Curious Spot For Our Range

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Curious Spot For Our Range

BN: $635.38
SB: $668.77
BB: $600
HJ: $673.55
CO: $1576.70
Preflop ($9.00) (5 Players)
Hero was dealt 7 7
Hero raises $12.00 to $18.00, CO folds, BN calls $18.00, SB folds, BB folds
Flop ($39.00) 7 2 A (2 Players)
Hero checks, BN bets $35.24, Hero calls $35.24
Turn ($109.48) 7 2 A 4 (2 Players)
Hero checks, BN bets $92.39, Hero calls $92.39
River ($294.26) 7 2 A 4 8 (2 Players)
Hero checks, BN bets $233.91
I'm interested in what people think we should be doing with our range in a spot like this where villain bets roughly half their remaining stack on the river. Ignore my hand for now as I don't think it really matters that much. I think it's an interesting spot because of the great price that they're going to be getting to bet call the river, the difficulty we have representing something that can jam over that bet most of the time, and how to build a somewhat balanced range in this spot. Any thoughts?

6 Comments

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Phil Galfond 12 years, 4 months ago
Are you asking what hands I like c/r'ing here in practice, or how we should build a good balanced range?

The 2nd question is as simple as figuring out how to make him indifferent to calling. Given he'll have (roughly) 4:1, we need our range to consist of 80% value and 20% bluffs, so we just look at our range, figure out how many combos will c/r for value (call that x) and then take the bottom x/4 combos and bluff with them. (may be better to choose some weak hands with more relevant blockers than the actual bottom x/4 hands).

In practice, it's tough to decide (and obv read based). Spots like this, with such a low PSR, I find pretty attractive to c/r bluff, mostly because we get such a good price (and 100% success rate) on re-bluffing his bluffs. Even though our success rate may not be as great against his value range, given the price we lay him, the re-bluffing helps substantially.

I do think that people fold too frequently in spots like this. Everyone obviously understands pot odds, but psychologically, people just don't like to call when they think they're < 30% to be right.
dinkinflicka 12 years, 3 months ago
Good explanation, Phil. So, say we were trying to play GTO in this example. We'd have 20 nut combos (77/22/AA/88/A8s/A7s/A2s/56hh assuming we opened all of these), and would thus need to find 5 bluffing combos. What (or better, how do we determine) are our 4 weakest combos that we get to the river with here? Are there any hands with blockers here (not sure what they would be)? Initially, I'd guess we could use some combos of 99/TT (although in practice, I'd generally not show up with these on the river - so maybe QQ/KK? , but seems very strange to bluff with these)... So I guess, basically, how would we construct a solid calling/bluffing range in this spot from a GTO perspective, to go along with the 20 nut combos I gave (but as Lefort said, this can become confusing, too, since we may not be checking flop with these combos 100%, and also how do we account for the times our 'nut' 77 runs into AA?

Interesting stuff. Always been intrigued with this theory type stuff, but have never had much clue how to actually apply in practice. Are most great players today doing this type of game theory analysis in all spots, or is it still more common for them to play a more exploitive approach generally?
James Hudson 12 years, 3 months ago
I would guess that some of the best hands to turn into bluffs here would be hands like 76ss if we got to the river with it because we block 77 and 56ss combos and 77 seems like the most likely value hand that we'd like him not to have (22 probably folds pre flop and aces will 3 bet some % of the time).
Sean Lefort 12 years, 4 months ago
Phil covered the balanced range part. The one caveat (as I just covered in a video recording yesterday) is that this is assuming very clear-cut non-overlapping ranges in that Hero has {NUTS, BLUFFS} and villain has {BLUFF-CATCHERS}. As soon as you add some hands to villain's range that beat some of our value hands, we get some overlap. Isolating for just the situations where villain has a pure bluff-catcher, we can use these frequencies and accompanying ranges to play perfectly. However, once you add some nut hands in villain's range then we need to be careful because we start making big mistakes with our bluffs. So traditionally, the best way to treat the situation from a practical standpoint is to understand the 4:1 ratio as a threshold that we can't possibly cross and certainly need to stay within (< 20% bluffs) unless we're not worried about being exploited and/or looking to exploit.

I think typically this is a spot where I wouldn't have a chk/jam range because I would have bet the flop with a high % (including this hand) and the board run-out didn't nuttify (sweet word!) any of my flop chk/calls except for maybe A8s. Essentially I'm forfeiting the ability to chk/call chk/call chk/jam on this board run-out because I'm CBing flop with a high % as I believe there to be more value with that strategy. Note that this doesn't necessarily make me "imbalanced" on the river, it just puts me in a spot where I'm capped to {BLUFF-CATCHERS} and am forced to react to how my opponent decides to play against that range.

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