Playing in a great Sunday afternoon 5/10 game. Maybe 1-2 other reasonable players in the game and the rest are a great bunch of degenerates, gypsies, and scalawags. A good time all around and not your average Sunday scattering of pet rocks waiting for the nuts.

My image, if villain is paying attention, is not great. Have entered few pots, mostly folding. But the one big hand I did play I raised limp on btn with A4s, bet J64 one spade board, double barreled Ts turn, and checked back Jd river and villain (different than one below) showed A6o.

Reads on villain are that he is straightforward/bad. Playing a good amount of hands preflop and sticky on the flop but playing pretty fit or fold after that. Only hand of significance we played was a couple people limped, I limp A4hh mp, he raises HJ to 40$ bunch of callers including me. Flop KJ2hh I check call his 105$, turn As check check, river 6c I bet 175 and he tank calls KQo.


Hand

Effective stacks are 655$

Folds to me in co and I raise 89o to $35, villain calls on the btn both blinds fold. BB nitty and sb/bb passive but I'm sure a lot of you don't like playing the hand.

Flop: J75r ($85) I bet $55 he calls.

Turn: 2c ($195) I bet $120 he calls.

River: Qd ($435) hero?



Give up? Check turn? What about if river is a K or an A instead of a queen?

Fold pre, I understand that the table is spewy and bad but no reason to start opening this wide. Yes blinds are tight but the sticky villain on the BTN will call enough to make this spot meh and not worth it. As played I think this is a good spot to shove the remaining of his stack ~445 and fold out everything except for QJ. I dont expect him to play sets like this but maybe Im wrong.

Im good with pre. It's super tricky, high variance, and I definitely see the arguments for folding, but in this specific case I would want to play as many hands as possible with Villain (and other terrible players). This is prob bottom of the range though.

Normally I don't like double barrel bluffing fish, and this turn card is not a good barrel card regardless. However, it sounds like he is going to bet the turn if we check to him anyway, so we can at least set the price and have some tiny bit of fold equity. I might not be thinking about that correctly though, so I'm not sure about turn tbh.

I think flop/turn sizing is ok but in general smaller is better. I would think our pair outs are live in this spot and we could get thin value with them on river vs 7x, 5x.

On river I think the only way we have fold equity is if we shove. If you don't feel comfortable with jamming vs calling station then check/fold. This is read / history / dynamic dependent and not something we can really answer.

Id probably play the hand but dont think its necessarily good.. Bet small on river he could have a pair lower than a Jack that folds to river bet.. And he never folds a Jack imo... No matter how much u bet.. Bet like 230

I probably would not raise the 8-9 off pre but we are where we are.

Seems to me two key issues to consider - history and the type of opponent:

1. History - Villain saw you double barrel and lose in the "one big hand" you played against other Vs. And from his perspective you drew out on him on the turn in the one hand you've played together. He might have you pegged as a bluffer and would not fold any "showdown" type of hand or he might remember you hitting the ace on the turn in the other hand and think "****, he drew out on me again", so he might fold a one pair hand to a big river bet. As you point out though, he may or may not have paid that much attention to how you've played any past hands so I'd say you can't go much by history.

2.Opponent - Villain is described as "fit or fold" post flop, and he's called two barrels, indicating at least some level of "fit". Some kind of jack in his hand would be a good possibility on this run out (and QJ would be very resonable for him to have). He could have a hand like 6-8 that would fold to a river bet but a lot more pair + hands in his range seems to me.

He might fold to a shove but IME it's not a long term winning strategy bluffing this type of player once he indicates he has a little something and there are not a lot of draws he could have missed.

If you are the $655, fold pre. If you arent, $25 is fine, $30 is plenty.

I think you can really improve your game if you study / think about good barreling cards and what runouts make good barrel candidates.

As an example, just because a turn maintains/improves your equity, you shouldn't necessarily bet it. It all depends on how much fold equity you also have, so for example in hand 1 the Ts isn't really a great card, compared to say the Ks (or any K for that matter)

Similarly, you barreled just about the nut worst barrel card in hand 2. You made a profitable cbet. It didn't work this time. Fold and go back to flirting with the cocktail waitress.

Good post, and this has definitly been one of the main things I've been considering over the past few weeks. I've gotten into the habit of blindly barreling my 8+ out equity hands regardless of the situation lately. I come up with justifications like well this particular villain peels so wide, he should be able to fold third pair when I bet again but as we know many times that just isn't reality.

I'll save that double barrel for the mousiest of the mousy villains moving forward.

You should be looking at stacksizes of those left to act before deciding preflop action with hands like 89o.

Choosing not to open it under any circumstance is fine also.

From the btn it's fine. From the co it's v on the loose side but since you rarely get 3b its okish but still losing. When I get bored /tilted I find my self playing hands like this and end up burning $
rest of the hand seems fine and you need to find a bet here otr (probably all in)

You are basically at the nut bottom of your range, which is strong and uncapped.
You can have all sets, aa/kk/qj/j7s/75s all wanna bet the river and if 89s/68s are your only triple barrell bluffs your range looks good. ( see the problem if you start adding extra off suit combos of bluffs to your range by the river. You shouldn't have that many bluffs here by the river (which is the problem with opening hands like 89o your bluffs increase by a a lot & your frequencies get all messed up and you end up having to overbluff which can be expensive vs many of the morons in fr live poker who just click call no matter what.

I was going to say I think a bet is in order and a large one at that.

Results for anyone who was interested:

I did end up shoving and got snapped by J7s. In retrospect not sure if I like it so much since when he calls turn his most likely hand is Jx or a chop with me. Not sure if the queen is scary enough of a card to get a fold out of an average rec with only 450 left on the river. A or K superior I think (though t wouldn't matter vs this specific hand).

Don't bluff the calling stations once they show they have something - one of the oldest dictums in big bet poker, but still true. And one I've violated more than once and regretted it

Last year at WSOP I moved into the main 10-20 game at Bellagio, taking the seat of an old friend. I asked for reads, and he said "the guy on your left is calling all bets". Sure enough, the guy ran his stack up from about 4k to 15k in about 3 hours when various young agressive Euro players took turns trying to bluff him after he called a flop bet.