Hi tizzl,
TURN
As TGSM pointed out, it's quite ridiculous to bet/fold this hand. Even if you bet as little as 100 here OTT, you only need 27.5% equity to call a shove. Against A9xx, a hand very close to the top of our opponent's range (he should slow play his sets here but he shouldn't have that many 44xx or 55xx and there are far more 9xxx,QQxx,76xx etc. padding his range) we have over 28% equity. If you bet you have to bet/call and pot/call seems smart.
I think CR the turn has merit but I would need to do a deeper analysis so I can't substantiate this argument at present. This hand made me want to focus on something different, namely the flop sizing.
FLOP
Your bet of $44 into $72 is a similar size to what I would use as a "standard" against an unknown on this texture. However, given that on this turn card we still want to bet/call the turn A
with a hand this low down in our range, I wanted to investigate where our source of profit is in the hand...
Clearly, when we bet/call the turn with Jacks unimproved and a weak FD we are not expecting to make a ton of money from getting it in against worse. If the play is +EV then it is because we are folding him off of his equity (he should get in unimproved QQxx against our hand but cannot against our range). That being the case, we increase the EV of our overall line by bloating the pot on the flop. This led me to consider whether we could bet bigger, say closer to 4/5th pot on the flop.
We of course cannot take this particular flop/turn transition in isolation. Yet when we consider our range on this board and on various turns, the case for a large flop bet becomes stronger. Consider that any overcard is pretty decent for our range against his continuing range; {T-A} comprise 20 cards that look pretty good for our high-card-oriented range compared with his wider and weaker range.* Furthermore, low board pairs {4,5} are unlikely to give him trips very often and it seems pretty bad for us to consider bet/folding the turn with an overpair on such a card without substantial nitty history. Of the other 23 cards (disregarding our hand at the moment) the majority put a flush draw out there where often times we will have an overpair +FD or Nut FD + gutter hand which we will bet/call. Since there are so many turns on this 954r structure which we intend on getting the money in with the case becomes even stronger for bloating the pot on the flop.
A final consideration against betting large on the flop would be if we were taking bet/fold lines frequently on the flop. Against an unknown I would argue that it is pretty terrible to bet/fold KKxx on this structure. A top 70% (excluding AAxx) hand only flops >70% equity against unimproved Kings 15% of the time (against unimproved AAxx 14% of the time). If we want to bet/fold KK here HU against an unknown then I think we are folding far too much of our range. Since we accept now that we are bet/calling these hands we have the final piece of the puzzle in choosing a larger flop bet size.
Finally in the investigation I want to look at what other flops fall into this class (of betting a larger amount based on the logic above). They clearly need to be rainbow to fit into this category (pair+FD hands have tons of equity on two-tone boards and require a different approach). It is also important that no straight is already present and that few are completed on the turn. To be similar in structure the highest card should be no higher than a Jack and the second ranked card should be unlikely to make much of our opponent's range two pair.
Obvious suitable candidates are {732, 843, 852, 942, T53, J63}r. I would also contend that a flop of J76r is appropriate since although we lose 8 overcards from the 954r board we gain 12 bricky undercards of 2-4.
We should also note that the width of our opponent's range is important here on the super-static flops like {932, T32, J53}. In a HU game, or against a BT open in 6max I would still advocate betting larger since our opponent will have A95x type hands with a pair and a gutter and I want to turn this into a two street game. Against an EP/MP open with a tighter range many of the low cards become bricks because of the relative dearth of wheel cards
in our opponent's flop calling range. On such really static boards it may make sense to bet the more "standard" 60% sizing.
Glad 2+2 is back up, hello again to all,
Quad
*It is also important to note that much of our opponent's calling range will be JT9x-type hands. His calling range is likely going to be quite inelastic on this flop and yet he is going to get better odds to stack us when we bet/call the turn into his two pair with our dry overpair. Betting bigger on the flop charges him a higher premium to do this.
Two Plus Two
J
4
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