, but I'm not sure how else to post the text blocks. I only analyzed villain's range in CREV and used this range for calling the 3bet: QQ-55,AQs-ATs,KQs-KJs,QJs,JTs,T9s,87s,76s,65s,[75]AKs,AKo[/75],[25]KK[/25]
I had villain calling all QQ and most JJ OTT. If not, I can make very profitable turn bluffs. I'd have to analyze the EV of checking with weaker bluffing hands to say for sure though.

I've adopted Sauce's preflop IP 3bet size strategy from his 2 Table $10_$20 6-Max Zoom NLHE Live Session series: 170 IP vs 60 and adding 1bb from the BTN. My understanding is to point is to buy position with a cheaper 3bet size when not on the BTN. I don't 3bet linear, but I definitely mix calling and 3betting many hands in my continuing range.

Hey, I wasn´t able to import the CREV mode from the text block you linked, if you´re interested you might send me an e-mail and I´ll gladly have a look on it and give you some feedback / hints:

crev [at] masterpokertheory.com

Cheers!

Hey, sorry for the delayed reply ... having some trouble here atm.

Fair enough, I took a look at your models - and the first thing I recognize is that you made it way too complicated (for my taste). For example you assigned a weight percentage to almost any combos in Villain´s defense range. Why? Why should MP for example EVER fold the nfd on the flop?

That makes it not only difficult to find a good answer, it makes it especially difficult to read and understand what your purposes were when defining that range. Not to mention that it´s almost impossible for a human (at least for me :D) to follow those range assumptions in game.

I will create a "simplified counter-example" and send it you via e-mail. You´ll see the difference and likely understand better what I mean then.

Thanks for taking a look at the sims. I admit they're not perfect. I weighted hands to better model gameplay and unknown tendencies. You can and sometimes should take multiple actions with each hand on any given street. Nice catch; I intended for villain to raise some% of his nfd's OTF but they must have slipped though the cracks.

I took a look at your sim. In the actual hand we were 124bb deep instead of the std 100bb. Also, you analyzed with the Jc river which is clearly a check with AK. The 3d river makes a much more interesting decision of bet sizing especially with the deeper stacks.

I'll send you my updated sims. I changed the frequencies around a bit and had villain fold JJ no spade OTF. Let me know what you think. I don't think they're that different or harder to read than your own.

How villain should defend flop and turn are the crux of the hand because they determine his defending frequencies of < AK to river bets. Idk how to solve the frequency villain should defend his low equity bluff catchers (QQ, JJ) in order to make my worst bluffs close to breakeven OTF and OTT. It's complicated because it depends on equities and future streets play on multiple runouts. I would love suggestions for a method to get closer to the right answer.