1/3, Sunday afternoon, 8-handed. About 4 hours into session but no previous history against any of these players.

Villain 1 (HJ, 35yo white male, $60) open raises to $15.
Villain 2 (CO, 45yo white male with tattoos, 60/30 maniac, $300) calls.
Villain 3 (BU, 75yo white male, 20/0, $800) calls. [This player has not raised a hand pre-flop in four hours.]
Hero (SB, $350) re-raises to $65 with Ah Kh.
Villain 1 and Villain 2 fold.
Villain 3 calls.

Flop ($163): 8h 5s 2c

Hero c-bets $80 into $163
Villain 3 snap raises to $300
Hero folds
Villain shows a pair of sixes and gloats for the next five minutes. Claims he was right to call with any pair on the button and should have shoved.

Question: How many errors were there in this hand (committed by any of the players)? Also, what percentage of the time should Hero check the flop vs c-betting in this setting?

I probably make it closer to 75-80. I'm happy if it folds out everyone but V1 and if someone comes along, I'm happy if they pay more.

You're betting into a sidepot of $10. With this hand and this board, I'm more inclined to bet something small like 40-50. V isn't going to bluff raise you enough that it matters. Checking the flop isn't bad either, I wouldn't worry about % of time to check at 1/3, these guys aren't paying attention to frequencies.

There's no sidepot. Villain1 folded and it's heads up on the flop.

Other than a bigger raise pre, I don't think there is much wrong here. Nitty old guy making this move usually has a set. The fact that villain went crazy here means you might be c-betting too much or he has some other table read/intuition convincing him it was a c-bet.

That said, with this villain type I would check this hand every time. If he bets into you, you can look him up if the price is right and possibly improve (backdoor flush) or get away from the hand. He can gloat all he wants, but he could have easily ran into a set or AA/KK and gotten stacked. His move only gets called by better and folds out worse hands, so let him get minimum value with ~70% equity. Kind of a clown move.

Bunch of potential problems but it's hard to pin down. What V3 and Hero should do here depend a lot on what V1 and V2 are doing.

V1 shouldn't have much he opens to $15 that isn't worth calling off with.
V2 probably should be raising to isolate V1 if he wants to play but if he expect passive calls behind then calling sometimes is OK.
V3's claim he should have shoved is wrong unless V1 and V2 are really bad. Calling was OK once V2 called but if it was just V1 he should have folded.
Hero's play is obvious unless V1 is on a really tight range in which case folding might be better. Hero's flop c-bet is fine. V3's play is a spazz move that gets him crushed in the long run but was right against Hero's specific hand.

How often you should c-bet AK is where things start to get hard to track because of the previous bad play. Your range should be very strong here because you shouldn't be expecting V1 to fold and V3 should be aware of that. That is a lot of assumptions and I wouldn't expect a lot of low stakes players to think it through the whole way or correctly. If V3 is thinking it through your range is over pair heavy and you should c-bet a lot but if V3 isn't looking past his hand and is making the typical "raise is AK" assumption then you need to c-bet less.

Your hand is played fine the one thing to note and i have noticed a ton in a new room im playing is that relatively small bets post flop after 3betting pre flop tend to induce ALOT. Its actually really hard to induce these days but small cbets seem to do the trick as ive seen quite a few similar hh lately.

So the key learning here is to choose this sizing with your overpairs.

I like preflop. A bunch of dead money in the pot, let's attempt to get this HU with the shortstack or the maniac and meanwhile give them terrible ~8:1 IO in doing so. Nice.

V3 most likely has a pocket pair (possibly a very big one) or a big Ax. He's not going to fold a pocket pair (especially a big one) to one bet, possibly not even multiple bets. He's not bluffy (right?) so it's unlikely he attempts to move us off AK with a worse Ax. So I check/fold the flop. It's ok to just give up against these guys.

The result is a little surprising, I wouldn't expect him to play 66 like that (I would think mostly he would fold, and sometimes would call). Hard not being there and having an exact read.

His preflop initial call is very debatable. He doesn't have the setmining odds to go against the raiser (who has an extremely shortstack), but he does have position on the maniac, and if the maniac can spew chips postflop (in possibly a protected pot) with lol hands, then it might not be horrible. Unless blinds were uber loose and bad, I would mostly fold here unless maniac is just so awesome I have to get in a hand with him. The second time around he's being asked to call $50 to win $380, so getting IO of 7.5, which is fairly horrible (especially if he's just setmining, although it looks like he wasn't necessarily doing this).

His flop play is debatable. If we're a tight guy, we just end up with an overpair here so much that we're never folding in a pot this size. It's possible he thought we was bluffing (poor as I doubt he has FE). If he thought his hand was best, well, not bad I guess since the pot is now beyond the point of commitment and he's simply protecting against overcards.

I probably would have folded at every decision point.

GmasteringtheartoffoldingG

Reraise preflop should be a little bigger, but he can't really call it anyway. If he's going to call pre, then he's correct not to fold this flop, I think flatting and getting it in are both reasonable for him. There's no way you can know that he's not just intending to flop a set or fold, though, so you have to cbet.

So, I count two clear mistakes:

- Your reraise preflop should be bigger.
- He can't call the reraise pre (but it's closer than it really should be)

What do we think about check/raising flop? I may be biased knowing villain has 66 tho.

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I would have gone $75-90 pre and 30-40% on the flop. You had the right idea and were in the ballpark so it's just some minor tweaks.

People generally have an inelastic calling range on a flop like this meaning he's not going to call $60 but fold $80. Save yourself some money on the flop which you can use to bomb turns and put the pressure on weak pairs.

This is the old adage of perfect play vs the correct play...
When we know villan has 66 the perfect play is c/r flop and bomb turn if a blank comes off.... Villan can't continue with 66 then,
But without the absolute info that villan has 66 the correct play vs his range is to c-bet.....
Having said this, because of the way c-bets are viewed now a more creative line might be to check/call flop, and then c/r bluff the turn, or if we spike the k/a then just check calling turn.....

For op hand is played fine Imo, villans raise on the flop is a spaz move though, and the old guy that makes it 15 then folds is just plain awful.

Raise more pre so to cut implied odds for set miners (like 66 in your case)
Instead of making $65 pre make it $115. Take some of the future cb and load it preflop so no body's got odds to draw.


Oh, by the way: what a "white male with tattoos" is profiled in your mind?
So, you got no other characteristics after 4 hours but just the color of their skin?
How bout yourself, are you white. black, brown, yellow or green? So that I can put you on some scientific ranges for my GTO perfect play. (LOL)

How often you check this flop with KK+, after raising to $85 & getting called? I check it 100% of the time.

Pretty much never absent a read that villain will bomb the flop with his entire range and keep firing on the turn and river.

Villain3 says he "had a read" and that "if you have an overpair you're never betting the flop". Hahahaha.

The maniac was a maniac preflop but postflop his balls shrink and his appendage retracts (if that is proper English lol). Judging by his conversations Villain3 would be lucky to register three digits on the Wechsler Adult or Stanford-Binet.

Not sure why everyone hates our preflop sizing? I think it's perfect. It offers the deepest stack very poor 8:1 to setmine (will never be profitable), and the other shorter stacks even less.

I think if stacks were shorter we could also think of raising an amount that would setup a PSB shove (flexing our FE plus ensuring we get to the river to realize our equity even when we whiff), but at these stack sizes I think that would be too much.

Gpreflopisfine,imoG

If he's going to stack off on flops like this with 66, then the preflop call will be profitable against AK specifically, though not against our range as a whole.

66 got 8:1 odds to setmine. When you factor in the time we set-over-set him + hit a two outer or runner runner on the turn/river (8%+ of the time) + don't pay off anything with KK on A high boards / whiff AK, etc., Villain's preflop call isn't remotely close to being profitable to setmine. I typically always attempt to offer my opponents in the ~8:1 implied odds area if I can, and even that might be considered too conservative (offering ~10:1 or even slightly more is probably fine too).

ETA: Ha, just read you part about not being profitable against our range as a whole, ok, fair enough. But even for AK this is fine because we won't pay off a set the huge amount of times we whiff (and yet he needs us to pay off every single time he flops a set just to breakeven).

GimoG