I thought calling the 3bet here out of position even with AK is not good, so I 4bet. Do we shove against his 5bet, or fold to the 5bet?

Or do we check fold 70% of the flops we don't hit out of position?

PokerStars - $0.05 NL FAST (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

BTN: 73 BB
SB: 100 BB (VPIP: 27.78, PFR: 25.71, 3Bet Preflop: 8.33, Hands: 36)
BB: 95 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: -, Hands: 2)
Hero (UTG): 116.6 BB
MP: 442 BB (VPIP: 16.67, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 6)
CO: 177.4 BB (VPIP: 16.13, PFR: 12.90, 3Bet Preflop: 7.14, Hands: 31)

SB posts SB 0.4 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.4 BB) Hero has K A

Hero raises to 3 BB, fold, CO raises to 8.4 BB, fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to 26.6 BB, CO raises to 56 BB, Hero raises to 116.6 BB and is all-in, CO calls 60.6 BB

5bets have a 120% chance of being AA at micros

The 5bet is just break even if villain is getting it in with QQ+ & AK, if we add bluffs however it is profitable.

If villain is only getting it in with KK+ (Which is a large % of what the player pool does), we need villain to fold 36% of the time to your jam, which is unlikely as there is little 4B bluffing at the micros.

So I would fold this to the 4B as it is only marginally profitable in the best case scenario.

lol so true

I often call AKo QQ to 3b even oop. At least calling it I have covered boards and really the 3b at micros is bit stronger.
But when 4betting then never play 4b/fold 100bb deep.

Don't 4-bet when your UTG raise is 3-bet. It's just bad.

This is pretty bad advice. Compounding mistakes isn't the way to make money in this game.

I believe that 4b/f AK is worse than 4b/push. Can be wrong ofc.
But 4b was clearly for value not a bluff, when we have to fold our valuerange then 4b range is badly constructed.

I disagree. What if we know he only calls worse hands (A3s, 78s, AJo, etc..) but only 5-bets KK+/AK? Ime, we will get calls from some worse hands, we'll get some folds, and it's not profitable to get all-in from these positions w/AK.

Do we know it? It is not a natural calling range.

If you fold vs his 3B vs UTG, is ok, is not going to be affecting your WR as much as you might think, FWIW it wont get you on trouble in terms of WR, calling is fine when at least, you have some history with the guy, but I like .isolated idea of Don't 4-bet when your UTG raise is 3-bet. It's just bad.

I like the 4 bet out of position you asked the question and you got your answer! I think we have to put him on a over pair unless he is a maniac and you have not given us any notes on the villain to indicate this. So lets assume you have no notes or reads on him QQ is the best we can hope for and that is a coin flip, most likely AA KK in my books so put this hand in the muck. However I can not understand your thinking with the all in to the 5 bet we asked the question got the answer we were looking for but then ignored it, if you were going to go all in you should have done this with the 4 bet!

There is absolutely no reason to 4b AI. Push AKo is very close in EV to fold, Im not a fan of 4betting strong hands and then fold them. If you want to do it why not, it is close.

Only saying that rather than 4b/f strong hand I call it, as soon as I decide it is good for 4b never folding. Actually this hand even though it is for stack does not have such a big influence on our winrate, it is only high variance.

People don't play perfect. They don't even play that well at $5nl. Go through all of your hands where MP or C/O has 5-bet your UTG 4-bet. What do they show up with 95+% of the time?

30 hands but those stats are unlikely to end up being some crazy aggro fish. People don't really flat 4-bets much so I doubt 4-bet/calling AK from UTG is going to go that well. To be honest, most of the reason we really ever stack AK at micros is because otherwise your ranges start to get horribly skewed and sucky. It's not like it's fat value vs. regs at this level.

It's a likely tell when someone 5-bets without shoving and we're dead in the water quite a lot. At the same time it wouldn't be the first time I'd seen someone make a spectacular fold here, so whatever. Don't 4-bet in future.

Sorry guys I might go on another ramble here but...

If he folds AK after facing a 3bet from CO, does he even have a 4bet range at all?

It will not take more than 3 hours for half-decent players to realize that his fold to 3bet after UTG open is close to 100%, and start 3betting him with any two low suited-connected cards profitably. I know this is 5NL and it likely won't happen now, but let him move up and see how big of a leak this becomes.

OP, the fact is that you're in a crappy situation when 3bet with AK in UTG by the CO. All the options seem pathetic at this point, so my advice would be to pick the one that sucks the least.

After you're 3bet:
Folding: I don't think you should be folding AK against a single 3bet ffs.
Calling: Don't. You're never getting back more than half pot cbet after you pair up. That is if at all you pair up with the flop.
Raising: Seems like the only option left.

So you 4bet and he raises small.

I'm usually not the guy to advocate 4bet folding strong hands. But the fact is that after getting 5bet, AK is no longer a "strong hand". The relative hand strength has nosedived. AK is a good hand to 4bet because we block both AA and KK, but 4betting here is just a semi bluff, not pure value.

Gameplay-wise and taking into account his 5bet size, if you 4bet-fold > 28% to a 5bet, it is profitable for the villain. Let's say you 4bet with just AA, KK and AK. 12 combos of AA and KK combined and 16 of AK.

So 57% of the time we have AK when we 4bet-fold and the rest 42% we have AA and KK that we 4bet-ship.

This is the only way I see that villain cannot make money off off us. So you 4bet your AK roughly half the time and fold the AK to the 3bet the other half of the time.

Interesting to see such heated discussion about a fairly common spot here. I think folding to the 3bet is ridiculous, is the plan to just split our range into 4bet GII and fold?

I think when considering whether to 4bet or 3bet, we need to consider what hands can we expect to call profitably, and use the next notch of hands for 4bet bluffs. I think AKo has merit to both flatting and 4betting. Flatting has merits in that I wouldn't expect to be crushing 5NLz 3b range vs. UTG, but we can certainly profitably call. I think 4betting has merits in that when we flat, I think we tend to underrealize our equity OOP and occasionally have to fold the best hand on a lot of flops, and taking down the pot pre has some more additional incentive in these games where rake is high. Granted, this opens up to spots where we get blown off our equity by 5bets like we see here.

Maybe the best strategy is a mixture of 4betting and flatting, either is cool with me. I think we need to consider what our 4b range looks like if we're always flatting with AK here, since this means we need to be 4betting some of our worst Ax at a higher frequency as bluffs.

Also, I think we should be 4betting a smaller size, around the range of 2.3x imo. I think when we 4b large we make stack sizes awkward when he flats our 4b, and our bluffs will generate a similar amount of folds for a smaller price.

Just my 2 cents, encouraging people to call me out for being an idiot

Nobody said fold, did they?

Oh, apparently MChares did.

I'd just ignore that...