Yeah, so maybe betting 5-7bb instead of 10 would have been the move. If he’s playing this way after raising, I really don’t like his flop raise. I guess he was r/f flop?
Yeah if he doesn’t call off the rest with just trips, you should flat the river bet.
Against a LAGgy button in the KQ hand, I would at least consider checking and inducing him to try and blow me off of QQ/JJ.
I think it was a mistake to lead small on the flop. That’s either a weak hand or a strong hand. Once you call the raise, it doesn’t look weak. I’d lean towards trying to represent AK/AJ and hoping someone either has that beat or wants to try and draw out against it. You probably want someone to call with Ax and turn two pair. Would you play AK the same way on the flop?
In this spot vs me it’s a snap fold. I’ve invited you down and want you to have a good time. I’m not going to insult you by softplaying you but I am going to be pretty straightforward against you. I’m definitely not going to be out and out bluffing you. The very bottom of my range here is Axdd maaaaybe an open ender every once in a while and the rest is basically sets. Against the specific player OTB you should be betting thin here for value which KQ is but I don’t mind a check and calldown line either, though you’ll end up in some tough spots OOP check calling big polarised bets.
Raising 5x from UTG+2 with K9s on less than 140bb, I’m sure is losing, and any of the offsuit combinations of the two pair hands is a towering inferno of your money.
Assuming “lead small” on the flop means like 35% pot and not a min bet, I like your postflop line, but would’ve bet smaller on the river, like half pot.
If you check the river, you have to c/r all in because he can’t have a boat. Nobody raises flop and checks back a brick on the turn with two pair or a set.
You were playing really solid. I was pretty shocked to see your hand. I was figuring set, two pair or maybe even QJ if you thought that I was going to shove most of my betting range there.
Good to see that you did so well after I left. Not sure when I’ll be back down. Definitely won’t be this weekend as I have a lot of grading to do. Possibly next weekend though. Had a good time though I might be a bit more selective with which table I sit at. Two players to my left were raising me off of hands most of the night and when I did push back they had it.
Bet larger on flop just for more value. This board hits tons of hands and you’ll get calls just because people hit even if your bet looks so strong into multiple players. As played against the raise, not sure about stack sizes but I think villain committed himself, so just gii.
Good river bet on average, maybe go slightly smaller.
My exact hand there is 100% a raise for value vs the crazy guy on my right he can call with bottom pair or worse there if he’s in the right mood. Even if you’ve got the nuts I’m drawing live, I’m ahead of top pair etc. So I’m not too worried about flipping vs you. If I can get you to fold decent equity (correctly vs my range) all the better.
At 1/2 vs a snug BB I’m folding as played. At larger stakes, I’m most likely calling but at those stakes they almost always have it there.
Edit: Regarding the OP, thought I hit reply to it but doesn’t look that way.
BB can have tons of straight and flush draws, of course he will be running bluffs here. And in many ways check raising two players closing the action is more powerful than just one, because the hero has to have some concern about if calling will even get it heads up and the button has a weaker range than the hero when he calls the flop.
They can have all sorts of holdings, but from my experience at live 1/2 a 4x cr into 2 players represents a range we’re not doing too well against.
If we call we have less than a pot size bet left and there aren’t that many cards on the turn that we are going to be ecstatic about.
Run a range consisting of all suited two pairs, all TT, all 99, all JQ, and say half of the offsuit two pairs (possible because he closed the action from the BB). Add to that all the combo and nut flush draws, J8s, and go ahead and throw in like 12 combinations of straight draws plus pair, even though in reality solid 1/2 players very rarely play JT/J9 this way. You’ll see that even with all those bluffs we’re only a little better than 40% HU against BB. Considering his raise an effective all-in (which it is in light of the SPR), that is insufficient to stack off.
(Should add that I don’t fully endorse the range above, as I don’t think Ad7d or Js8s are in his c/r range with full weight, the same we give to a hand like KhTh. I’m just trying to be generous to your “lots of semibluffs” interpretation)
Your point is c/r into two players oop including a loose bad player otb looks strong. True, but it also IS strong. He is risking 270ish against OP (with only 80 in the pot), and as the Villain says himself itt, he doesn’t know whether big stack fish is going to call down his trashy JT or w/e.
Heading to play a few hours of 1/3 after work tonight. I haven’t had a winning session since I hit the mini bbj for about $6k ~3 years ago(probably only 7-8 sessions over that time). I was a winning midstakes LHE player in college with decent volume and played a lot of 1/2 NL after I finished law school but before I was employed, and had a decent win rate there too (but lol variance) but man it’s been a rough stretch.
Sorry to pick on you AllTheCheese, but I think a few points of your analysis are way off.
A couple things here. First of all, you should also be reducing the x/r frequency of some of the sets/straights, as he may slow play some of them. Second, it’s possible for a winning player to have hands like J8o here. This opponent was described as solid and tight, so that makes it less likely but I don’t think in reality it’s un-solid to have J8o here sometimes. He should also have 87s preflop, or he’s making a pretty significant preflop folding mistake. Some players could have 87o here as well.
So basically I think you’re over-estimating the value range a bit here and under-estimating the bluff range a little bit… at least in terms of what should be available to pick from. Obviously some players will drastically underbluff. I do agree that very very few low stakes players are showing up with JT/J9 here.
Two things: I think considering this raise an effective all-in is a pretty big mistake that is very common among bad winning regs (sorry, no offense) in live low stakes games. If we call the $75 raise, the pot is going to be $255, and we’ll have $170 behind. We’re not obligated to go all-in every time somebody bets/raises for 30% of our stack. We’re not obligated to go all-in on the next street, either. And it’s not bad to call and play the next street, either. This way of thinking about the game is very bad against good aggressive opponents, because you’ll end up giving them TONS of leverage to use against you and they can bluff you with reckless abandon. If you give me the fold equity of a $270 bet every time I make a $100 bet in this spot, you’re going to over fold really badly and I can just go nuts.
Second, even if we were considering this an all-in, 40% equity is really really close in this spot. Maybe you know that, but some people ITT are acting like we’re nowhere near having the equity to GII. I haven’t run the range vs KQ math, but assuming you’re right that it’s 40%, we’re like 1% short of the equity we would need to GII against that range. We’d need like 41.1%. This is another common mistake from the small winners in low stakes NL games. They don’t like getting 120 bigs in as a 58/42 dog, it feels gross to them, so they decline +EV wagers to protect their stack. While this can be correct if you’re on your last bullet, etc, it’s a pretty big strategic mistake if you’re properly rolled.
So anyway, when you start asking questions like, “Does he really check-raise all of his QJ here? All of his sets? Does he have T9o, and if so does he have 87o as well?” then you realize that this is a really close spot. I think a lot of people will count T9o at full weight and then totally disregard 87o, and maybe that’s right for some players but if a player has T9o in their range then there’s a pretty high likelihood they have 87o as well.
A lot of spots when I’m counting combos an opponent can have, I have like two sets of possible ranges in my head - their widest preflop range and their tightest. Usually, the ratio of value to bluffs holds pretty steady, though. For example, if the relevant cards are Ts9c on the board and we give them T9s and 87s, there are two value hands and four bluffs so they have it 33% of the time. If we give them offsuit as well, it goes to 9 and 16 and they have it 36% of the time. If the cards on board were Ts9s, then they’d have a 3:4 value:bluff ratio (42.8% value) with suited combos and if we went to offsuit as well, it’d go to 9 and 16 again for 36% and that’d make a bigger difference, but still relatively small in the context of an entire range.
The places where it can matter a lot more are narrow range spots or spots where we are removing particularly nutted combinations that do not get offset by also widening the bluff range… such as whether a player has small pairs in their range that give them sets.
Anyway, a lot there to digest but I figured I’d dish out some in depth analysis now that we’re not on the old site anymore. I haven’t posted in depth poker strategy online in a loooonnng time lol…
All this talk makes me want to fire up PokerStove, is that still around??
Also, maybe I’m weak tight but if I got to this flop w/ 87o in BB’s position (very possible in a live game), I’m probably c/f’ing to this action unless I’ve got some specific reads. I think there are better hands to have in our bluff range than 87o, especially in terms of equity against Hero’s GII range. Given our read of Villain as good and TAGy I would discount those types of hands–really think his range is heavier towards value than you’re assuming, especially at 1/2.
This is also the most online poker hand analysis that I’ve done in a long time haha. Feels good. Maybe we’ll eventually need a Poker subforum 
Dude! It is pretty insulting the insinuation that I’m some bad reg. I’m not a reg anymore, but I did crush as a reg in online low and midstakes for years pre BF and have been a crushing reg a few times since at low stakes (most recently, early-mid 2018) before dropping out because of work commitments and loss of interest. The insinuation is wrong.
I find the analysis you posted to have some major gaps. You treat what I say as if I had said it in a vacuum, independent of the board texture, our holding, and the fact that there’s a live gambooler type in the pot. So you say things like
when I didn’t say that. This board texture and a loose fish OTB makes it very unlikely for a solid Villain to have a holding that is raise/folding (think about it). As for us, we’re not obligated to jam, but if we call, we have to call over 70% of turns if jammed on and should probably jam if checked to. Also if BTN backraises, we have to stack off. Regarding this as an effective all-in is, yes, a simplification for ease of analysis, but it’s not wildly far off the reality.
See, I don’t think you’re on the same page as me on this, but the answer to your questions about whether he c/r all of his sets and straights is YES, obviously. There is a fishy BTN with lots behind who is very likely to chase draws. The idea of a TAG reg 2p2er type check/overcalling with the goods here at significant frequency is not realistic.
For the question about “if he can have T9o, can he have 87o,” the way to think about it is: T9o is downweighted in his preflop range (say, idk, 66%), and therefore 87o is even more downweighted (say 33%). That puts four combos of 87o in his preflop range. When he has naked OESD to a bad straight, how often do you think he c/r’s two players? If the answer to that question is 25% or less, then you’re talking about zero to one combo in his range.
There’s maybe more I can get to, but I’m tired of typing this. So I’ll just close with one more
That’s not clear because we’re not heads up. I think we want to have more equity than the breakeven point in the heads up calculation if we jam, because there is some chance that BTN is trapping a big hand, or e.g. we could be up against like KT (tom) and 9dXd (BTN) in which case we’re in terrible shape. I don’t feel like running it, so maybe this is wrong and somehow we have 30%+ equity three-way against reasonable ranges, but I doubt it.
Help me visualize something about game theory more intuitively.
A polarized bluff/value betting range has an inherent advantage over the condensed calling range. An optimal calling frequency can never have as high an EV as the corresponding optimal bluffing frequency. I understand the disparity arises from the bettor being able to win with both value hands and a proportion of bluffs, while the caller only wins when ahead. But can someone explain this more precisely? How do you visualize this? I’m sure this is a related factor though I’m not quite internalizing it, but as the size of the bets increase, the net expectation for the bettor rises. So even bets 100x pot, in correct frequency, enhance expectation, and the caller cannot do anything about it. (I’m reading the Brokos book, Play Optimal Poker.)
Yeah you’d want to fold a bunch of kings on the turn to a follow up all in. If a diamond comes, certainly fold everything that doesn’t have a diamond. If no diamond comes fold everything that does have a diamond as it blocks flush draws, which you want the BB to have.
Doesn’t the caller have a lower EV because he has a weaker range than the bettor? If the bettor constructs his range such that it is weaker on average than the caller then, uh, things are going to go pretty badly for him.