Saturday night 1/2 game.

Hero: Been playing aggressively, have shown down KK to win an allin.

Villain: One of those guys who thinks he knows how to play poker. Sat down with a friend and has been giving a running commentary to him, mostly Captain Obvious stuff. I expect him to not be very good but to maybe not just play ABC. Just basing that on the chatter, haven't drawn any conclusions from his play so far. V has $210ish, H covers.

Preflop, H is OTB with Ac4d. One limp, folds to V in CO who raises to 12. My read was that he only decided to iso-raise after there was one limper to him, so I decide to 3! him to 40. Blinds and limper fold, he calls.

Flop: 8d 5c 2d ($86)

He checks, I bet 50 (a bit big maybe but its a round number) and he snap calls.

Turn As ($186)

He hesitates, looks down at his chip stack, then looks back at the board, then says "I'm all in". It's $132. Hero?

Bad play leading up to this point but I think you know that. He could be "putting us on" kk-1010" and getting out of line with kq/kj type hands, but I would fold and vow not to play this garbage hand as a 3 bet in the future.

He can be attempting to get you to fold your apparent KK/QQ in this spot. Can't fold A4 here.

Preflop raise size is too big in position (and I'd prefer it to be suited aces to avoid doing it too often). I'd make it more like $30. You're not really attempting to end the hand preflop when you're in position with a 3-bet. That's more for when you're OOP.

Flop bet size is big as well as you mentioned.

When we're in position, we want to scale down our bet sizes in general because we want to take advantage of our positional advantage more and that happens when we have to make more decisions. The bigger the early bet sizes are, the less decisions we make.

Call

Check back flop; value is super thin and your hand is too good to bluff with. If you choose to bet, bet bigger, not smaller, to simplify the turn.

Too good to bluff with? We have no pair and a gutshot. This is a great hand to bluff flop with, imo.

Against the range (TT-77,AJs-A7s,K9s+,Q9s+,JTs,AQo-ATo,KTo+,QJo), hero's hand has 55.33% equity OTF.

It's generally bad to 3! a hand like Ac4d because a lot of the hands V will call with dominate you and the hand plays terribly post flop if you are called.

As played, it's not a very good board to cbet as Vs range is mostly composed of big pairs when he calls the 3! pre that you have no fold equity against, you block his AxXx range so there are less combos of that that he has. It's also wet with diamonds so a few high suited broadways are also in his range.

When he shoves the turn he pretty much always has a better A or 88 here unfortunately. You are only hoping that he is bluffing with like 4 combos of high suited diamond broadways. Next time just fold pre so you don't get yourself entangled in this mess.

You're contradicting yourself here. You say the flop is not good to bet because he has a lot of high pairs and diamond draws, but on the turn he has a better Ace or a set.

But it's really hard for us to realize that equity by checking the flop. We don't have showdown value.

It's harder to realize by betting the flop. That's the point.

When V calls flop I imagine his range is 88-QQ, AK, high suited broad ways. When he lead shoves turn I believe his range is narrowed down to exclusively all combos of AK that floated flop, 88 and a few suited broad ways that spazzed out. I believe V would be more inclined to check his big pairs on A turns in fear if he is somewhat of a thinking player.

Pre is a little out of line and a little gross considering how little stack leverage you have post $200ish eff.
Check the flop sometimes - AP don't fold turn. A lot of the hands he check-calls otf might just jam an A turn because they were going to check-call a shove anyway.

3! with A4 I say is out of line and gross but good for image, maybe .. wtf!. I rather have two dark cards instead A4o

I have two games. One looser when I get in lots of pots. But when I got into my tight mode, I’d only raise the pot with AA, KK and AK, and even then only in the back so that I get fish to call me or maybe 3! on me because I'm stealing. (LOL) . I generally want to have a hand that I can call or shove a 4bet if I'm raise. Even in the back I need a good hand because I know what people think about when they see me raising in the back. Some of them know what that raise is. That's why I need some good players at my table. One or two will balance the behavior of the entire table.

Wrong, if you check and whiff the turn and he bets, you would fold. You need both of those cards to realize that equity, by betting the flop you likely buy the river card for free. You also would simply bet and take it down here pretty often.

I hate this hand from most angles but cbetting the flop here is the best move he made imo.

Plan A backfired.
Plan B would include always seeing a turn with what is often the best hand and can turn the near nuts, top pair, or more straight draws. You cannot call a ck-raise, but can call a turn bet on A2345678 and might be able to bet turn yourself when checked to or just try to take it to showdown. It's just so marginal that checking becomes the preferred line in short stack situations... the lack of leverage really is a problem.

Looks like a bad player that has exactly Axdd but what do i know.

Id prolly tilt call in game.

So obviously I'm getting out of line here with A4o and this is a non standard play, but I think it was +EV and would do it again. I was a little off the mark with the strength of V's hand but (by chance or otherwise) I was correct that he didn't have a 4betting hand at least. I think loose threebetting in these heads-up spots with villains capable of folding is really profitable in general, people have little experience in dealing with being loose threebet. It's actually pretty much impossible to counter loose threebetting without adopting a light 4betting range and most LLSNLers have a super tight 4bet range.

I think this is way off the mark. Hands are only too good to bluff with if they're not going to make better hands fold. Here, I need to bet to get folds from stuff like 66, 77, AQ etc etc. It doesn't matter if my equity is already high as long as I can still improve my situation by betting.

A lot, apparently.

So at table I wasn't sure what to do because I generally hate calling big bets from LLSNLers because they so rarely bluff. This guy I was a bit suspicious that he might be capable of it. I was also having trouble putting him on a hand. With the NFD I thought he would probably have x/r OTF, likewise with a set. If he turned aces up I thought he probably would have checked. I didn't think he was calling flop with just high cards. So it was hard to see how he had an ace. There were various draws down and I wondered if he was using the ace to try to take it down. That didn't really seem that likely but it was one of those spots where nothing seemed likely. So I called and he had AQdd, and I rivered an offsuit 3 for the wheel because that's how I roll.

This hand is an example of how it doesn't really matter if you're dominated when threebetting as long as they can't 4bet. I got mildly unlucky here with diamonds flopping, but most of the time flop is going to be blank and I'm going to take it down with a cbet, even though I ran into a pretty good hand from villain.

Villain spent the rest of the night praising my play, I think because he was convinced he had a live one here and wanted me to hang around.

Kind of amusing that we have both these responses going on ITT simultaneously:

1. zomg you can't threebet with A4o, that's a terrible hand.
2. Don't cbet with A4o on a blank flop, your hand is too good vs villain's range.

Heh, i know right?

Im posting this mostly for myself, bc i have to tell myself this over and over again bc i play at different stakes.

2/5 and below, they have exactly what they are telling you they have.

See i suffer from this leak alot, I'm like, "why would an ace ever donk all in on turn? Especially Axdd. Seems like an easy check/stuff."

Heres why. Because they turned top pair. Lol

Why would 44 ever 4x raise my flop cbet on 224 rainbow? Easy, because he has a boat. Lol (this happened to me a few weeks ago)

So yea its kind of hard bc as a thinking player you sort of say ok well he cant have this this or this. But just pretend you asked your mom. "Hey mom, an ace hit and this guy went all in what do you think he has" mom: "he must have the ace!" Its really that simple lol. Sure sometimes you incorrectly fold, but more often you correctly fold.

Now, where it gets difficult is mixing stakes. At 5/10, this would be a spot where i would never fold bc yea flush draws x/r alot and no value hand plays this way and it just looks like an obvious/bad bluff (which you actually see at 5/10) But, as ive put in so much volume at 2/5 lately, im overfolding in higher games where lines dont make sense.

No. What matters is whether you will improve, on average. There is always a chance that a bluff will work.

You're getting those suggestions from two different sets of people.

I think you're generally right about this, but a complicating factor is that the rake where I play is a brutal 10% capped at $15, but no flop no rake. So if I make it $30 and villain calls, we will instantly lose $6+ from the pot. As a result my threebets tend to err on the larger side.

Yeah agree with this and it's a lesson I have to constantly relearn as well. I thought this one was kind of tricky because even if I buy that this can be the NFD, that's still a narrow range for him to be repping, and I'm getting laid a good price and have outs vs everything, etc etc blah blah. But the fact is that at LLSNL whenever I go "huh, I'm calling because I don't get what you're supposed to have here" I wish I'd folded a large majority of the time.

Right, but the downside of bluffing is getting called and his calling range is pretty narrow on this flop. His better-hand folding range might actually be wider than his better-hand calling range, because it includes so many hands like AT, AJ, AQ etc. Betting has a couple other advantages: one thing is that I'm continuing to tell a story about having a very strong hand, which might enable me to barrel again on something like a K turn. Also, I'm denying equity to worse hands, which is not usually something to base a decision on at NL, but it's actually a decent sized factor here because he has a huge number of hands with pretty good equity: for instance, QJo has 23+%, I really don't want to let him have that if I can avoid it. Compare and contrast with having AK or AQ here, where I dominate a ton of his worse hands and there are many fewer better hands he will fold.

This hand seems really unnecessary 100 BB's effective at 1/2 with no dead money. Some mixture of boredom/winner's/entitlement tilt. Certainly not enough info in OP to convince me 3! makes sense.

Well, I think if you've been playing like a robot for month, doing some weird things can be helpful.