First time poster and wanted to get some opinions on this situation.

9-handed 2/5 home game just started. Villain bought in for $1k and appears to be a conservative young Asian male. Hero bought in for $400.

4 people limp. Hero ($400) in SB calls $5 with Q/10o. BB checks.

Flop ($30):
Q J 10 (rainbow)

Hero bets $15. BB calls. Villain in middle position raises to $75. Folds around to Hero.

What would you do?

Welcome to the forum, OP.

Completing pre is OK. QTo isn't a great hand, and your position sucks, but you are getting good odds and can look to flop a monster or fold nicely multi-way with hands that if they hit you hard likely hit someone else enough to give you some value. I would very much not get excited about any one-pair hands post-flop, though..

I would bet flop bigger, as a lot of TP and pair plus draw hands will give you value. I go $25, and it would be a bet/fold. AP, even with the small bet, it's a bet/fold, imo. There may be some JT and KQ in his range, but everything else in his range beats you except unlikely chops.

Thanks Garick. I actually flopped two pair with QTo.

Yep, I'm aware of that. I was saying that pre-flop, my plan would be to not get excited about one pair hands on the flop.

Since we flopped 2-pair, I would get somewhat excited, though I'd have been much more willing to tangle on a QT4r flop than the QJT one we got.

The hand in his range that crush me are QJ and K9.

I would be ahead of KQ, KT, KJ, J10, J9, Q9 and all these would be close to a coin flip. I can see those hands raising in middle position.

You are forgetting 9T (prob only suited, since he's in MP, but still four combos in a limped pot and maybe more. Call it 6 of the 16 possible), TT and AK (not everyone raises these, but at least 6 of the 22 combos), JJ/QQ (unlikely as no raise, but possibly he was going for a L/RR and missed, call it 3 combos of the 12).

That's 15 more combos that crush us. All of QJ is in his range, which is 9 combos as two of the Qs are accounted for. Let's say he plays K9 about half the time pre, that's 8 more combos. Total that crush us = 32.

Hands we're 60/40 against are all the pair plus straight draw. He prob has all of the K versions pre, for 41 combos, but he likely only raises instead of taking the free card about half the time, so call it 21. J9 and Q9 don't get limped in MP by a conservative player often. Let's say they get played at all half the time and raised OTF half the time. That's 6 more combos. Total of 27 times we're 60/40.

Hands we crush are JT, which he likely always plays pre, but on this board prob pot controls often. Lets say 6 combos.

So if no more money could go in to the pot (if the $75 raise was effective stacks), we would see an EV of:
49.23% of the time, we would have only 16% equity, for an expected loss of $15.35
41.53% of the time, we would have 60% equity, for an expected win of $19.94, and
9.23% of the time we're loving life with 88.77% equity, for an expected win of $9.21.
This would all seem to indicate a call, as we'd have a positive EV of $13.80.

The problem with the above though, is that the $75 does NOT indicate effective stacks. Instead, we have two streets to go and another $320 behind. This puts us in a very bad spot. If we shove here to deny his pair plus draw range odds, he folds it, but also folds his JT, which is the only thing we're crushing, and gets our whole stack in loving life with his straights, sets, and higher two pair.

If we flat, WTF do we do OTT? We're committed if we call any bets and he has all the options with position. He can check back all his pair plus draws and try to realize his SDV of his pair as well as get free chances at the straight. Or he can bet big with a range that will have great equity against us if called and we have to do all that EV calc over again, but now his semi-bluff range is likely much smaller. Life just sucks donkey dong if we call OOP on this wet board.

Your reverse implied odds are very bad here, as is your position. If $75 was a shove, calling would be a marginal +EV move, but with these stacks, it's a clear fold, imo.

Tough spot; it's tempting to fold rather than play the rest of the hand OOP. The basic problem is that your hand will rarely improve and the board is slick. So the money that goes in on subsequent streets is reasonably likely to go in bad.

In the long run, the players who don't put money in bad or dead, win. I would seriously consider folding, and probably would, in the end.

I don't hate preflop but it could be a fold. Playing from the SB sucks.

On the flop I think bet-fold is a perfectly reasonable line to take. It's a mistake to remove AK from villains range, not everyone raises it preflop every time.

He needs to be a very poor player to play most of these hands like this.

This should be a turbo fold if we think villain is playing reasonably solid. The only hand he should raise here that we beat is JT. We chop with QT while everything else has us crushed (98, K9, AK, QJ, JJ, TT).

If you're going to fold to a raise when you get a top 4% outcome on the flop starting with 80BB, fold pf.

Can we talk about the fact that OP has pegged V as 'conservative'?

Young asian male buying in for 200bb in a home game? I don't get a lot of those that I would say are conservative in my games. I would bet his range is wider than we're expecting.

Still think it's probably a fold since we're leading with 80bb from the sb and that should look pretty strong, but we made it pretty small so he may think he can blow us off our tp-type hands.

Also flop bet should definitely be bigger.

In Tommy Angelo's article on reciprocality, he has a section titled "Betting Reciprocality."
http://tommyangelo.com/articles/reciprocality/

Betting reciprocality is the difference between your betting decisions — raise, bet, call, check, and fold — and theirs. There are two clean ways to think about betting reciprocality.........One way is to trade some parameters with your opponent, project the future in that reality, and compare. I call this reciprocal analysis.......The other way of thinking about betting reciprocality produced this conclusion: "The hold'em hand I think I've made the most reciprocal profit on over the years is queen-ten. That's the hand I think I have played most differently from my opponents most often."

When I first read this I couldn't wait to read how he played it, as I thought it was a garbage hand that got me in trouble in my early years a lot more often than I found it rewarding me with the pot.

Much to my disappointment, Tommy failed to mention how he plays QT, and I had to trust my instinct that he mucks QT [the vast majority of the time] just like I do.

After reading Garick's posts, I am convinced that is what Tommy was alluding to. I knew it all along, Confirmation is still comforting.

I think it's not that QT is unplayable in any situation. Of course not. The player just needs to know when the hand now belongs in the muck.

I first read this months ago when I bought his book "The Elements of Poker."

"The hand that has the highest reciprocal potential must be a hand that gets played lots of different ways......" For Tommy, that hand has been QT.

This.

I'm probably going to see the river as cheaply as possible, now that V has shown some interest.

Stacking off would be fine against many players though.

Nits don't buy in for $1000 at a home game. He is looking to mix it up. I would fold to the big raise on the flop, but whatever you do, don't show. If he is really crazy enough to make (and show) an outrageous bluff here, then save those adjustments for the next hand. But unless you know otherwise, if someone bets something, they probably have it. It's very difficult to put an accurate range on an opponent that you haven't played any hands with.

Why? I don't think "80BB" and "top 4%" make folding to a raise worse than other situations. We complete SB if we think we can do so profitably, we bet if it's the most profitable action, and we fold to raises when we think doing anything else will lose money.

In this case, I'm good with Op's line, so long as he folded to the flop raise.

I should of definitely made the flop bet closer to pot.

I don't think the nut straight (AK) would raise in V's position. I also removed sets from his range because no raise pre. My read is telling me he has a straight draw with a pair, KQ.

Would anyone call or stack off to KQ here? What about check raising on the flop?

if we knew he has KQ then of course we can get it in here, but really, KQ is the only hand in villain's range along with J10 that we're ahead of and there are a load more hands that we're behind.

I think Garick was right in his first two posts. Your flop lead is good, but it needs to be a bit bigger - I'd go pot or a bit more, but as played, once raised you have to fold because while two pair looks strong superficially, it's actually a mirage and you're crushed by a raiser's range.

Check raising may well take down the pot immediately if all villains are weak, but if you're called it leaves you in a nasty spot where you're out
of position in a bloated spot with two streets to play a only two or four cards in the deck you're happy to see.

bet/fold flop for pot.

if you're just flatted on flop, I'd bet/fold turn and check fold river

This is where poker players lie to themselves. I do it to myself all the time. This is where the convincing voice in your head says, "He's got K-Q, shove" and the reality is that his range is always much wider than one hand here. Maybe I' being MUBSy but I think villain has a lot of Q-J, K-9, and 8-9 in his range. With much of the rest of his preflop range, including worse two pair hands and pair/draw hands, he's just going to play it much more passively unless you know how he plays.

There are certainly players that are capable of making this play with pair/draw hands, but you don't know enough about him at this point to confidently include those hands in his range because you don't know anything about how he plays. All you said was that he was conservative, but conservative players don't buy in for 200 BB's. Like, ever. So I think your read is off, and until you know the opposite can be true for a player, a big raise equals a big hand.

Also, even if he has K-Q here, he has 14 outs. Even if that's half of his range (which is overly generous), the other half still has you crushed.

Would put villain on QJ,KQ,K9,89. I generally try to avoid going broke in limped pots. He made a very sizable raise in a multiway pot without reads I would fold this and like someone else said don't show anyone. Also try to see if he'll show you his hand if its a friendly game like that.

I wouldn't worry too much about your absolute hand strength here, it's as simple as we don't beat what he's repping and we don't have a strong enough read on him to go crazy. I think it's fine to limp pre with this hand if your comfortable stabbing at good board textures and semi-bluffing occasionally. Bet/folding should be your bread and butter at these games until your forced to adjust.

iraise, did you mean to put that post in this thread? Seems like a response to a different hand.

I think you have some serious results-oriented thinking going on here. You keep trying to get V's range down to one hand, which tells me that you likely called, he showed KQ and hit to beat you.

You're just throwing way too many hands out of his range. Why KQ, but none of the other pair plus SD hands? Also, just because you wouldn't play AK or TT that way doesn't mean V wouldn't. You can throw out many of the combos of them, as I did in my long post above, but you can't eliminate them from his range all together.

Check-raising the flop would be bad, as the flop checking through on this wet board would a disaster. So many cards either kill your action or your hand.

As for stacking off vs KQ, obviously if he shows us this hand, we shove. He might fold, which would be great for us as he surrenders a ton of equity. If he calls, we are ahead by a tidge (51.67%) and have a little bit of dead money in the pot. Our shove represents 47.5% of the pot, so we have a positive EV on a shove of $33 even if he calls.

The problem, of course, is that he's not going to show us his hand, and his range isn't just KQ. Shoving would always get called by the parts of his range that have us crushed, sometimes get called by the hands that are flipping with us (which would not be a mistake given the dead money in the pot) and always fold out the hands that beat us.

This hand is great illustration of the importance of position.

I was 5-6 hands in the session and V seemed to be the solid type. I put him on KQ because I do not think QJ/Q10/J10/89 would raise on a Q J 10 board. I would just be calling down reasonable bets if I had those hands. Obviously he could be raising with QJ and K9 to see where he's at and to charge the draws which were the two hands I was mostly worried about.

You need to stop mirror-imaging your Villains. Just because you wouldn't play a hand a certain way doesn't mean that they won't. Especially with your small donk which looks like a blocking bet. This could often mean you're trying to set a price for a draw, and I would therefore pretty much raise with that entire range. Many V's would also be raising KJ and KT, and a few would even raise 9T.

Yup, this pretty much sums up my perception of the hand. 3 of his hands have me crushed and KQ is close to 50/50.

I folded and didn't say anything. The dealer voluntarily ran it out and the turn card was a 3 and the river an 8.

2 hours later I asked V what he had and he told me he had KQ. Even though I would of won the pot I feel it was a good lay down.

This helps a lot. Thank you.