Fold if this is 9 handed

Young "pro" in town to grind cash games, whether seen at TAG or not, knows that this is the perfect bluff card and probably wouldn't check turn with a hand that beats us on turn. He might have backdoored a flush, but I think we are good enough time to make this a call.

If I'm villain, I'm betting this river almost 100% of the time, regardless of my cards.

Versus a bad player this is a pretty clear value bet otr to get value from 99, 76, 66 etc...

Versus described villain it is not.

I want to call just because I don't know wtf he has.

Double barreling the turn is bad and cbetting this flop might show a profit because we have the gut shot and back door fd but the gut shot is to an obvious straight etc.... check folding the flop is probably fine but I'd cbet versus described villain but it's definitely not printing money.

Well finally someone knows what they are talking about

Turn is one of the worst card to barrel

I did say I wanted to call though but I always want to call

But it's a fold otr he's likely never bluffing except with A6s and we beat like only 99 going for thin value

Scratch what I said. Obviously we have plenty of hearts in our range that we may or may not barrel.

I stand by barreling the 8s though. Not bluffing a hand because the "worst" barreling card hits is bad logic. When we have no perceived bluffing range, yet a perceived value range, we should bluff some percent of the time. If we don't bluff this particular hand, we are never bluffing, and are not only playing exploitably, but playing *exactly how he expects us to play*. That's a terrible combination.

Besides, there are plenty of hands he's folding. Any 6x hates this turn (all of which we're behind at SD), any BD draw + over type floats won't even give a second thought to double floating when we barrel this card, and 99-QQ have to seriously consider what hand they have beat when we continue here.

But yes, misread the board, obviously we should feel no need to do anything but c/f when the turn brings another heart.

Why?

Mainly, the equity of your hand is poor against their flop continuing range, that, while a bluff *might* work occasionally on this turn, you are still spewing more overall. I might not even have bet the flop.

Which is why this is wrong:

This is frequently true in many hands. This is why the turn bet would be called a bluff. In and of itself not a good enough reason to not bluff.

Bluffing OTT is good because we have a very good chance of getting better (and better draws) to fold.

I obviously agree that we should bluff less on cards that help his range more than our own and bluff more on cards that help our range. The reason the logic of the quoted sentence is bad is because if you just blanket apply this rule in each and every time a bad barrel card comes, then we are never ever going to bluff on any cards that helps villain more than it helps us.

Conversely, it's bad logic to conclude that we should bluff just because the best barrel card has hit because we'll end up monkey barreling aces, which is insanely easy to exploit. A halfway-thinking villain can recognize cards that are good or bad to barrel, and if their adjustment plan is as easy as call any worthwhile hand on A turns and fold any non-nut hands on paired board turns, then we are never going to be forcing players to make mistakes.

So by all means, bluff a lot less on the 8s than you would on an A here, but if we have the very best bluffing hand in our range, we should consider bluffing in any spot against a thinking player. Again, having no perceived bluffing range AND no actual bluffing range is great for villain, brutal for us (that is, in any spot where you'd like to have a value range).

You don't want to be burning money while bluffing. You want to pick the right hands and right boards to do it with. Too many people only think about what they can get their opponent to fold, and not what they are repping or how they are doing against their opponent's overall range.

This hand does not have a good chance to improve here. You have some ROI and you dont know if your outs are all clean. A better hand to bluff with (if you must, but either way a paired board is iffy to bluff or semi bluff on), is if you had some blockers to either a big draw, straight, or set, on the flop, then you are more likely to get a fold.

Uh fold pre AINEC. Assuming this is 9-handed.

You logic is based on the premise that "we should be bluffing mechanically x% of the time regardless of the context", which is wrong. You should only be bluffing in profitable situations - why should you be bluffing just for the sake of it?

I dont know how that's insanely easy to exploit.
For them to call you down every time a "best barrel card" hits, you are basically saying you could never have a value hand there, which's wrong, because you are only bluffing some of the time. This is why we bluff on cards better for our range - they can't easily call you, as you will have it some of the time.

I didn't say anything of the sort. I said in certain situations against certain opponents, that number shouldn't be 0%. I outright said the number should be lower on an 8 and higher on an A.

If it is hard for us to have a bluff, then villain will adjust his range to our bets in a way that will make it profitable for us to bluff. I think it is very very very easy for villain to know that it's tough for us to have a bluff here.

If we're wrong that he'll adjust accordingly, then at least we've made it so that it's not possible for him to exploit us in the long-run because our range is *still* going to be profoundly value heavy in this spot regardless of how we play our discounted combos of JTs.

Sure, it improved *some* of our hands, but if we just auto-bet our entire air range just because some of our hands got better, then our ranges are going to get insanely bloated.

We'd have to put this particular situation aside because our range is so narrow that we can auto-barrel an A and be fine. But in any situation where our ranges are much wider, if we were to auto-barrel the card that improves our range the most, our range would be so bloated with trash that villain could just fold a small percentage of his SD hands, call most of his SD hands, and raise a bunch of air. It wouldn't matter how we readjust because even if the A gave us a few more top pairs, our range is far too bloated with air fight back, unless we want to dig an even deeper hole with a still-bloated range. So we don't just auto-bet every time an A hits; we just bet a lot more than we would on a paired turn card.

Anyway, this isn't even the situation we're talking about. I just thought if I presented the inverse conclusion of what I'm saying then the point might be clearer or at the very least demonstrate that I'm not trying to argue to be barrel monkeys.

None of this is important when considering whether I should be bluffing.

If I am semi-bluffing, they are important.

I just think its very hard for V to continue with hands like [A5s, A7s, A9s, A6s, 66, 99-JJ, 65, 76, JT, QTs, ] when we barrel OTT. I don't see how you take all these hands out of his range OTF and OTT (even if he is tight-TAG).

Pretty much the only hand that continues is 8x (which we're obviously b/f to), 75 (how does a "tight-TAG" have 75 here?), and some -draws. That's actually a pretty small part of his flop-calling range.

We're not semi-bluffing OTT. In fact, unless we hit the non--9 OTR, we're x/f the river anyway. So we can take a 2nd shot at the hand now, and see how sticky V really wants to be.

~~~~~

ETA... maybe I'm just wrong, and this is a terrible turn to barrel. But not bluffing just because your hand has little chance of improving is limiting your win rate at LLSNL. Against this V, we probably have to assume he can read hands a bit, but against most V, they barely read their own hands, let along read ours.

I haven't read all of the responses yet but here's my take...

Whoever said fold pre needs to drop down in stakes. Pre is cool.

Flop, c-betting this 50/50 depending on who's behind.

Turn is blech, probably gotta check/fold. (or have a solid dynamic with the dude where you can double barrel this terrible board). But wait! he checks!

Turn, he should be betting this card 100% of the time after you c-bet and check with his entire range... (unless you are a barrel monkey or calling station or your perceived range is only overpairs which you aren't, you aren't, and it isn't.) The fact that he doesn't means that he has some leak in his game. Which leads me to believe that the river is a call.

Getting 3:1 on the river... Sure you might have been wrong this time, but you'l be right more than 25%.

why do you believe this? i think it is certainly not true (unless hero is playing a strategy which he shouldn't be, and this is designed to maximally exploit it), and the conclusion you draw is somewhat harmful (although i agree that the river is a call).

If he bluffs less often than he should on the turn, should that lead you to believe that he bluffs less often than he should on the river?

I guess im the only one who thinks cbetting this with our position isnt optimal?

I thinking c/r flop and barreling turn is much better...

Our hand looks like what it is on the flop either that or some overpair and any thinking player will see this.

What is our range when we bet flop check turn? A lot of air and check/calling overpairs. What reason does he have to check back any hands on this turn?

Is he trying to trap our overpair into paying off another street? He should bet turn unless he thinks our overpair is going to fold to a bluff on this turn. And if we are folding here with an overpair to what we perceive to be a solid TAG then something is wrong with our game imo. If we have a value hand, He can almost always get 2 streets of value if he checks turn, but he can almost always get 2 streets of value + the possibility of 3 streets by betting turn as well.

Does he have some equity like 6x or 45hh? Since our range is more air than actual hands, he should bet his hand with over 50% equity vs. air for value to charge our overcards and his hands like 6x as a bluff since our UTG range here has a lot of turn folds in it.

I don't know if I should have included that in my post as a reason for calling river... However I do think that there is a kind of paradox here. If he's bluffing less often than he should on the turn, I actually think he's likely to bluff more often then he should on the river.

To a lot of players who don't know how to bluff well, the turn looks like a good spot to check back the draw because they think in their mind 'I'm gonna see if I hit my draw and if I miss and he checks river, he's scared so I can bet him off his hand'. I can't tell you how many times I take a bet/bet or check/checkcall line vs. bad players on obvious draw boards and they take the bait. To them, they don't understand that each street is the continuation of a story. They just start telling their story on the river and we can snap em off with a pair.