Villian is early 30s white guy as am I. Played one hand with him an orbit ago where I check raised him on the flop on a multiway pot with top and bottom on 896 flop, he smooth called, I fired turn and he called, I check folded to half pot on the river and he flipped 75 for the flopped straight. Likes to limp/call. Otth

I'm utg+2, effective stack 400. open to 15 with 5s6s. Villian on the button and both blinds call. Both blinds are loose passive fit/fold types. Flop 23J rainbow with a spade. BLinds check I bet 20, villian calls blinds fold. Turn (pot 100) 8s I fire 85 villian calls. River (pot 270) offsuit ace, I jam for 270ish, villian tanks.

I'm trying to get him to fold a jack

From 1-10, I'll give it a 6. Most people dont doubt barell with Ax in live games so hes going to be suspicious about you really haven an Ace, and you might check the river with KK/QQ, so you're going to get called here a lot.

He has to fold more than 1/2 the time for this to be profitable. Id say its very close. Id give you a 5 but I bumped it up to a 6 overall for the nice turn bet.

OP: What hand is at the bottom of V's flatting range on the turn? H (utg+2 preflop raiser) is still uncapped on turn. My concern is that AJ is the exact bottom of V's flatting range here.

Third barrel is too polarized. H would not jam 22/33/AA/JJ, he would value bet. H would x/c KK/QQ.

I can't endorse it. I think the river Ace was an unfortunate card. The 3-barrel plan was good and I think would've worked on a different river. I think a value bet by H would rep a stronger hand here and all V's weak Jack combos couldn't call a value bet here anyway.

I think he can have j9 plus. Saw him flat pre to an EP open with qj off and show down a winner. I can also have AJ here and I would definitely be jamming my sets and AJ with a psb left on river.

So if he's calling AJ+ and folding everything else he can easily have all 9 combos of AJ, but I think most of his sets he's putting in a raise at some point. 45s gets there but does he hang on to it and there's only 3 combos to begin with. He could conceivably have a hand like A4ss but that's 1 combo and it's a coin flip if he calls it anyways so who cares. So if he has something like 13 combos of must calls he certainly sounds like he has enough Jx to fold if indeed he is folding to make this a good bluff. I don't know if you showed him the 96 from the other hand but he might just think you're FoS.

I disagree with the A being a bad card to bluff. I think it's the best card you could hope for besides your actual outs of course. Between that and being at the bottom of your range, if you aren't triple barreling here I don't know where you are triple barreling against this particular opponent. If he's not a believer then don't even bother cbetting. Semi-bluffs aren't so good if the bluff part has a 0% chance of working. Now that you're here you have to go for the third barrel. A+ gold star slam dunk triple barrel.

Point made, though I think you'd value bet the top of your river range.

Forget this particular V for a moment. Against a standard 1/3 Villain, what would you think is at the bottom of his/her turn calling range in this situation given your uncapped line? I think we could agree it's not J9.

The art of all this is knowing how far to range-adjust this particular V. One standard deviation of range strength? Two?

And if the guy is that light, why can't he have J8s? It doesn't sound as if he has shown you his fold button yet anyway. And V already called down with QJo, which for me would be at the rock bottom of any plausible range here.

I can't endorse bluffing predicated upon blowing a sticky V off a range that's so atypical if not borderline implausible. As I suggested earlier, I think a value bet would rep stronger than your jam.

Pre is very marginal
Flop seems meh, 1/3 flop 4 way is a recipe for multiway calls which you don't want with 6hi
Turn and river seem OK but you were really left with no other options given pre/flop decisions

Way too early to be getting out-of-line preflop, imo. EZ fold for me.

I probably attempt to take a free card on the flop and check. Not convinced that we're folding a pocket pair to one bet on this board so we better be prepared to barrel.

I mean, I understand why we are barrelling, especially on this turn card and especially on getting him to fold what is now just second pair on the river (although the most common Jx for him to have facing a preflop raise is AJ). But the thing is, the last time we barrelled we check/folded the river, so it doesn't exactly give a lotta creedence to us ever actually having anything. And on top of that it looks like the Villain has figured out the best way to play us is to simply let us spew into him, and he's doing that yet again in position (should really stop your action before "he tanks", because often he simply snaps us off with his flopped set/etc. and rakes the chips we're giving him).

GmoreABC,lessFPS,imoG

With all due respect, this is Petitio Principii in action here.

I agree he'd raise with non-JJ sets. And we all agree the center point of his range is a strong Jack. But he's already flat called 120 dollars worth of bets against H's uncapped range. That's just a lot of money to spend on a weak J against an uncapped range. Would any of us do this in a cash game?

And now he's finally going to find the fold button against a polarized jam getting 2-1? If he hasn't found the fold button yet, I don't think he finds it on the river.

Fair point. We need someone capable of folding to make a triple barrel good. I'm taking it for granted that the reason we cbet is because we thought the villains can fold at some point, we're not just counting on hitting a 4 to make money here.

I'm no logician or debater so I had to look it up, but isn't it just as much a logical error to assume he is not a folder therefore the triple barrel is bad?

All in all, we don't know much about the guy. So far we've learned he won't fold the nuts to a check raise and has a loose preflop range. I do think a lot of live players, myself included would call twice here with KJ or QJ vs certain opponents knowing they won't go for 3 barrels except with the nuts making it a trivial river fold. This villain has already seen the hero bet twice then x/f a river so it's not inconceivable that he still has a folding range on the river after calling twice. If that's not true of this villain, which none of us can know at this point at least with the information we have, we shouldn't be c-betting or even opening this hand to begin with.

So I guess there's a x% chance that the villain is never folding no matter what the river is because we made a bad read to begin with, there's a y% chance that the villain has a big hand, and a z% chance he is folding his Jx. As long as z > x+y, then it's a good bluff. Plus, we get image points if we do get called.

Ima play Villian...

Less than half cbet on flop multi way and THEN he gets happy with his turn bet to set up a jelly jam

Hmm

IF Villian made this call he read your FoS and now he has reading ability image points

Preflop is marginal at best, spew at worst. Generally I’d just fold this from EP. Postflop is almost a mandatory triple for me, although we could debate sizing.

8/10 would bluff again. Recommending this bluff to my friends.

I like everything until the river. Not saying it isn't abet but I'd bet it the way i'd bet qq/kk otr so something like $130 or so . That way you can rep qq/kk and Ax. Not saying you can't shove qq/kk but imo this looks a little less bluffy and when he does have nutted hands you save a little bit of money on your bluff
If river is any card besides and ace or jack I'd be shoving

I like how you played the hand

You at least have a 5 to block some 45 combos. I don’t hate the bluff but it doesn’t feel like a good bluff where it also could be some value jams. Against thinking players I wouldn’t pull the trigger, and it’s made worse because villain got lucky and thinks he value owned you by calling till missing river value with a flopped straight. Doesn’t breed the kind of fear that makes a man fold.

Agreed, river bet is highly suspicious. You’re basically saying you have 54s, a set, or like AXss that hit the ace. And would you really use this size with a bare ace?

This being said I don’t think you are running this play blindly and probably have just a few combos of bluffs that mostly fall into this 65ss/QJss type of range. So, fine probably.

I do think we should be trying to keep linear ranges here. So betting like half pot is very logical to me.


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Thanks for the input guys. The bluff ended up getting through. One thing I'm seeing in my transition to live is that players seem reluctant to call big river bets without nutty hands, and being at the bottom of my range I decided to go for it. Online I'm always jamming this combo fwiw

You guys are thinking too much about what villain thinks about a jam here. We don't know what's going through his head at all. Even if villain is a thinking player and believes we "only" rep sets, 54 and AJ to him, that's actually a lot of combos considering how narrow our range should be when we bet/bet/bet into a 4-way pot and what bluffs do we have here on an ace river? A thinking player has to really think we're a punter to consider us bluff heavy.

I think you're just being extremely averse to bluffing.

Mike: could we ask you to reveal what percentage of your River bluffs at 1/3 have gotten through in your database?

This stat is extremely vulnerable to selection bias, and considering that Mike is a winning player it would make river bluffs appear better than they actually are.

Absolutely, I agree. I was just looking for some kind of "optimistic/upside case" baseline. My mileage would obviously be poorer.

I havent played very much 1/3 as its mostly 1/2 or 2/5 in my area. For a while I kept a bluffing stat but it was only money won or lost. If I bluffed $100 into a $140 pot, I either got credit for +$140 or -$100. For a long time I sucked at bluffing but got better as I specifically kept track of them.

I kept track of bluff profit/hour. That kept me focused on looking for good bluffing opportunities. Bluffing once every 100 hours and getting it thru for 100% ratio doesnt add up to anywhere near as much money as bluffing 10 times per 100 hours and getting 80% thru. Off the top of my head I think I got about 75% bluff bets thru.

FWIW, if 75% of your bluffs are working, you are probably way underbluffing, and should look for spots that aren't slam dunks. A half pot zero equity bet only has to work 1/3 of the time to be profitable, and a full bot bet only needs to work half the time.

Edit: Keep in mind that you should have a success frequency greater than the required success frequency because we should never be taking -EV bluff spots, driving our average success rate above the requirement. I imagine a 55-60% success rate would be reasonable for full pot bets, but that's just a guess and there's no way to say for sure without assuming/measuring a probability distribution for villain's fold rate across all scenarios.

seems not great.

well were 4 ways we should play pretty straight forward..

pre open is marginal but i like it

flop bet is sketchy but i like it

now we got called on the turn! we fired into a 4 way pot and still got looked up im scared .
im already thinking about shutting it down unless we hit. ok we missed. fire that second barrel should fold out the floats and isolate us with a strong range. we can rep JT+.

well he calls the 2nd barrel im done with the hand..

oh a scare card on the river? or is it? because we arent betting AQ/AK twice how smart is our opponent..?

we cant rep this ace i dont bluff here.

Agreed...and keeping track of things like this on a spreadsheet at home keeps you hyper aware of looking for spots to bluff so you can pad your stats and add to your total when the session is over. Ive stopped keeping track of that stat as I work on other plays and I know Im bluffing less now. Gotta get back to it.

I may start trying that, given that I usually argue these points with some general exploitative considerations (worrying about range stuff too much), versus "does it just work often"?