You're saying stuff like this and "I play ranges and not hands", sounding like you're presenting deep statistics. You aren't. Knowing he makes this play with worse than AA is different than seeing his exact hand a few times. If he has a Q and was making a clever play is different than him spazzing out with a low pair or air.

You may be convinced that calling and fastrolling is great for the game. Here, you're giving up something real to do that.

Seems like things have run their course.

Rodeo:

1) What did villain have?

Everyone Else:

2) Lets pretend villain had A/Q (very unlikely with river 3bet), what does everyone think of his WA/WB line?

Classic WA/WB works against an unthinking nit/TAG who misses value bets on the river and who never 3 barrels. Against a LAG opponent, you bluff him off hands you bet (costing a bet) and sometimes get hand read and bluffed (costing the pot). Generally, this isn't a great line against modern opponents -- a guy who value bets 4th or 5th pair and who also bluffs liberally isn't a great target. Against a tough opponent capable of both thin value raising and bluffing, you show your hand strength and get owned too often.

i made a mistake when posting this hand in that the big blind called on the flop and folded the turn. i add that little tidbit to help everyone understand what a goofy line our villain ended up taking.

when villain donked the river i snap raised thinking he was taking a wa/wb line and was caught off guard when he 3bet. the first thing that made any sense at all was 77. i asked him if he had 77. he didn't reply (obv.). i didn't think he would slowplay 88 so i discounted that. for a split second i thought he could have QQ, but that seemed pretty silly. i couldn't think of a reasonable hand that he could've played this way and ended up calling.

villain had QQ

This is so far off base, it's not even funny. Shirley you can't be serious.

I'll give you a hint: poker is more than just VPIP/PFR/AF numbers. You're trying to get into the head of your opponents and figure out how they think and what THEY think the proper way to play poker is. We're not trying just trying to calculate his flop c-bet % or something... from the results of the one hand rodeo posted, we can already start to figure out how the villain thinks.

There's other stuff you'll see like live tells that you can start to correlate to strength/weakness that you'll see at showdown.

Not caring what villains have in a hand because it's "statistically insignificent" is ridiculous.

QQ?

wtf?

Never ceases to amaze me how wrong I am.

NH. (Actually, no, you missed the 4th bet on river )

With only two opponents, I can see someone check calling the flop as a slow play (not that I would ever do that). Hero would probably Cbet 100% of his preflop 3bet range.

On the turn the only thing I can see is the villain must have put the hero on AA/KK and discounted hands like AK that might check behind on the turn, or he was pretty sure hero would barrel the turn with AK too.

This seems like a pretty bad line for the villain, but you played into it by raising and calling his 3 bet. Before you raise the river, you have to consider what hand the villain would call your raise with. I don't think the villain has very many hands that would call, and he has some slow plays and river suck outs (77) that will 3 bet.

Oh, FFS, this is one of those hands where I'd have to work hard to keep from bursting out laughing at how terribadly the villain played. In the reciprocality sweepstakes we come out so far ahead that the extra bet on the river doesn't matter. Play well, make a plan, stick to it, and don't let the results mess with your head.

Print this great AB quote out and stick it to your dashboard for the drive to the casino. Against the range of hands the villain river donks, how did hero do? The fact that villain showed up with lolslowplayed monster is lol, not an indictment on how hero played.

i agree with alan that this is results oriented thinking.

i didn't "play into" villain's bad line, villain got lucky first to hit his two outer, and second that i had an over pair to the board. if i don't have an over pair i just call the river and villain makes the absolute minimum.

let's use reciprocality. hero has QQ and villain has AA. this is how i imagine it would have played out: hero caps pre 3way(12SB), hero b/3b/c flop hu(20SB), hero k/r turn (14BB), hero bets river and gets called (16BB). 16BB vs. 13.5BB. let's say villain waits for the turn to raise. hero caps pre 3way(12SB), hero bets flop and gets called in two spots (15SB), hero b/3b/cap turn hu(15.5BB), hero bets river and gets called (17.5BB). 17.5BB vs. 13.5BB. if he waits for the turn to raise and doesn't cap that's still 15.5BB on the river, which is 2BB more than the line he actually took. whatever scenario you come up with, we make more money with QQ in that spot than the villain did.

not to nitpick but both of your scenarios have villain putting in a bit too much action. I think he did fine on reciprocality w/r/t the exact holdings.
most people would say he left money on the table against your range, but look again and the only possible thing I'd say he could do differently is to c/r the turn and hope you're calling down with AQ,JJ-99 or taking off one more card with AK.
it's pretty creative to mimic the wa/wb line.

i think villain should be capping pre with QQ in this spot. the big blind was loose and willing to call a lot of bets to see the flop. Also, as far as reciprocality is concerned, i don't think him putting in 4 bets w/ AA on the flop is unreasonable for this villain. i've seen him put in that much action with AJo on a Jxx board before. it's possible he could put us on KK, AQs, or the other AA until we k/r the turn, and i think he's even more likely to r/cap the flop if the big blind comes along.

i don't really think it's that creative to take the line he took. i feel like he just fell into a lucky spot where he's putting my range in a spot where he doesn't think i'll be willing to bet the river so he wants to make sure a bet goes in. if he had any idea how strong i was he would've tried to put in more action sooner i believe.

Sure, if he "knew" you had AA he would've played it differently, including not capping it preflop.
I was saying that your 3bet range includes a lot of hands that will call down from a c/r (partly because *you* are wa/wb with medium pockets or top pair) or fold somewhere, though I will back off and agree that him showing aggression earlier will probably net the most vs your entire range, whereas this line has exactly 2.5 bb going in against all but the tip-top of your range, and even that is doubtful since it's also a donk-of-death line, and as some have argued there is little benefit to raising. He has to rely on you knowing the standard wa/wb line, and you knowing he knows you know,.. in order for this to work.