Right, but just because you fold against straightforward players doesn't mean you have to c/f this river vs a thinking, observant player (who maybe had posted in the cutoff or something and therefore had a reason to cold call preflop, or maybe he misclicked preflop, or maybe it's a different scenario where we're considering c/f). There's no obligation to play the same against all players. Hell, I often see a good player make a call down vs someone else but I know there's no way in hell he's making that same call-down vs me. So the fact that I know a good player does X against player A doesn't mean I know or even think it's likely that he'll do X against player B.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, I don't think betting makes any sense. Messing around with propokertools, I came up with this as the most optimistic scenario for hero:

board: 8d8h5d3s6d
Hand Equity Wins Ties
7d7s 39.74% 15 1
A5:xx, 22-99!88!55!33, Add, $R$R:dd 60.26% 23 1

Since villain is not going to bet 22, 44, or A5, position doesn't really matter and we can just treat this as a value betting situation where we don't have enough equity. When we check to villain and he bets, we should almost always losing be to a flush or 66.

I think it is very possible that the situation looks a lot more like:

board: 8d8h5d3s6d
Hand Equity Wins Ties
7d7s 10.61% 3 1
A5:xx, 66-TT!88!55!33, add, $R$R:dd 89.39% 29 1


Betting only makes sense if villain never does this with a flush draw on the flop and is bad enough to call A5, 44, and 22 on the river.

Hero played the hand perfectly and should now check-fold to complete the perfect exploitation of this villain.

this is what i was thinking. i mean, i'd figure if everybody on 2+2 wants to call with 77, i guessed villain would call with these. i'm often confused in spots like this where i'm betting into a villain with sub-equity, because i think i have odds to call, but don't want villain to play perfectly against me. in this case, i didn't even consider c/f'ing an option until everyone was saying how bad betting is compared to c/c. imo i think c/c is the worst option.

I like how the discussion has gone in here.

Spoiler if anyone cares:

Villain never bets 76 if checked to?

It's a call if he doesn't bet his pocket pairs and bets all his 76s. Given he bets TT/99 sometimes, our equity is closer to 7% so check/fold seems right.

The only problem is that he knows OP never has anything, he just bluffed his way to a chop with 9 hi for gods sake! How often does tricky old man flat button w/AKo to trap OP, raise flop with perceived best hand vs. Boss Nine High, then turn AK into a bluff in river? I always like to add a couple percent of equity for inexplicable plays like this, but in this case still seems like a call too far.

One more thought for those of you worrying that our check-fold can be exploited... do you realize that we likely have the worst possible hand in our range?

In EP, opening A5s would def be a bit spewy. So we cannot have worse than 77 on the river. So if we fold the worst hand in our range, we risk being exploited? That is not how things work

But oh wait... we have the worst hand in our range. And as we all know, we are supposed to bluff with the worst hand in our range! See how silly things can get if we follow this train of thought?

Interestingly, I have certainly played against old school live players who can fold 99-TT on this river. So against these players, we actually should be bluffing with 77 which is kinda funny, but good to know.

And Desertcat ya... he prolly calls 76s or 65s if he makes it to the river. It can be challenging to narrow down the ranges of cold-callers.

You probably just don't understand live players because you live in you anti-social online only poker world.

I was going to post something very similar to what DC said but was too lazy. I'm not the most aggressive player but I can certainly LAG the **** out of people occasionally if they're on my left. It never ceases to amaze me how poorly people adjust to it. They lolplay when the should be mashing, they mash when the should be folding, they saw you three bet them once with 9 high and suddenly now you're always supposed to have two random cards. They see random acts of aggression or spew when in reality they are very calculated strikes.

It's easy for you to say this is the worst hand in Jr's range but a lot of bad players think he'd be betting any pair so A high or 67s are now the nuts

ZOMG, OP included "misses obvious value bets" in his read so I don't think villain is going to bet 76 since that would be an aggressive value bet. Also, I find that players who take the "raise flop, bet turn, ck river" type lines tend to be wussy. This seems like a guy who is like "yay, I get to show down!" with his small pairs when we check. My analysis is based on OP's read, not on the general live population.

Fwiw, my initial inclination was to b/f. The discussion of c/f as an option got me interested in the hand since I realized I probably have a leak in similar situations if c/f is indeed correct. I started breaking down the hand hoping to defend b/f as the right answer, but I just cannot justify it.

C/c seems god awful to me... this doesn't sound like a guy who is going to bluff raise rivers and OP says he is a weak value bettor. So our money clearly goes in much better with a b/f than a c/c since we extract money from the hands he is too wussy to value bet.

And b/c is just suicide for obvious reasons.

Also, don't be mad that you couldn't leave the country to play on Stars post-bf because of your ankle monitor and live in a state that doesn't have Blowada

Yeah, I mean that's all true like 99% of the time. I'm just saying bad players often react poorly to players they think are too aggressive. I agree that in this spot c/f is probably the best line. But we basically have our nut low hand on this particular action/runout. In similar situations it's not going to many more hands like 67s that a villain could be betting that make it a ****ty crying call instead of a snap fold. Bad players are capable of making bad bets in spots like this simply because they don't expect you to ever not bet your pair

Some interesting math that I will prolly mes up since I haven't done anything like this in a long time:

Assumption: If we b/f, we always have the worst hand when villain raises.

b = percent of the time villain bets when checked to with a worse hand
c = percent of the time villain calls a worse hand when we bet
-10 = pot size after villain bets riv

The equation for the EV of c/f should be:

f(b) = b * -10 + (1-b) * 0

The equation for the EV of b/f should be:

f(c) = c - (1-c)

So using a graphing calculator, I came up with the following values. The values can be interpreted as "B/f is better than c/f if villain bets a worse hand > b% of the time given c".

c = 10%, b = 8%
c = 20%, b = 6%
c = 30%, b = 4%
c = 40%, b = 2%
c = 50%, b = 0% (we should obviously always bet if we are winning > 50% of the time when called)

The takeaway from this is that we have to be more and more confident in our read the more we expect villain to call a worse hand when we bet when comparing b/f and c/f.

So if we think villain will call with stuff like 44 and 22 and 76s, b/f is almost certainly better since we will win close to 40% of the time when he calls. Villain would only need to bet a worse hand > 2% of the time when we check in this case for c/f to be a bad. If he does so even 3-4% of the time, it is a disaster for us.

I do think he will fold 44 and 22 though, so we are probably safe since he would need to bet a worse hand 6-8% of the time which seems silly to me given the read.

Just imagine how complex things can get if we consider the possibility of a bluff raise... in fact, a river bluff raising range starts making c/c and b/c real possibilities at certain thresholds. And big bet tards say LHE is solved

B/f. 22, 44, A5s, 67s, and dinner for two suited are paying you off.

I'm thinkin' call the flop, and bet the turn if a non-scare card pops, and feel-out the river.

Unguarded: that's nice and all but this is the live poker forum, we don't use equations and algebra and stuff and we certainly don't pull our graphing calculators out at the table! We speak in general platitudes and all pretend we are rich. Thanks anyway! 😀