Button folds, I raise K2dd, big blind 3bets, I call.

269r one diamond.

I check call.

4r

Check call.

5r

I check raise, near instantly he 3 bets and I fold.

A few things:

He’s a good tag with lots of poker experience in many games. We play micro stakes together from time to time, but most of our history is in tourneys.

Yes, I think I need a bluff check raise range from the top of my folding range.

I’m not sure from which part of his range he selects his 3 bet bluff range,

All of my real draws have paired up by the river, all of which are probably near 0ev as a check call, up to maybe (K6s).

I think it’s going to depend mostly on what we do with hands like ATo down through JT on the turn. Calling too many of these hands may be an overflow of near 0ev river calls.

Ok I’m gonna leave this here for now.

people rarely fold a pair on the river in 3bet pots.

Not only that , which pair ( better hands) than yours u think he can fold ?

Bob wants a bluff range for the sake of having a bluff range. But against a tourny guy who reacts instantly on any street it's useless (imo).

I want a bluff range so he can't own me with thin value bets on the river; so I can claim more of the pot with my strong hands.

Check out "The Intelligent Poker Player" chapter End Play pg 96. Note the check raise region is selected from the top of the folding range.

You don't rep enough 3x / 87 and you have all the A hi's and some K hi's in your range, so I highly doubt you're in the bottom 20% of your range here. I don't like it.

AP is he really 3 betting river with anything besides a straight or better (or a bluff)? I think you can exploitatively call the 3 bet. But I don't think we should have gotten there this way w/ this hand.

i'd just check/call the river. he can be bluffing with jack, queen, or king high, and either bluffing or valuebetting ace high

Yeah I just don't think we're low enough in our range to bother w/ a play like this. I'd rather pull my bluffs out from hands that have good blocking features like K7 here.

Like what are we repping w/ this line? 33, 55, A3, some 87 combos, random 5Xs hands that rivered two pair (95s/65s/54s)? He's also getting 9:1 so when we only have like 25-35 value hands, we really need to be careful w/ how we bluff. And when he can already give you a bunch of K7/Q7 combos, starting to bluff pairs becomes suicide.

@gr26 and Montrealcorp: I do think if we're balanced enough here, this raise will work against the weakest part of villain's value range, like his weak one pair hands. I know I'd be value betting this river against an aggressive opponent a ton when he check calls twice here.

What is your value check-raising range? If it's small (which I suspect it would be), your "bluff check raise range" could be so small that you would be playing closer to optimal by never bluff check-raising than by picking a single combination of a single hand to bluff check-raise with.

Probably none of it.

Do you believe that he's owning you with thin value bets? How thin do you think they are?

Although it's optimal to bluff-check-raise from the top of your folding range (because if he makes a mistake and calls too much you want to have the best chance of beating him), it could be that the size of the mistake of bluff-check-raising a hand that's just a bluff-catcher is larger than failing to bluff-check-raise at all. K2s feels more like it's in the bluff-catching range than it is the check-folding range on this board.

We can probably proof it out here, or make Bob do it for us.

Like I suspect we never have 9x or better prior to the river in this spot. A hand like QQ has too much value to be used as a call call raise on this board.

On the same token, I don't think we have 88, 77, or even good 6's in our range.

So our range entering the river is probably something like:

Pairs: 6[QJT543]s, 6[QJT]o, 55, 4[AKQ53]s, 4[AKQ]o, 33, 2[AKQJT3]s, 2[AK]o
Draws without SDV: 87@25% 75@75%, T[87]@25% (we fold turn sometimes, we raise turn sometimes), 85s
Draws with SDV: A5, A3, K5, K3s
Overcard hands: AK-AT, A8, A7, KQ-KT, K8s, K7s

If you deal a river 5, then K2s is in the 34th percentile of our range and should not be getting bluff xr. Arguably we'd wanna call down as low as like A7 here. Throwing AJs+/AQo+ into a 4 bet range doesn't change this math much.

So yeah, I think river xr is pretty spewy, and we're actually in around the middle of our range.

I've been wondering if this statement means that Bob is villain and this is just a brag post about his 3-bet bluff with Q-high that made villain fold a pair on the river.

I'm gonna leave this here for now.

lol no. I was really the small blind.

I liked Aaron, jdr and babar's posts as they all point me more in the direction of adding weaker bluffcatchers to my river check call range. I'm dumping a lot of King, Queen, and Jack high hands on the turn, which does bring this hand closer to the bottom of my river range than jdr's analysis showed, but I haven't done the math yet.

for me this moment much more interesting... i am often stuck in such situations. I have KJ, i know the guy is at least 2 streets autobettor. I call a low flop, see blank turn and fold. So much pain everytime.

I tend to call turn w/ K hi and fold river UI. It's too strong to be folding in these wide range situations when we just have so much trash in our flop xc range.

to answer some question posted upthread:

I have lots of threes in my range as I don't check raise the flop with less than 97o. So I have 93s, 63s, 32s, K3s with a backdoor flushdraw down through T3s, A3o, I often call the flop with 53s, 43s. That's already about 43 value check raise combos that I make it to the river with before counting the few combos of 87 that I don't bluff the flop or turn with. Call it 45 value combos.

So that would mean that I need 5 bluff combos giving the opponent 9:1 on a river call.

The question with flop and turn decisions like this one isn't one of "how far am I from the bottom of my range?" it's "does my opponent have enough unpaired hands in his betting range to bring up my realizable equity enough to make calling profitable; this should be true of any decision where we hold a hand that can only beat a bluff on the flop and turn.

Also, the in position player is entitled to a flop and turn profit with his worst bluff because of the value of checking. This means that on the turn we should allow a small profit for the in position player. Thus I have no problem folding more than minimum defense frequency would suggest on the flop, turn, and river heads up out of position.

I think bluffing the turn with Queen high no draw isn't good, and then bluffing the river is also not good, and then 3 betting the river with the very bottom (maybe T7o or T8o would be worse), of the big blinds range is quite bad.

I did some lab work:

608 turn combos

416 continue

68.4% call, which gives up about 12.5% of the pot as instant profit for the in position player.

After river card removal:

380 river combos

T8 and T7, cannot beat a bluff so I may fold them before checking combos.

372 river combos that can beat a bluff.

Here, the value of checking is debatable. This is what I think:

big blind gets 6:1 on a river bluff, raw minimum defense = just under 86%.

big blind's bluffs have a small chance of winning unimproved:

T8o beats my (T7, 87) about 6/380 times that I check: about 1.58% of the time, which equals a profit of (6BB*1.58%) = about 0.095 big bets.

So to make the big blind indifferent to checking, I should offer him 0.095 big bets profit on his bluff, or 1.095/7 = about 15.64% fold frequency, or exactly 84.35715% calling frequency. just slightly less than strict mdf.

372*84.35715% = 313.8 combos that continue

AQ is right at the 308-324 threshold for me, so the question is either

a) don't check raise bluff AQ
b) check raise bluff AQ

Interestingly, 5 combos of AQ(5/16 = 31.25% frequency) add up to 313 and those are my 5 bluff combos.

However there's this:

which is a good argument that I can't deny. In fact, check calling and bluff check raising with the top of the folding range has the same ev of zero either way in equilibrium. So we got that going for us.