I am not hero or villain in this hand but I saw someone ask about this situation, and because I face similar situations all the time I was curious what people think here. I also wanted to make sure I wasn't offering him bad advice lol.


It's a 1/3 NL game. The villains in question are losing players, with obvious flaws in their games, including the willingness to play very bad hands preflop. Hands like 43, 63, 32, 64 are favorites. Sometimes they aggress with these preflop hands (apparently either assuming that they are being super tricky, or that they will come in "under the radar" by hitting low card flops by card removal when everyone else is playing high cards, not sure.) Sometimes they are very passive with these preflop hands. And then of course sometimes they actually have high cards, which they then feel they are playing very normally.

Effective stacks are $210 (if my opponents are playing awkward stack sizes, I'm forced to as well. At least their long-term donations offset the problems inherent in the stack size for me.)


Preflop: Hero opens QQ to $12 (standard) from MP. Cutoff (bad) and BB call.

Flop is 743. (The dreaded 6 SPR), but hero bets $25, only villain in the CO calls.

Turn J . Hero bets $50 into $85 and villain shoves for $125 more. Pot is $290 and it's $125 to call. Hero is getting about 2.3:1.


Villain is not bluffing.

Hero needs 30% here to break even. If he has a set I'm dead to the 2 queens at 5%. If he has 2 pair, I've got 8 outs and 18%. If he has AJ, I'm the one crushing him. I can't shake the feeling that the way the hand came down, the jack just seems to have hit him. But I could be wrong and he could have the straight. Or I could be wrong about how he'd play a flopped 2 pair.

I tank because I hate paying off the donkeys. Finally I call, because I can't shake the feeling that the jack hit him, and if so AJ is by far the biggest part of that range.

Other ways to play? Check a street?

Super tough spot, and its one of those situations that will be marginally positive/negative EV wise depending on the opponent.

I plugged a guestimated range into pokerstove (that honestly is too loose due to the check-raise shove) and your getting 43% to call. I think on the long haul this is potentially a breakeven call, but I fold here the majority of the time with no reads on villains betsizing. (I know 43% makes it +EV, but that range is capped heavily towards the strong size)

PokerStove Entry
Hero: QQ
Villain: 77,44-33,AJs,KJs,74s-73s,65s,43s,AJo,KJo,74o-73o,65o,43o

1. I've found from my experience that Baluga Whale was onto something when he said turn check-raises are usually the nuts. Bad players would float a lot of times here with a Jack, because they would be under the impression they are slowplaying you.

2. At least at live 1/2 NL, when bad players get a monster hand they tend to shove on the turn quite frequently, after they get done slowplaying the flop like every poker pro ever.

3. Also, I might make the flop bet a bit bigger to get value from a bad player who calls too much (At least $30.00 but I'm typically pot-betting). I'm also never checking a street against a station.... value bet! value bet! value bet!



Edit: I'm probably way less experienced than you so take all of this with a grain of salt :P

^ Yeah I agree on not checking.

Snap

maybe the J did hit him and he has something ugly like J7....doubt he called $25 otf with absolutely nothing. id go slightly larger preflop also...bad villains with the willingness to play bad hands preflop

AP, probably a sigh call as I mentally prepare to reload

my random fun guess is that V has JdXd

SIGH-FOLD.

Your line is super strong and he's still shoving.

If he called the $25, he's calling the $50 with worse, not shoving for $175.

Typical LLSNL players would probably call turn with Jdxd as well.

Sigh fold or sigh call. Really lousy spot. For less than 100bb, I sigh call.

How out-of-line is a ~$20 open at this table? You say players are bad and playing all sorts of trash; if that's the case, I find it hard to believe that a $20 open would be too outrageous (it certainly isn't at my 1/3NL table, but I know tables do differ). Anyhoo, if we raise to ~$20 we setup a HU SPR of about ~4.5 where we can simply stack off postflop on TP; raising to $12 will create a HU SPR of ~8, an SPR we probably shouldn't be stacking off to postflop (and yet a Villain could get us there if they wanted).

I think this hand illustrates what a big difference there is between HU and 3ways in terms of SPR. A HU SPR of ~8 we probably wouldn't stack off to postflop (and we would pot control). However, 3way the SPR becomes about ~5, where it will be trivial to play for stacks (could even play for stacks on 2 overbet streets). And yet in each case, we gave our opponents rather decent 18+ implied odds to stack us. If we hadda raised to 10% of stacks preflop we wouldn't really care about HU vs 3way, but in this particular case, we do, imo.

Anyhoo, the bottom line for me at this point is the SPR is 5.5 and we're up against bad players who might stack off with pair + draw, smaller overpair, draw, etc. This is not the type of board I want to play 3 streets with. So I would overbomb the flop ($50ish) to setup an overbomb on the turn for stacks so long as a bad card doesn't fall.

As played, getting raised on a later street sucks. Our hand kinda looks like what it is (we raised preflop, cbet the flop and continued on the turn), and yet he shoves anyways. But putting in 40% of our stack to fold when no draws come in is also fairly meh. I would probably stack off here, although I would feel a *whole* lot better about it if we simply sized our bets bigger on earlier streets.

GcluelessNLnoobG

Results:

I thought 13 was the ''dreaded SPR''

This is a pretty easy fold in the 1/2 games I play in. I guess he flopped a straight or a set and decided to slowplay until the turn (the most common line where I play).

If you think the Jack helped him, well, I dunno. J7? I´d probably still fold.

I just read PLNHE. Having a real hard time applying the concepts to my 1/2 game with a $500 max buy in.

If a $12 open is standard, $20 is going to be huge and unlikely to get much action. Folding everyone and stealing the blinds in this spot most of the time can´t be the best way to make money here.

Overbetting the flop and overshoving turn is an interesting plan as well, but doesn't it just fold out the majority of villians range with 2 to 6 outs that we really want calling us? Even droolers can find a fold with 88 here to two huge bets.

Personally, I think the OP played the hand perfectly until he called on the turn. I don´t even think a typical $1/2 player is even raising the turn with AJ or KJ which are a small part of his range. We are destroyed by his range.
Typical 1/2 opponents are playing their cards face up, so just bet/fold them to death.

Despite putting in 30% of our effective stack I think calling is pretty bad.

I think PNLHE is wrong on this (although they might footnote it). Basically, very few Villains bomb/bomb/bomb PSBs, so therefore an SPR of 13 is usually big enough for us to have more than enough room to move; even if we bet all 3 postflop streets, so long as we bet smallish, that should still leave us in a spot where we are not committed on the river (and thus can bet/fold easily).

Middling SPRs (6-9) are the gross SPRs, imo. An opponent can easily force us to play for stacks by betting each street. If we bet each street, we'll be committed. And yet these SPRs typically require 3 postflop streets to bet, which means opponent will typically have to be super bad in order to pay off with a worse hand. And if the pot has gone quite multiway, all opponents have gotten juicy preflop implied odds. They're pot control SPRs (imo), and yet pot controlling is difficult if our opponents don't let us, plus we can also make mistakes by pot controlling on drawy boards when an opponent has a draw (and yet at the same time we feel handcuffed due to not wanting to commit).

GcluelessNLnoobG

Your $500 maximum BI game will differ quite a lot. As PNLHE even suggests, as soon as stacks get a lot bigger, we can't easily setup stackoff SPRs preflop, so poker isn't as straightforward. In fact, in these games, so long as you can thin the field, it might even be more correct to make smaller raises in order to setup larger (and thus more manageable) SPRs; or (shudder) not even raise at all depending on how loose table is (cue lol's).

I'll admit that obviously table conditions differ from place to place, and that what is "standard" in one place won't be in another. But OP describes his opponents as typical loose bad players who love to get into a pot with junk; this sounds exactly like my 1/3 NL table, where a $20+ raise (while on the biggish side) is also not too big to never get action. I'm not exactly sure what he means when he says $12 is the "standard" raise. Does that mean that's what is "standard" for him? Or is that what all these other losers are "standardly" opening with? How many callers is that getting? Has OP actually attempted to start opening $20+, and what kind of results is that getting?

As I say, I wish we hadda just opened a little more so that we could make this a super trivial PSB/PSB. But as played, I still think a bomb/bomb is ok. Is any one of these jokers ever folding a draw to a bomb? The answer is 100% absolutely not. Will someone fold 88 to the second bomb (cuz they're obviously not folding to the first)? Perhaps. As I admitted in my first post, I hate facing the raise here, and my usual line is too fold, but unfortunately at this point I believe we've simply put in too much of our stack to fold (again, easier to call if we bombed the flop, plus easier to stack off if we raised more preflop).

GcluelessNLnoobG

Someone else posted this on another forum and I wanted to check with posters here because I like this forum better and because it's a lousy spot that comes up often. He also plays in Vegas just like I do.

My standard raise is $15, but $12 does seem to be closer to standard in 1-3 NL games in Vegas. I also think some 1-3 NL games in Vegas are kind of nitty and his description of villains fits with the 1-2 NL games better, so I'm surprised he describes villains as that loose (although those villains do exist in Vegas). I feel like I'm already pushing it with $15 and $20 will get calls occasionally but will often pick up the blinds. It depends on which villains are behind me though. It also could depend a little on what room I'm playing in.

The person who posted this hand did include a few more assumptions about villains that I decided to leave out. I wanted to see what assumptions people would make here.

I have never open raised to $20. I have raised to $18 after 1 limper and $21 after 2 limpers. I think I usually win the pot right there when I make those raises maybe about 60% of the time but that guess could be off by a good amount. It's really hard to say.

since he just called flop and c/r turn at 1/3 my guess would be he flopped str8 and waited for turn to c/r. like it has been said lots do this/ however I still may call his shove if my read was say 1 pair and str8 draw which i also see a lot of .but wouldnt have put him on hitting the jack on turn at all.