1/3, 4-5handed late at night, villain joined table from another a bit late, and is quite active and very aggressive, three betting quite a bit pre, and staying active post. He's not too wild, is def. a comptent player, though I suspect his aggression is a bit too much and could be a leak: I have yet to find out for sure.
Hero has pretty tight image, haven't 3! more than once in the hour or so he's been here.

330 eff.

5 handed, V raises to 10 UTG, fold, I raise to 30 on BTN with TT, folds back to him who calls.

FLOP (60): Q45

He checks, I think about checking back and just calling down, maybe betting if checked to. Instead I bet 30; he thinks and makes it 110.

Hm, tough spot, seeing as his value range is so narrow it just looks so FOS. I have a tough time seeing him do this with a Q, since he should know my range is weighted towards JJ+, AK, he shouldn't want to commit himself with a raise and fold out all worse, always getting called by better. This is sort of why I just wanted to x/back and call down on most boards, just risk letting him draw free for one street.

On the other hand, this spot could honestly be desirable if he really is just going to make a move like this, and the bet is to induce. Still don't know him well enough though. Thoughts in general?

You underbet every chance that you had.

pre........make it 50 at least. how does 30 do anything but bloat the pot?

on the flop, either check or bet pot. a half pot bet screams weakness. Like either you whiffed with AK, or you have an underpair to the Q. which is exactly what you have.

He is not just floating here. He either has Qx, spades, or some kind of wheel gutter, like A2, A3.

It is a good spot to either shove or muck. But calling is a disaster since the only decent card we can hit is a T.

If you shove, you are reppping AQ+, and you might get him to lay down a Q. Ironically, the hand you are doing worst against.

I don't think that he is going to lay down a flush draw, so you would most likely be flipping against his range.

And if he has Qx. He has you crushed, and you are almost drawing dead.

So, I like a fold here. We could have saved 30 bucks and checked it back. But folding is much better than wasting another 80, only to have to fold to his shove on the turn.

Man, I disagree with virtually every word of this post.

50 is too large for a threebet. 30 is on the small side, but hero is in position. The aim of threebetting is not to blast your opponent out of the pot. If that's the plan, you may as well pick a junk hand to do it with. I guess another way to put this is that "bloating the pot" is kind of the aim when we are in position with a hand that is better than his range.

Betting pot OTF would be insane, it just guarantees you only get called by better.

You say in this post that the halfpot bet "screams weakness", yet when you range the opponent, this doesn't seem to have had any effect. You're ranging him to almost entirely stuff that would c/r anyway. If the opponent doesn't react at all to us screaming weakness, does it matter?

Calling is not a disaster, it keeps his bluffs in. Shoving means we just lose to all his value hands and don't get any more out of his bluffs. It doesn't help to shove against flush draws since he'll have plenty of equity.

Just check this back, OP. As played, I'd just fold. Yeah, the raise looks a bit FOS, but meh. I certainly don't think you should be continuing with all your TT here and TT with T is the worst to continue with because you block some flush draws.

i agree that pre could be a little bigger, but 50 while OTB is too big IMO. 35-40 is where i'd go.

flop, i probably check. what are we loosing value from really? he will call a bet with 99-66. he will call a bet with some FDs. is he going to float us with KJhh? probably not. maybe he floats with a few Ahighs that we lose some value from, but still, it's going to be a small portion of his range.

i'd check flop, if V bets turn, i'd call 1 street that isnt a A/K/J (folding to more river aggression). if he checks turn, i'd bet like 1/3 - 1/2 pot and evaluate river

^^ To you guys suggesting to check flop:

If the guy is aggressive, aren't we turning our hand totally face up as 99-JJ/AK? Because nobody checks back QQ+/AQ here.

This in turn gives him rope to bet turn and river with his entire range, so calling turn to fold river seems super exploitable against these type of guys.

I like to check flop/call turn/call river.

Whilst I'm OK with the 3! Pre, and I would readless 3! Tt here, but against a player we suspect to be overly aggressive, I might take the line of flatting pre, then calling any flop bet, probably even any turn, and then see where we are at.....as soon as we start playing back at this guy we can only really get called by worse stuff, or raised and put in dumb spots like this......
It's an easy game when we are in position, use that position to allow an aggro villan to bet himself into a hole.....

Is this a good table, especially shorthanded with this guy? Even if the other 3 are fish (are they?), it sounds like we might have a tough time getting into a pot with them with this guy at the table.

I might just flat preflop. I don't know how loose the blinds are, but by calling the small raise we might already isolate him. We could 3bet to $50 to prevent ~setmining odds, but then if he's competent he's unlikely to call that, plus there's so many ugly boards that we might not feel like committing on. This guy seems competent and aggro; do we really want to build a pot preflop where he can threaten our stack postflop (I'm assuming he is very capable of stealing pots) and we're going to hate a lot of flops? ETA: Also, 3betting large and simply taking down 5bbs uncontested against this guy probably ain't a horrible result.

Against an aggro, I prefer the check-back-to-call-down route. The problem is that with an SPR of 5 he can still make us play for stacks by two big turn/river bets (which he might do thanks to our weak looking check back); we wouldn't have had this problem had we just flatted preflop. If we're going to bet, I think it should be to fold (what, we're just going to call with second pair and hope he doesn't put us in on the turn?), but of course we're not going to feel comfortable folding either.

I think you basically played into his hands with everything you did here (both preflop and flop). If we have a solid confident plan on how to deal with that, fine. Otherwise, meh.

GcluelessNLnoobG

Overall, this is my thought as well. By 3betting, we take all of this away, plus handcuff ourselves to making a commitment decision very early on (most likely with a hand that will be fairly meh as TT will often see an overcard or two on the flop).

By flatting, we setup a rather large SPR of 16, which gives us a bunch of room to move postflop and use our position to make decisions, all the while not bringing stacks until play unless we decide we want to.

GcluelessNLnoobG

4-5 handed i probably 3! with QJ/QT/Q9 some frequency of the time and would be checking back that too some % of the time. if he's aggressive enough, i might be checking AQ/KQ also, but that would also depend on how much he'll station.

I guess you could check those behind if you have those hands in your 3! range to begin with, but what if you're playing ABC poker and

a) have a strong 3! range only, and

b) are cbetting TP+ on this board always?

If we call there will be $280 in the middle and we will only have $190 behind and probably be facing a turn shove. We need to decide if we are seeing this hand to the river and shove or fold now. I suspect he sensed weakness when you paused to think and is bluffing. You were there though.

There's no reason you have to shove now just because you've decided you aren't folding. What's wrong with calling and calling again?

Yeah usually going call/call when checking back, but obviously hugely villain dependent.

Without getting too hung up on creating a strong check back range, 5 handed I might have KQo as a 3b pre sometimes and would consider checking it back (and maybe some AQ against an aggro) to cover up my TT check backs. You also might have some FDs as well, so don't get too hung up on being face up.
You then basically call any turn bet and riv depends, folding TT pretty often though facing a second bet or a

As played fold flop. We have enough better hands to stack off with.