3betting A4o has to be profitable imo. He didnt 4bet with AQs and probably would have folded this flop with AQss so its a fine play at these,stakes

Prefer checking back the flop but betting is ok. I think betting is fine but checking back slightly more often. We have a lot of sdv and villain never flats worse

The problem is the description suggests this guy will rarely fold a better hand. I would much rather have 44.

So, generalizing here, but if a 3bet from the button will be be interpreted by opponents as repping a huge hand (QQ+, AK) and we rarely expect to be 4bet, I can easily buy that A4o works here (yet is still not really the hand you want to do this with).

So does this imply we might take something like the following approach:
1) 3! with suited connectors
2) Flat with QQ+ (worth the disquise)
3) 3! with 22-JJ
4) 3! with AK, AQ, KQ?, AJ?
5) 3! with suited ace
6) fold all the other stuff b/c your range can't be that big here

And of course, mix this up a little, flatting instead of 3! depending on stacks and opponents and to look like more/less of a maniac depending on how things are playing.

And yes, this is insanely exploitable, but based on the theory of how folks play at 1/2 to 2/5 is this a bad general approach?

(Sorry, this must be a standard discussion here, but I've been on about a 10 year hiatus from 2p2 & poker. Grateful if anyone can point me to existing threads on this.)

The ace is the key card. I think people will 3bet T9s more often than A4o but thats a little backward imo. We have a blocker here and can see a flop heads up with an equity advantage and position. We can 3bet as a pure bluff because villain is opening too many hands and not 4 betting enough. Or 3b just to build a bigger pot with a big hand.

With A4o we have an extra bb as an overlay and we are ahead of vs range, so 3bet to iso hu for value is fine and pretty std imo

Like we can 3bet a suited connector just to maintain our position and build FE, but A4o is technically a better hand to 3bet because its hard to hit anything and ace high is good on a lot of flops (like this one)

We shouldnt be 3 betting solely because we think its cool or to set up other hands, we can 3bet here just to isolate in position

Not saying we have to always 3bet here but we should def keep this hand in our 3bet range when our opponents never 4b AQs and fold better Ax but call with T9s

To me 3 betting junk hands like this is a play that needs folds a high % of the time in order to be profitable. You got to know wide his range is and if he'll fold it pre flop. Although I'd prefer something like K9s, Q8s, 97s, 65s etc. A hand that's not good enough to flat but has some potential post flop.

This is not a junk hand. If you are playing a big pot heads up would you want KTs OOP or A4o IP?

The A4o is not only favored, its much much easier to play. You will steal more sklansky bucks than he will.

This turned into the nut spot to 3bet because we ran into the nut tippy top of villains range and he made almost zero sklansky bucks. He could have and should have raised pre flop, flop AND turn and when he shoved he ran into one of the worst hands we could call with.

In other words, he got extremely lucky and the poker gods punished him for it

At low stakes I'd expect to see something like AQdd or AJdd a lot here but I've seen enough weird stuff over the years that I'm still calling. I don't think he floats flop with enough non-FD Ax hands.

The 3b and cbet are both fine.

However as a bit of advice one of the most significant adjustments I've made over the course of my time playing poker is only attacking "good spots" with hands better than ATC.

I've burned a ton of money attacking spots like these where I just know "he doesn't have anything" or "no way he can call down" when I have literally ATC/0% equity. This hand isn't that bad but i would probably limit making this play to when I have a suited ace. In this particular scenario it actually doesn't matter much but in general if you're always pouncing on these spots without a somewhat fixed bluff range you will be overbluffing bigly

I'm confused. The AQ made a large amount of sklansky bucks. He got us to put in $210 with a mixture of 23.23%, 16.36%, and 11.36% equity. Basically made around $150 in sklansky bucks.

I mean there's the times that he check/folds to us on different flops or potentially different turn/rivers, so maybe he only made $80-$100 sklansky bucks.

But we aren't OOP. We are on the button 3betting a guy who raised a limper. And we are basically concerned about the cases where we are called (since we are presumably folding to a 4bet here, I hope).

In this specific situation, there are lots of hands we'd prefer to have than A4o.

He was comparing KTs OOP to A4o IP and saying we'd rather have the A4.

Right, I get what the comparison is, but don't know what the point is supposed to be.

There is none. It's a straw man argument.

LOL, I don't think it was intended like that but I dunno.

I guess that JB Clark is suggesting that the original raiser often has something like KTs?

But if so, I still don't buy that argument since if there's an ace on the board you'll rep it whether you have an ace or not, and generally when villain calls down with an ace on the board he's got a better ace. And this hardly ever checks down to river where ace high beats king high so the HU mathematical superiority of Ax over Kx seems mostly irrelevant here.

No we made all the money in the hand because of his inelastic pf range. There is a tiny % of hands he gets to the turn with compared to the amount he folded. Vs the range pf that OP described.

Hero can 3b for value because v never reraises AQs...does not 4bet light.

If he had a light 4bet range this hand is not as strong but its actually still quite strong here because of the huge gap between his r/f range and its eq vs a range that flats

When you're miles better than your opponents, you can always just do whatever you want, exploit well past your own margins, and make money - probably more money by 'getting out of line' and playing poker better than everyone else. However, there are going to be game conditions/game flow where you want to tone that down and the conditions above seem to warrant better preflop play from you.
You have been aggro, this V is likely folding less/heroing more, and your raise takes away play by making things even more shallow than they already are. That's very bad cocktail when trying to squeeze juice out of marginal spots. Fortunately, V played this hand extremely poorly on every street (preflop is fine i guess), but he still got the money in super good. Sure, I was calling turn too because, yeah, he is perceived to have a lot of hands here, but that's probably yet another misconception here - he wasn't that wide because you 3bet him, and he wasn't that wide once he puts all the money in the middle...as someone said above, they usually aren't wide (even for $200) unless they're whaling.

Perhaps the games we play in are very different, but I disagree with almost all of this. V's call not raise with draws. V's slowplay sets, especially on but not limited to dry flops. They won't 4b AK cuz 'it's a drawing hand' but they will (correctly albiet perhaps unintentionally) float AK OOP "cuz it might be the best hand". And V's on draws bet when they hit their draw.

2p2 keyboard warriors can go on and on about how bad all this play by V's is, but it's probably worse for us to know that's what they do, and somehow fall for it anyway.

Common man. He cc'd with an absolute monster and folded out every hand he could have peeled more value from when he jammed the turn except the one we actually have.

Based on OPs reads he played it great. If his reads were wrong its spew but this is where u can make a lot of bbs at this level. If he never 4bets AQs and plays fit fold post, we can 3b all of our aces and a bunch of other stuff too and print money

When he is capable of flatting this board OOP without the fd, then it gets tougher. At a higher level you will be 4bet a lot or you will get called on this flop a lot more often

And the fact that he did indeed have AQs and didnt 4bet in a spot where he should be 4betting 100% means OP had the right read

WP

Other than when most of the money went in and OP was obviously crushed but called anyway before hitting a miracle suckout, yep, played it great.

I made no mention of action pre or otf in my comment. You can shower all the love you want, I'm pretty indifferent. (IMO suited Ax is fine, unsuited we're probably overbluffing, but until they play back at us, why not.) But ignoring the horribad turn call is missing the part where we actually learn from our mistakes.