Me again with new hand and a frisky triple barrel bluff. Would like a line check please, sorry about the no. of hands today

I think first 2 streets are fine. OTR we have so much value (most of our SDs get there, so many 2P/sets etc) here that I need to find some bluffs, and I think KQ is one of the best here so I decided to triple barrel bluff. KQo blocks the nuts and doesn't have any spade blockers either and more importantly has nearly 0 SDV. In restrospect, I think potting or overbetting?!? river would be better here.

Thoughts, good bluff or spew?

iPoker - €0.20 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

CO: 40 BB (VPIP: 11.11, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 10)
Hero (BTN): 102.4 BB
SB: 100 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 1)
BB: 115.55 BB (VPIP: 27.27, PFR: 22.73, 3Bet Preflop: 11.11, Hands: 66) Likely reg
UTG: 119.95 BB (VPIP: 30.69, PFR: 25.74, 3Bet Preflop: 11.27, Hands: 209)
MP: 109.75 BB (VPIP: 21.05, PFR: 18.42, 3Bet Preflop: 3.23, Hands: 82)

SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has Q K

fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to 2 BB, fold, BB calls 1 BB

Flop: (4.5 BB, 2 players) A J 8
BB checks, Hero bets 1.8 BB, BB calls 1.8 BB

Turn: (8.1 BB, 2 players) 6
BB checks, Hero bets 6.45 BB, BB calls 6.45 BB

River: (21 BB, 2 players) 9
BB checks, Hero bets 16.8 BB, BB calls 16.8 BB

If u decide to bluff turn, overbet river.
Id estimate betting turn and shutting down on river to be slightly worse than this.
So either dont bet turn or fire on
Against a proven decent nitty reg barreling turn and overbetting river is definitely best.

As a hint: You dont need bluffs you need to get value.
Gametheroy wise bluffs are not meant to generate profits. Having a bluffrange is only meaningful as means of assuring that you are getting payed with your valuehands.

Thanks for the response. I agree perhaps its uneccesary, but I find most regs at 20NL overfold due to people underbluffing these lines make it profitable to bluff. I don't know how villains stats make him look fishy reg, looks standard to me over 66 hands for a reg.

Why are you not cbetting? Because we have SDV & maybe can call turns?

Sorry i thought that he was 22/11 i fixed my post.
Given that he definitely looks like a reg i think your play would be fine if you overbet river.

Against weaker players i like to try and check down. No point in betting if they never fold better and i am rarely barreling turn. They have so much Ax and they check down quite a bit when we have the best hand. Wouldnt call turns if i dont improve. Most people dont stab as much as you think.

Overbet looks like good option. You can have all nutted hands he cant

Is overbetting turn reasonable? Is this a spot to do so or do you prefer overbetting river?

Dbl barrel is mandatory when you bet this small otf. His range should be a lot wider and he needs to fold a lot on this turn.

Ap give up river, i expect a bet here to be -EV as well as an overbet. Also you're just bluffing too much if you bluff this hand. It's just an awful spot to bluff because so many draws missed. And well, also because nobody ever believes you when it's BvB or BTN vs Blind.

Thanks, I agree with turn analysis that's the aim of small cbet size.

You really think it's that bad (I know we are probs overbluffing a small amount)? Also why do you think noone believes us when it's BTN vs Blind, we have so much value here?

I think the hand itself is a nice bluffing candidate. We don't block Kx/Qx spades that have a pair that will fold to a river bet.

But really, these arent good spots to bluff unless your opponent has low WTSD or folds a lot to river cbets.

I think no one believes us btn v blind or BvB because I've spewed/barreled a quite a bit of runouts/preflop from 5NL-200NL where people should be folding, but they just don't. I've seen people 5b AI 77 SB vs BTN against me, AQo/AQs, etc. One time I've even had someone 4b/call off 77 fairly quickly SB vs BB when I had 44, and I was just so confused... I was fairly new to the table as well.

I remember this one hand I had SB vs BB recently. I thought it was an okay spot to bluff, and I had no idea how this reg basically insta called me.

I open QJo SB, BB flats. Flop 8810ss, I c-bet he calls. Turn A I bet he calls. River I think 5s or 6s. I obv have no showdown value, and I think he has some missed draws that can fold and a lot of one pair hands that can fold. Didn't have a spade blocker, but I didn't want to give up the pot. I bet 70% pot, I get nearly snapped off by AJo no spade. I mean, naturally I shouldn't have many bluffs here, so at least if he were to call, I thought he'd at least tank about it for a bit with no spade blocker and especially since him holding a J blocks some of my bluffs.

Jesus, that's sh*tty. I've had somewhat similar experiences, I just find it hard to check back something that always loses but when you bet and you get folds you feel gangster lmao.

So basically, bluffing in a specific hand (ignoring ranges, balance etc) is only profitable if we can get villain to overfold, e.g. we need reads of nitreg, so although we can get villain to fold better hands we should check as we need villain to be folding more than enough to make it a +EV bluff, correct?

Triple barrel is good, can quibble over sizing/over-betting and such. Just be aware that if you start working in over-bets then you need to do it with a range.

It's okay, haha. I know how you feel, and sometimes you've gotta let the spew take over . Imo I don't think this is a terribly -EV bluff. It might be slightly -EV, but also it's high variance as well since the pot is already big.

Unless regs can track your stats for over 3k+ hands and gather samples on your river c-bet stat, I don't recommend too many 3-barrel bluffs especially on blank runouts & especially at the micros. I see some nit regs who c-bet 60% otf, 50% ott, and 27-37% otr. Whenever I see them 3-barrel, I just laugh and fold everything but the nuts. I think the other day I had A10hh in the BB & flatted a nit reg's open from UTG. Flop was 742hh, turn A, river A not completing the FD. He bet fairly large otr, and despite my not wanting to fold, I folded pretty quickly because he had I believe 28% river c-bet.

So yeah, the point about bluffing to make sure you get paid off on value hands is a good one. But it doesn't really matter in some specific, exact one-time spots because whether or not you actually have a bluffing range, people are always going to assign bluffs in your perceived range. Especially moreso BTN vs Blind or BvB.

Yes, bluffing in a specific hand is only +EV (ignoring balance) if we can get our opponent to fold above the break-even point needed for folds. He doesn't necessarily have to be a nitreg, but most of the people we are trying to exploit with these 3-barrel bluffs are nitregs.

And I would definitely never ever recommend 3-barreling fish/whales. Ever.

Cheers for the response again, some good stuff in there. It's crazy how underbluffed trip barrel lines are. If you look at what people should be bluffing on these runouts, they underbluffing like crazy so you can sometimes fold like 100% of your range in 3BPs. I'm on bluff catching on certain runouts where everything missed and seems fishy af.

+1, and better players (hopefully ourselves) realise this and overfold. Whereas those who don't, there is no reason to bluff.

GTO doesn't really look at individual hands as bluffs or value combos, it only cares that the total strategy is minimally exploitable, which includes x/c/f with some frequency at most decision nodes. Computer would think more like "this decision tree loses -0.0000652 big blinds every hand and I don't want to lose, I'll try something else assuming Villain plays perfect to determine if a different strategy would reduce my losses".

The EV of betting (or any decision) is a product of the pot. Even with AA, Hero is indifferent to betting or open folding when the pot is 0.

With blinds/antes, we're betting with the intention of winning the pot. V is only continuing because there are chips already in the pot. Technically you're both +EV from chopping the blinds and shouldn't expect any value from each other except indirectly from posts and maximizing your share of the blinds.

I wouldn't say we're only bluffing to extract value with our hands that W@SD. I would say we're betting this range and betsize because it maximizes our EV through a combination of maximizing Vfolds/W@SD and minimizing Hfolds/L@SD.

GTO is usually check/calling strong hands at some frequency because maximizing the the EV of those hands through balanced betting isn't as valuable as maximizing the EV of its entire strategy through range composition. In most circumstances, it will only bet frequently when it has range and/or positional advantage.

You don't need bluffs or value, you need to win more percentage of the blinds than you lose by any means necessary.

Not sure if any of this is applicable to 20NL though.

@ALong, even though regs are in the habit of over-folding you need to remain aware of what it is you are representing and if your line is credible. Blasting every gutter because "lol nitreg" is probably spew (not that I think you played this bad).

You've just repeated what he's said in a more complicated manner. He's basically said bluffing doesn't actually bring profit unless
1) Villain is overfolding because they're nitty.
2) Villain realises we aren't bluffing enough so overfolds, therefore we lose profit with our value hands, so basically the GTO stuff that you're talking about.
If villain always believes our range is optimal, although it isn't, so calls the optimum frequency there is no need for us to bluff unless villain is capable of adapting (obvs not at 20NL) as by bluffing we are just losing money vs a static calling range .

Obviously none of this applies anywhere near 20NL, and obviously I'm not doing this consistently, my thought process is pretty clear with this hand and my line is definitely credible.

I wasn't criticizing this particular hand and I tried to make that clear.

I wanted to express that if you're calculating +EV bluffs in a vacuum against a nitreg probably everything is going to make the cut, but using all of them in a long term strategy is probably -EV. I'd expect that V is capable of adjusting to such an exploit.

I don't think the rest of my post was a restatement. I apologize if you found no useful information.

Apologies if it came over too critical of your post, I just think some of it was a little irrelevant to what sinna was saying and too GTOey. I agree with what you're saying and definitely found your post helpful

Alls of these statements are very very wrong.

1. You are obviously not indifferent to betting or open folding with AA preflop dont see how this is arguable in any way.

2. The definition of an optimal range inherits never folding too much. Therefore the best a bluff can be against an optimal range is having an EV of exactly 0.

3. GTO applies to all games no matter the stakes.
It is just ridiculously more profitable to play exploitively because everyone is so far from playing GTO.

1. When the pot is 0 then Hero is indifferent to betting or folding AA.

When you bet, Villain has the option to fold his entire range and the EV of your bet is 0. Because you cannot force V into a -EV strategy, Hero's betting strategy is 0 or -EV.

Folding also has an EV of 0, so Hero is indifferent.

2. I agree. You must have misunderstood what I said.

3. This is semantics. I think it was pretty clear that I meant GTO is not an appropriate strategy because of the existence of more profitable strategies, not that GTO does not exist.

I think we can sometimes, due to weak fish river range. No idea if it has been profitable overall, but works quite a bit.

What you are saying does not really make sense to me. I think you got the concept of being indifferent to do something wrong.
You try to explain the arbitrary fact that if people would play optimal preflop in a situation where there are no blinds, everyone would just fold everything except AA.
While technically in this scenario folding AA would have the same EV as betting.
This has very little to do with the concept of being indifferent to take an action. We are never indifferent between Betting or folding the nuts. Not betting would be a mistake.
Your betting strategy cant be -EV when you have the nuts.

The definition of indifference is that a player cannot change his EV by changing his decisions. With a pot of 0, both betting and folding the nuts has an EV of 0. Hero is indifferent to betting or folding the nuts by definition. Neither betting or folding would be a mistake.

I did not say betting the nuts is -EV. I said any betting strategy (or any other strategy for that matter) must have 0 or -EV when there is no pot and Villain has the option of folding, with any possible ranges for Hero and Villain.

This fact is not arbitrary, it was necessary to show that the purpose of any action GTO takes is to win a percentage of the blinds and nothing more. After blinds are posted, the strategies for all players are +EV and you are not getting any value from other players directly.

Pot is never 0 in poker so if you never indifferent to open folding or doing anything else with nuts.
What are you saying is that poker is 0sum game,everybody has same chances to win.So if 6 opetimal players play game nobody is wining overall but AA are still making money.

I just realised that what you mean to say is that our value betting strategy can only be 0 or -EV. This is wrong.

If we have an optimal value to bluff ratio our opponent is indifferent to calling or folding a bluffcatcher.
Betting the nuts however is always a +EV play.
Valuebetting in a GTO scenario is always +EV except for the absolute bottom of your valuebetting range.
In an optimal scenario bluffing is only necessary so that villain cant exploit you by overfolding. This is what i was trying to explain earlier.
Only betting the absolute bottom of your valuebetting range has an EV of 0 given optimal playstyle and an optimal opponent.

If you are interested in this topic i can recommend "The mathematics of poker" by Chen and Ankenman.
It is however very theoretical. They go through a number of model games to explain GTO scenarios.

This is only true if Villain is a perfect player who never makes a FTOP mistake. (Or even a misclick.) Otherwise, betting the nuts is +ev.