live 9-handed 20-40 game.

Slightly but not seriously LAG Villain raises UTG+2. Folds around to hero in the big blind holding pocket 7s. We call.

Hero has plenty of history with villain, he is a solid thinking player who is a winner in the game and likes to get to showdown but is not unable to let go of a hand that is 2nd best.

Flop comes A 6 8 rainbow.

Villain bets, hero calls.

Turn is 9 rainbow.

Hero checks, villain bets. His turn betting range includes plenty of hands that dont have an A. He knows i am more likely to fastplay an A on the flop but will some percentage of the time wait for the turn to k/r with an A heads up.

Is anyone interested in k/r this turn to try to fold out any pocket pairs >77, or is calling turn and evaluating river the best line?

this sounds like a contradiction at first but then I got rid of a couple of negations and it made sense again...
Anyways, if you have history with villain and he is not dumb (i.e. he realizes that your ranges are balanced) he will not fold a pair that beats your pair often enough. The showdown value of 77 pushes it to the middle of your range where calling is right IMO. If you'd have just a OESD w/o SD value, turn check raise can be considered, but not every time as I personally don't like spewing chips on big streets.

I agree with this. Also check-raising the turn every time you have a 7 probably means you have too many semi-bluffs in your range at that point (although it depends on how often you slowplay good hands on the flop).

You said so yourself that he is sd bound and can't let go of a 2nd best hand so we are trying to fold out hands that we beat anyway by cr'ing. I would call ott and fold to basically a T-K otr.

Ten is a great card for us and one we'd donk imo, but I know what you mean.

I like a turn check-raise if he's betting hands that don't have an Ace in them and could fold.

We have a not-very-strong hand that we would like to get to showdown, and we particularly want to see the river because our not-very-strong hand can get a lot stronger.

Let's semibluff with hands with less showdown value.

(It's hard for me to think of a hand with a 7 in it that you would have here that doesn't have showdown value. A7 is TP+redraw. 87 and 67 are close in strength to 77. Would you have just called the flop with 97?)

Uh, fold flop?

ding ding

You would have to put a pretty tight range on villain preflop for folding to be correct. I think his opening range here is top 15-17% of hands, which based on a stove gives us way too much equity to fold to a flop c-bet.


Armor, Phil, Alan, thanks for the thoughts on range construction. Helpful to think about how the showdown value of the pair impacts the placement of this hand. Alan, to your question, the only hand outside the top of my range I would k/r would be 97, and would sometimes k/r and sometimes k/c. I would play a weak A as WA/WB and probably just call down. Does that seem logical?