1/3 Live 10-Handed (No Rake, Time Charge)

BTN straddles. He said he’s played one million hands online and he seems to be a good thinking player. He’s more LAG than TAG but not too loose preflop.

Everyone folds to UTG+2, who just sat down for his first hand. He has around $75. I’ve never played with him before. He's a black guy, 35-45 years old. He calls.

It folds to me on the CO. I look down at Kc Js. I have around $350 and BTN has me covered.

Your play?

Definitely raising. Don't get intimated by whatever nonsense the BTN says about having a million hands or whatever. Presumably the straddle is to $6? I'd make it $25.

I'd raise it, make it $20 or $25. If it's the new player's first hand, he posted $3 right? So he could have called the extra $3 with pretty well anything.

You should the BTN isn't that loose preflop so he wouldn't put a 3-bet on you unless he has something decent. KJo is in the bottom half of the range I'd raise here, but I'd still do it.

Sounds like you're scared of the BTN though. In that case, I'd try changing seats to get position on him or changing tables altogether rather than sticking in this spo.t

Straddle is $6.

The poker room allows you to play your first hand without posting any money so UTG+2 could've folded his hand for free.

KJo is too good not to iso a shortstacked fish. It doesn’t matter if BU is Phil Ivey.

The limper actually makes it harder for BU to get out of line as well.

People that are good at poker generally won’t tell you that they’re good. Don’t be intimidated by some guy that has his multitable nit reg strategy dialled in, makes him better than most live guys, it doesn’t make him a crusher.

Ya raising pre from CO always

Are we sitting in the worst seat at the table? My guess is probably so.

I think we have to play much tighter with a Button straddle on, especially with it being a good and non-shortstacked player, due to often ending up OOP. I'm also not loving that a super shortstack is the only hand involved so far (a raise would setup a flop shove against him and I'm not sure how great KJo is doing in most of those cases). So I would probably lean to a fold.

GboringpokerG

I'd open raise from CO with KJo vs the BTN straddle.

I'd iso-raise a short stacked fish with KJo.

I'm not sure I'd attempt to do both at the same time.

Reason being is a laggy BTN can squeeze your iso with quite a wide range that he's happy to get all in with against the short stack and that's going to put you in a sticky spot if you have a wide iso range here. The BTN can basically take a low risk gamble for 25bb (12.5bb with straddle) whereas you're having to gamble for your 115bb stack because of your position.

someone that gets it!
fold pre
because of the above

1/3 Live 10-Handed (No Rake, Time Charge)

BTN straddles. He said he’s played one million hands online and he seems to be a good thinking player. He’s more LAG than TAG but not too loose preflop.

Everyone folds to UTG+2, who just sat down for his first hand. He has around $75. I’ve never played with him before. He's a black guy, 35-45 years old. He calls.

It folds to me on the CO. I look down at Kc Js. I have around $350 and BTN has me covered.

I raise it to $40 to try to go for the steal. BTN calls. UTG+2 folds.

Flop ($90): 5s 4s 3d

Your play?

what i do too much: think for too long and put out a weak bet

what you should do instead: just c/f

$30 pre; now c/f.

+1. I'm sure that this guy sucks at poker.

When the flop comes 543 two-tone and you block a bunch of Broadway hands (that V can fold on this flop) with your KJo and you don't block thaaat many FDs with your Js - you've got to check/fold.

Apart from becoming hugely unbalanced if you bet KJo here you're just going to get floated too often for cbet/give-up to be profitable.

Probably all V's AX call a flop bet and they beat you at showdown. The following all continue flop and either beat you at showdown or have lots of equity: pocket pair or board pair, any X6s/X2s, any XYss, maybe overcards in diamonds, maybe X7dd.

So he's going to continue a lot on this flop which means you'll have to double barrel a lot of turns. But you've got to dodge spades, diamonds, Aces, Twos, Sixes and Sevens before you're going to want to bluff turn.

So you can't bet flop. You obviously can't X/C flop. X/R flop with air would be extremely unbalanced (both mentally and combinatorially) so you've just got to X/F.

This sounds good. Thanks.

In the actual hand, I bet $100 and he folded. But afterwards, I thought about the hand and realized that I am very unbalanced with that bet.

I should add that I'm making some assumptions here about how this villain plays. Key among them is that he's not flatting a wide range of offsuit Broadway, gapped connectors and mid AX hands. I'm assuming that because he's supposedly played online a lot and he's generally aggressive.

These guys have relatively tight flatting ranges generally consisting of lower pocket pairs and middling to small unpaired hands unlikely to be dominated by typical opening ranges and blessed with lots of playability i.e. suited/connected hands. Their bigger pairs BWs and big offsuit hands are generally 3betting here.

I also assume an internet player with lots of volume to have some idea of opening ranges and how they interact with different flops - from bitter experience if not from actual study.

Therefore I expect this player to see that lowball flops aren't great for your range here and thus be motivated to defend wide and aggressively if he perceives you to be betting frequently on such boards. If he has the sort of range I expect then he's going to have the hands available to make a good job of defending too.

If you instead observed a villain flatting JTo, A8o and Q9o in situations like this and then playing fit-or-fold you'd obviously have to play these lowball boards very differently for maximum profit.

In that scenario balance goes out the window because V is a level-one thinker. Furthermore lowball flops become great boards to cbet wide and exploitatively (unbalanced) simply because this player type has far too many X8o+ type hands in their preflop calling ranges to effectively defend low flops. His pocket pairs and SC are swamped by loads of offsuit junk that can't defend very often on lowball or highly disconnected boards and he'll automatically overfold.

That loose-passive, ABC sort of fishy player is the type against whom we shouldn't c-bet too much air on connected middling/high card boards - because their offsuit junk hits frequently enough to call at least one bet on those boards. On those boards vs those sorts of players we still bet unbalanced but this time we're tighter and heavily skewed to value.

Once I played with a dude who said he has $1M in tournament winnings online. He was a nit and playing 1/2 nlhe in a dinky florida casino. Looked like he could use a haircut too.

$40 pre seems like a lot, go closer to $30. Time to give up on this flop, much harder to get Ax to fold with two overs to the board and a wheel draw.

Nothing wrong w making it 20. If the btn wants to be all cool and raise this spot then so be it, but he might play the majority of his range as a call too, or fold. Hell, if he’s that good, go ahead and jam on him.

I really dislike the huge preflop raise sizing we chose. We're simply risking way too much ($40) to win far too little (there's currently all of $7 in the pot) with far too mediocre of a hand. It's kinda similar to the idea of just open jamming; yeah, we'll take down a heckuva lotta $7 pots preflop, but the times we're called will easily destroy us overall.

Postflop, I dunno, I guess we could cbet small and hope to fold out Ax. But we also run into a bunch of hands that ain't folding to one bet. I've always been of the idea that our preflop raise size makes no difference to calling ranges so long as the raise size is reasonable. A $40 raise after 1 limp in a run-of-the-mill 1/3 NL game is quite unreasonable, and thus his calling range is tightened significantly from the norm, imo.

GcluelessNLnoobG

The pot is more than $7 because of BTN straddle to $6. The pot is $16 (blinds, limper, and straddle) right before I raised.

My bad, didn't realize a straddle was on...

GcluelessreadingnoobG