I bought in a bit late to a $25 +$2.50 tournament on ACR; starting stack of 5,000 with blinds currently 50/100. Anyone care to critique how I played this?

Hero: 5,000 chips, in the BB
Villain: 7,200 chips, in the SB

MP limps 100, Villain calls additional 50. Hero wakes up to A J in the BB and raises to 350. MP folds, villain calls.

Flop (640) comes A J 8. Villain checks, Hero raises 500. Villain calls.

Turn (1640) comes 2. Villain checks, Hero raises 2,000. Villain goes all in. Hero snap calls.

I'm mostly questioning my turn bet, because with two flush draws, I wanted to make sure I was pricing him out. I'd appreciate any commentary though!

Your bet sizing on the turn seems large; 2K is essentially betting the pot here right? But he's probably reshipping anyway, and the only hand it makes sense for him to have that is beating you is 22, and if he has that one..well that sucks. Much more likely that he has worse 2 pair, some flush draw, etc. So if you wanted to induce the shove your turn bet was fine; if you wanted to play pot control your turn bet was too much by 650 or so chips IMO.

I sometimes like a big turn bet, particularly in a blind v. Blind scenario. Looks bluffy, which may induce a bluff shove. However, given your stack size, you were not likely to fold, so a decent player will only come over the top with a pretty strong holding. As such, in this particular fact pattern, I think you bet is too big. You are folding out all worse hands that might bluff raise, and only getting called by better ( or maybe a2). If you bet 1000, your still giving flush draws the wrong price, but may induce a bluff raise.

Dislike your sizings - just keep your bets consistent at 35-50% of pot and you'll do fine. Here I'd bet turn and shove the river. That is the ultimate goal when building q pot. otherwise glad tp see your aggression.

Pre is very large, but yeah never folding.

I guess it had a set of 8s. although Villains raising us on the turn is 90% the times the nuts, we can't fold this. V could have a lower 2 pair.



Sent from my C2105 using 2+2 Forums

you seem to be limiting the range that V can continue with at every step
but if you have him pegged as a complete station then go for it
+ whatever gregz is about to say about equity denial

Equity denial is a less applicable concept here. A high boards yo.

Greg...would you care about talking a little bit about equity denial? If OP doesnt mind.

I think it's more worthwhile to talk about than the decision faced by the OP on the turn, but sorry to derail anyway. To deny someone equity is to force them to fold. Ideally you'd want to do this when equities are close and likely to
shift, like say we were live and we had some guy 3bet us and we saw he had AK and we had 99, it would be great if he folded to our 4bet jam, we'd net more chips(assuming proper bet sizing) from the pot by him folding than we would by him calling off (not realistic).

A better example would be having AT and getting called by the button, the flop comes T93hh, you have a strong made hand but are very easily outdrawn. If you bet the flop and the turn blanks, you might want to consider over jamming the turn if the stack to pot ratio is appropriate like less than 2:1. Conversely, if we had AK on A27r and are against ATs, then the equity is very unlikely to shift.

In short you are probably familiar with the concept, it's is just applying it correctly that takes some work.

Tks Greg...

But doesnt make our hand too faced up? Or should we need to balance also?

Like the AT hand, should we jam here with almost atc that we think we are behind also? Or that would be a different thing?

Thanks for all the advice all. I think my bet sizing could have been tweaked for sure to deny equity to any hands with a draw. My goal was to induce the all in semi bluff rather than do it myself and induce a fold. But it sounds like I was lucky that he flipped over AK and the board ran out with out a King.

why raise pre?

Vs people who limp, I wouldn't be too concerned about being face up. The AT hand is a complicated example, it's a good flop for a button flat range where the board can become favourable to villain on a whole number of cards. We shouldn't be doing this with atc.

So basically its trying to make our op fold a hand where we are a bit ahead to avoid variance?

Correct!

I'd bet less OTF and OTT, but folding after the flop is out of the question.

1500 on turn gets the same result, but not folding either way. Unlucky if he has 88.