joe_h3

I think you could raise flop for value if villain was betting more of a merged range on the flop. Even then I prefer a call, but you could justify raising for value.

On this texture and vs this sizing, it looks like villain is betting more polarised. This means his range is made up of stronger value hands and higher equity bluffs. Your equity vs that range is likely to be worse - esp the part of that range that continues to your raise.

By raising you put yourself in a spot where you’ve got a very marginal hand, out of position, in a bloated pot. Which generally I think you should avoid.

I like your river fold, though, for sure.

I think vs a 56/15 fish, you’re going to see Kx here very, very often and check backs with busted hearts.

You could argue that, given price, check/calling is +EV, but I really doubt it’s the highest EV line.

I don’t like bluff catching vs a passive 56/15 fish. Generally these fish call a lot wider than they bet, which means betting ourselves (even if it looks thin) is generally the higher EV line. It allows us to put money in against the weaker part of villain’s range. When we check/call, we only really invest money against his stronger hands.

I’d prefer bet/folding to check/calling this spot.

I like the fold, given that you block some busted diamond combos. I think you probably need to call some of your AQ combos, though.

I actually like the preflop call. I think you can 3b a linear range if the blinds are very 3-bet happy, but I don’t mind flatting if not. AQos fees that little bit too good to 3bet/fold vs a standard 5nl lineup.

I’m not folding here. I think vs a fish (we know he’s a fish due to his preflop play, as well as the weird min-click on the river) we can still be ahead of a min-click range.

I like the way you played flop and turn, although I agree you could go bigger on the flop.

As you’ve correctly pointed out, a fish’s range is likely to be inelastic, which allows us to bet exploitatively big with value and size down when we’re bluffing. I’d go closer to 3/4 pot here and expect the fish’s range not to contract at all.

I like the turn play. We can defo get called by worse hands vs this player type.

I agree with your river thought process and think either check/fold or bet/fold is the way to go.

Against a passive fish, I think check/calling isn’t a high EV line. They call wider than they bet, so we put money in against the stronger hands in his range by check/calling.

It’s thin, but I’d probably lean towards bet/folding about 1/2 pot. I think we can still get called by some 1-pair hands. Vs a raise it’s the easiest fold of our lives.

Overall I think you played the hand well and that your thought process is really sound.

I agree you should be sizing up the turn. On a board this wet, your value range is going to be strong and your bluffs will have decent equity. I think both of these things mean you want to size bigger. Villain has to defend the majority of his range to this sizing.

Mate, I understand your frustration but the games at these stakes are still incredibly beatable.

And I think you made a couple of mistakes in the posted hand which suggest that your game needs a fair bit of work. That’s where you should be focusing your attention.

Preflop

As mentioned already, your sizing is too small. You’ve gone just over 3x, which lays villain too good a price to flat and play against us in position.

I’d bump it up to 4x pre.

Flop

I think you can consider range betting (ie betting all your hands) small here. You have a range advantage in a 3bet pot. This helps avoid the slightly icky branch where we check and have to play out of position in a bloated pot, in which villain’s positional advantage gets magnified.

The decision I find most worrying about this hand, however, is that you’re not convinced you should call the flop once you check. I think cbetting ourselves is the more +EV line, but if you do check, you have to call.

We have overs and backdoor diamonds and are beating a decent chunk of the bluffs villain will stab this flop with.

If we check/fold this hand, we’re check folding a huge percentage of our range. This makes us incredibly easy to play against. If I was up against you and noticed you were doing this, I’d flat way wider vs your 3bets and stab with impunity when checked to.

Hi kentbro1990 -

Preflop

I think you might want to size up a bit preflop. I usually go 4x vs 1 opponent out of position. 4x vs 2 opponents I think leads to you playing multi-way out of position a bit too often. I’d go somewhere closer to 5x, maybe 5.2x.

Flop

I think when you 3bet pre and get a flop this dry, it’s fine to just range bet even out of position. However I’d like to see a slightly bigger sizing. Villain can continue with an extremely wide range vs this sizing and then make your life difficult in position on later streets. I’d go something slightly closer to half pot here.

Turn

Villain’s range is more filtered than yours after he flats your c-bet. Ie, some of his junk has been filtered out, whereas you still have your entire preflop 3bet range, given that you range bet flop. I think this means checking is going to be good very often here, perhaps with your entire range.

However, when you do check I think it’s a pretty mandatory check/call with JJ. This is because:

• while villain’s range is now slightly more filtered than yours, he can still have floated quite wide vs your small flop bet - this means he can have bluffs
• you’re relatively high up in your range - too high I think to meekly x/fold turn

Think of all the combos you 3-bet pre that you’ll want to x/fold this turn with. I think you’re folding too much of that range if you fold JJ here. So I think you have to defend the turn, with the intention of folding river.

River

I like your river fold. We have lots of better hands to call, both in terms of sheer hand strength (eg AA) and in terms of blockers (99 with the 9h).

I agree with RaoulFlush that we should range bet flop.

Unless we’re checking everything, then our check back range is horribly capped and face up (due to the lack of weaker Ax in our range we can check back to balance our checking range).

We’re in position and have a pretty substantial range advantage on a dry A high board, so range betting should definitely be permissible. It also simplifies things: it means we don’t face huge barrels on the turn, which we’ll then struggle to defend against with our horribly capped check back range.

As played, I think I’m probably folding the turn. You block some of the very few bluff combos villain can have with the Kc in your hand and I don’t agree with OP that villain will be betting hands like QQ here. They have stable showdown value but can’t expect to get called by too many worse hands. I think they have very little reason to want to bet here.

I’m definitely folding river. I just don’t see villain having enough bluffs, while he has plenty of Ax hands which defend to the 3bet pre.

I think the big mistake in this hand is checking back flop: it complicates things and leads to the tough decisions we face on later streets.

I hadn’t considered your point re: rake postflop, which is an interesting one.

And I certainly agree we want to be ISOing very wide preflop. I’d definitely be ISOing hands as weak as 89os for instance. I’d just prefer hands with a bit more playability than 55.

Having said that, if villain has a high fold to flop Cbet then I agree it’s definitely going to be a +EV play. I guess my analysis is based on us not knowing which exact fish type we’re up against, and wanting to be sure we have a bit of extra fold equity to help us out when ISOing a hand with such little versatility or playability postflop as 55.

Interesting hand :)

I actually think this hand is a bit of a misplay.

Firstly, starting with preflop. Unless you’ve got stats to show that villain limp/calls wide pre and then folds flop very often (ie he plays fit/fold), I wouldn’t be ISOing 55. It’s a hand which doesn’t play well postflop and benefits in situations where we have good implied odds - ie we need to be able get paid off big when we flop a set.

There are a number of factors that contribute to having good implied odds:

1. Deep stacks, so a lot of money can go in when we make our hand. Villain is short, so we don’t have this here.
2. Being up against a strong range, so villain is incentivised to shovel money into the pot postflop. Villain limped pre, so it’s unlikely his range is concentrated with strong hands. It’s likely full of weak holdings which won’t be able pay us off when we do smash the board.
3. Making a small investment preflop. In essence, implied odds are the ratio of what we can win relative to our investment. Small investment + ability to win a lot of money postflop = good implied odds. By ISOing to 5x here we kill what little implied odds we have and inflate the pot with a hand which rarely flops well. Unless we have a lot of fold equity pre or postflop, this doesn’t seem like a good thing.

I’d have preferred overlimping pre. We invite multi-way action and keep our investment small, which seems good when we’re basically trying to flop a huge hand and get paid off.

On to the flop. As played, I like a small c-bet. The board is semi-wet, but villain likely defended a v wide range preflop so will have missed often. Our hand also needs a fair bit of protection as our SDV is pretty unstable.

I like your small sizing, as fishy players tend not to notice or adjust to bet sizing well. Ie, if they’re calling then they call regardless of bet sizOMG - and the same with folding. So a small bet here achieves as much in the way of protection as a big bet IMO, while losing less when villain doesn’t fold. A nice exploit is to bet big with strong hands and bet small with your air against these type of players.

I like the turn check. We can’t bet for value and villain won’t be folding any piece of the board . Time to head to showdown and hope to beat some A high type hand.

I think river is a misplay too. Your reasoning around blockers and missed draws is sound theoretically, but I think is trumped by a population read. When a passive, fishy 2nl villain suddenly shoves river for more than pot, their ranges tend to skew massively towards value. These types of players call wider than they bet, so when they’ve overshove you should be pretty terrified. So I’d fold here, even though from a theory standpoint our hand might make an acceptable call given what it blocks and unblocks. If you want to look at the situation from a MDF/theory standpoint, we don’t have to call very often at all here given villain’s sizing. But as I say, I think that’s totally irrelevant here.

Hope that helps. V interested to hear if you think differently, too :)

I tend not to use positional fold to 3bet stats. It takes a long time to build up a meaningful sample and they’d clog my hud up. You can make fairly decent reads on player type/tendencies just using the 3bet stat, IMO.

Ah that’s really interesting. I agree you probably don’t want to be 3-betting polar vs someone who’s defending that amount. Which site do you play on? The 5nl zoom pool on stars is still full of people who fold way too much based on what I see.

If you’re running those numbers then I suspect you’re not doing nearly enough stealing from late position. I’ve not seen Pete Clarke’s “From the ground up” course, but I’ve read The Grinder’s Manual and he talks about this extensively during the first couple of chapters. I’d recommend you pick that up and have a read.

He also talks a lot about 3-betting and how to construct good 3-bet ranges. At 5nl, where you’ll often see people folding to 3-bets ~80% of the time, this is definitely something you want to learn about and fix. I suspect you’re never 3-bet bluffing if you’re running a 3% 3-bet.

I might well be wrong on all of this but I think the presence of the fish makes this hand very interesting. I think it definitely increases the amount of suited Ax that CO has preflop, as he’ll flat them to realise implied against a fish who will play poorly postlfop. I disagree that he should be 3betting these, as he’s incentivised to play them postflop against the fish.

I think this dynamic could also make his turn betting range a little wider than it otherwise would be, as he’ll want to extract value from the fish’s one pair hands.

But this is 100nl after all - the fish are probably better than in the games I play, and I’m probably totally wrong.

I think this is a fine 3bet pre as part of a linear strategy.

I’m also fine with betting flop, but agree with Citanul that we can’t just be betting this flop small with range out of position.

I’d advocate going polar here when we bet, betting some decent hands for value and some suitable bluffs. Betting polar also means upping the sizing.

I think this specific combo is a decent candidate to be part of our bluffing range, as we block some Qx combos and we can turn equity on a heart or broadway card.

I’d be giving up this turn with this hand. We have more suitable hands to bluff, and we’re probably overbluffing if we include hands like this in our turn range.

Preflop: I think the 3b is fine as part of a linear strategy, but I also think a flat would be fine.

Flop: we’re out of position and we don’t have too much of a range advantage. Yes, we have AA and AK which villain probably doesn’t have, but villain can have (a conservative estimate, given we don’t know his tendencies at this point) ATs, TT, 88 and possibly A8s. We don’t have any of these combos.

I think it’s also hard to balance a value betting range with bluffs. Are you 3-betting a linear or polarised range preflop? I’m not sure going polar is advisable out of position against what we assume to be a strong UTG range. Assuming we’re not polarised preflop, then we don’t have the KQ, KJ type hands which make natural bluffs on this board.

These factors mean we want to check very often, maybe with our whole range. I’d check with a plan to check/call. It’s more balanced and makes the rest of our range (eg KK, QQ) easier to play.

Flop as played: Once you bet, I’d be calling villain’s raise. He’s very unlikely to be raising a worse hand for value. This means that when we 3-bet, he continues only with hands which beat us.

Calling keeps villain’s raise a bit wider, and means we can put money in against the gutshots etc he keeps barrelling on the turn. It’s unfortunate that AK has turned into a bluffcatcher this early on in the hand, but that’s where we are.

In summary: I think preflop and whether or not you c-bet need a bit of examining, but that the 3-bet on the flop is a pretty massive error.

You absolutely cannot be betting flop small and only betting turn huge
when you hit the nuts.

I’m going to have to disagree with this, given that we’re taking about 2nl. While I think the flop sizing is too small, it is absolutely fine at 2nl to:

1. Adopt a range betting strategy with a small sizing when up against fish, as they overdefend preflop and then fold too many flops.
2. When up against fish, bet smaller as a bluff/for protection with the weaker parts of your range and bet huge when you have the nuts. An unaware 2nl fish is mostly going to have an inelastic calling range. Ie, if they’ve hit the board they’re going to call any size bet, and if they’ve missed then they’re going to fold to any bet. Thus it makes sense to exploit that by betting smaller with bluffs and bigger with value hands.

Obviously it’s important to know what you should be doing theoretically, but those exploitative adjustments are crucial when people are playing as badly as the average 2nl player is.

Side note: How do we know these 2 players are fish? SB flats a 3x open out of position and the BB starts the hand less than 100bb deep. These are both red flags to me which indicate that these players are unaware/unskilled.

Knowing what we know about these player types, here’s how I would play the hand:

Flop: I like betting, but I’d go slightly bigger - around half pot. You can still get called by some weaker hands and you gain more protection against 2 random overcard hands.

Turn: I’d go massive on the turn once you make what is effectively the nuts. I like your sizing of almost pot. I know you mention above that you’re worried it looks too polarised. I don’t think you need to worry about this at all. A fish won’t be thinking about what your line means. They likely won’t be thinking anything at all beyond “I have a pair, I’m going to call”. Against 2nl fish, there’s no need to worry about being balanced. I’d be betting large with a very value heavy range here.

River: Again, I’d go massive - around pot.
This guy’s a fish, so I’m not expecting him to fold a flopped 9 and certainly not a rivered Q or 2 pair. What I’m saying is: his range is wide enough that you can DEFINITELY get called by lots of worse hands, even when sizing up. He’s almost never raising a worse hand, so I think it’s a fairly trivial bet-fold if he does raise. I think you miss out on lots of value by betting under 1/3 pot on the river.

Yeah, I think you played every street well. I like the polarised flop sizing given board texture - and as you said I think you can still get called by worse on the turn, so betting again seems solid.

I think on that texture, flopped sets are going to x/raise at least some of the time, so he probably doesn’t have all combos of sets when he x/shoves the turn. Plus, the Ks we have in our hand blocks some flushes. Given that he defended a 3b oop pre flop, he probably shouldn’t have too many spade combos. AQss, possibly ATss? Plus maybe some 9Ts if he’s defending that much of his range pre? But again, some of the flush draws with less SDV might x/raise flop to balance out the value raises, so I don’t think he has that many on the turn at all.

Bottom line: he doesn’t need to bluffing with the naked As very often to make your call profitable. Plus, this is 5nl: people make very weird, inexplicable hands which you couldn’t possibly put in their ranges. So I think you can always chuck a few random bluffs in people’s ranges.

Vnh

I like the way you played the hand :)

Peeling KTs against a likely wide and polarised button 3betting range seems pretty standard. I wouldn’t defend much wider than this (I’d be folding/potentially 4bet bluffing K8s and K9s depending on the opponent), but you should be able to continue on a lot of flops and you’d likely be overfolding if you let this one go pre.

I think you’re too high up in your range to fold flop (especially given villain’s small sizing) given the number of hands you defend that are weaker/have completely whiffed the flop.

You can fold stuff like 77, 88, QTcc that has little equity and no real blocking power.

I’d question whether villain’s cbetting 100% of his range on the flop. I can see your reasoning given his sizing (a smaller size indicates a less polarised/more merged range) and the fact that he has a nut advantage. He has KK, AA, AK which you rarely have.

But the board’s pretty wet and you still hit it fairly often. You have lots of spade combos, some suited aces potentially up to AQs, 99 and loads of combos of Kx.

So I don’t think he should be range betting. But he might well be.

I agree with your turn reasoning and like the fold. You have lots of stronger hands in your range that are more suitable to defend. And you have more suitable hands to turn into bluffs (eg combo draws).

I think you played it well - but I might well be wrong!

Agree we should probably fold preflop here. I’d open AJos from UTG but fold ATos.

Also agree we should check back flop. We have stronger hands to value bet, and can balance with a few high equity flush draws and some no equity/no SDV hands. I’d also bet hands like KQ so that we still have some bluffs on spade turns.

The reason I’d check flop is because, with middle pair, I’d much rather invest money by bluffcatching against a wide BB range than I would by betting ourselves. When we bet, we put money in against villain’s stronger holdings. When we bluffcatch, we put money in against more of his weaker holdings.

We can balance our flop checking range with some flush draws with overcards (eg AsKs, AsQs) and maybe the odd combo of top set, given it blocks lots of villain’s calling range.

As played turn is an easy fold for the reasons stated above.

I think shoving or folding are vastly better options than raising here. Your hand is pretty crappy, and with your stack size and positional disadvantage, villain can put lots of pressure on you postflop.

Better to just try to win the blinds and antes - or, depending on pay jumps and position in the tourney, folding and laddering.

I’d shove, though - SnapShove says you can open shove Q2s+ profitably from the sb.

Hey man, I'm also a beginner so sorry if this doesn't sound too helpful.

You have just over 20bb right? It might be better to shove pre if your only goal is to steal the blinds. This saves you from having to play a pot out of position with a weak hand.

While 3xing it pre is pretty large (and you'd think would give you some nice fold equity) villain can still peel with a pretty wide range in position, esp if they're not really paying attention to open/bet sizes.

If villain is as tight as you say, we can get him to fold lots of better hands by shoving.

As played, I think folding the flop is the only option. You're out of position with no pair, no draw and less than a pot sized bet behind. You could be drawing to 3 outs, you could be drawing dead already. You also have very little fold equity given the amount you have left behind, so villain is calling with any pair he's decided to go crazy with on the flop.

Completely agree with this - given your read on villain, I don't think he's folding his pair+diamond hands on the turn.

These spots are really interesting in bounty tournaments. I often end up calling wider than ICM says you should, because the bounty value outweighs the value of laddering.

Having said that, with a loose big stack still left to act, I think TT+ and AQ+ seems like a reasonable reshoving range.

I agree we should bet flop to get value from all the smaller pocket pairs in villain's range. It also helps us define villain's range a bit more accurately, and eliminate their air hands.

I think when we check back flop then we probably have to call river. This might not apply when we're this deep in the tourney (as villain is likely a competent player), but at these stakes I think lots of villains will double barrel their air when we check flop, as they'll think we have a very wide range and will perceive us as weak.

Villain's much less likely to take this line if we bet flop IMO.

I'm a real noob though - only just started trying to take poker more seriously and stop button clicking - so I might be way off. Please don't crucify me! :p

I agree, I think I end up calling here, as BB has so many 9x hands in their range. Although I wonder if 9x would lead river, hoping to get called by KQ or AQ that probably checks back. I don't know, it's a really weird line...

This is really great, Owen - thanks very much, mate.

I learnt a ton from this, thanks so much.