Snowman, not only are you advocating a totally not-standard play in calling a 3 bet for 1/3rd of our stack and setting up what is likely a 0.5 SPR situation 4 ways with one of the nut hands to not do this with, but you’re actually claiming those who disagree are “level 1 thinking” players. That’s pretty damn audacious of you.

If we had like 5k hands with a guy and we know he only 3 bets AA and KK, then yeah sure, jamming TT is suicide.

But we don’t know that, sample sizes are small. We also don’t know that this dude is terrible enough to check fold a wheel draw and 2 overs at this stack depth on this board and that we can play literal perfect poker on the flop (fold if he jams and jam ourselves if he doesn’t).

We need an incredibly compelling reason to raise and call a 3 bet in this situation versus just committing ourselves and running our equity (or folding out or overlimp/calling like GG suggested given the tell). And “I’m smart and not level 1 thinking” isn’t exactly the way to do it


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It's funny, when I post hands that are kind of obvious what to do but I think are interesting for strategic discussion, not because I don't know what to do, I get flamed for playing the hand and not knowing what to do. Can't win

Of course we can think "outside the box" and make exploitative adjustments to our playerpools. But we still got to respect mother nature when we play. We can play in alot of different ways against different opponents- but within the basic limits we have regarding stacksizes,pot odds,implied odds and so forth.

Putting in 1/3 of your stack pre against a nutted 3 bet range from a tight passive scared money guy is just a -EV play, it just is. The stacksizes and his nutted range is impossible to overcome, and actually folding preflop to the 3 bet is the exploitative adjustment here: not giving him action due to his 3 bet range being too tight.

Yup. Like this weird assumption that we can play perfect FTOP poker on flops flies in the face of, well, all things logical.

Like if we are convinced he has KK+, then sure we can set mine given the amazing implied odds even at such a shallow stack depth and try to bink a ten. But that means we fold every time we don’t flop a ten.

Like if the flop was this 432 and he goes all in, and the first caller folds, are we folding? How can we justify folding. We have no idea if his range is KK+. He could have AK/AQ and just be piling it in here. We don’t know.

Or flop of J32. Same action. Are we folding?

Poker is a hard enough game even when we just limit our decisions to brain dead, standard plays. Trying to be a God ninja on guys we have like 100 hands on is asking to make downstream errors that will be hugely costly.

I remember back in my limit days when some random touring grinder was in town for a few months. Long story short I had AK on like AT4-brick-T after 4 betting pre from the sb (he had 3 bet an UTG raiser) and went bet bet bet. He raises river and I made a huge fold because after all, no grinder raises here as a bluff if he isn’t aware that you’re capable of making a huge lay down because it’s suicide, and what bluffs does he even have?

Then he flips over 94o that he apparently just decided to have in his range because he was on some sort of drug that I hadn’t noticed.

The standard play is obviously to pay it off and lose to the slowplay or the KTs or something, but instead I decided to be the expert and make some huge fold, and in the process sacrifice a 15 bet pot and show to opposition that you can screw with me in huge situations with the correct image.

What made my results better? Not doing stuff like that.

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I don't think OP or I disagree with bolded above
But when you have basically the same line-up day-in and day-out
and have several hundred if not a thousand hours logged against them and they never switch gears, We should be putting that information to good use.

Of course you should put that information to good use. But its many different ways to do just that.And guess what, in this instance putting that information to good use is to make an exploitative fold to the 3 bet, cause our experience with villain tells us he have a nutted 3 bet range- and we exploit his tightness/nittyness by folding hands we normally woudnt.

Of course we should. Like if guy only 3 bets KK+ and we know it, it’s suicide to get it in with jacks for 100 bb just because it’s the “standard” play. I don’t think anyone disagrees with this. Hell I’ve coached people who have like 5000+ hours of experience with the same guy, and if they want to do something that looks absurd on the surface because they know how they play (my buddy once got like 200 bb in with bottom two in a heads up limped pot on like J32-8 from the bb because he knew the other guy was always slowplaying pre and overplaying post with aces, a play I probably don’t find because it looks like suicide to get that much money in targeting an overpair), then by all means, exploit the bejesus out of them.

But we don’t have this kind of history with this opponent, so it’s kind of a moot point. All we know is that he seems to be intimidated by the stake, and that he likes his hand enough to raise from EP if he actually was EP. it’s useful, but it’s not enough to make me want to make any sort of crazy deviation with TT for 37.5 bb effective.

Like maybe he’s a nit, but one who’s read poker content and believes hands like 88 and AQs are good enough to get in for his short stack. In that case, not going all in is just bleeding EV all over the place because we make equity realization harder, leave more hands in the pot that can beat us, and don’t maximizally exploit the two droolers in the mix with us.

We have no idea if he’s comfortable making his robotic short stack decisions or if he’s just another live nit who automatically goes bananas with KK+ and treats every other hand he wants to play like a draw.


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What OP and Snowman is trying to argue is the same as driving a car all year long with summertires on it, despite having 5 months winter with half a meter snow and minus degrees. Because you are a pro car driver, you got this- so you can think outside the box and dont need to change to wintertires like other worse drivers have to do. You have to use your skillset right?

Guess what: even the worlds best behind the wheel need to follow the rules and use wintertires when its winter conditions outside. Its no difference if you are formel 1 driver Michael Schumacher or 90 year old Olga with her 30 year old Toyota.

Not sure who my Brazilian F1 fan friend hates more: Renault for Singapore 2008 or Toyota for not putting Glock on wets


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Also if I had a dollar for every time I saw a HH of a “tight” villain who ends up showing down QJo that he raised from EP, I’d have Bitcoin millionaires jealous.

Exaggerations aside, we can’t really conclude anything unless we have a big sample and actually see some showdowns.


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Tight passive scared money guy tried to raise from what he thought was UTG. Why are you surprised and or unprepared for a 3bet?

Because he's scared, passive, and tight. These guys don't know anything about position. They have 77+, and they are raising the same amount from every position.

I wish I had mentioned in the OP that his "small" three-bet made me think he had AK, but I thought about it too late.

If you do have a reliable betsizingtell on him weighting him towards AK instead of a big pair, then that obviously changes things alot.

Then this becomes a slam dunk shove pre for me. We are a slight fav as it is against AK, and with dead money in here as well its a slam dunk +EV stackoff pre.

How many hands do we have on this guy? Why are we making broad assumptions? On what basis is this?

Some guys make small 3 bets because they have AA and they don’t want to lose the customer and then go all in with AK/JJ because they’re afraid of seeing a flop and not knowing what to do. Some guys are the opposite because they’re afraid of committing all that money without the nuts.


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77+ is 48 combos, AK is 16 for a total of 64. If he 3b JJ+ AK that’s 36. So you’re going to get 3b over half the time

For sure. I assume OP have a solid samplesize on this guy, and that the sizingtell is reliable.

But yeah, we cant jump into conclusions too fast if we dont have a solid basis.

There are no assumptions. I know how this guy plays. I've played with him for years. The minute he checked the flop I knew what he had. The "small" pre-flop was a tell, too, but not definite. Ditto V2. V3 I've only played with a few times, but enough to know she's calling the $120. Anyone who calls $60 pre vs. one player w/ 58o is calling here.

So we have a death read on the kind of ranges this guy has but we don’t even know if he’s scared money? Something doesn’t compute here.

So let’s just roll with the assumption that he has a major sizing tell and we know we can just completely BTFO him on any flop. Well, we’re still leaving two wide ranges in that we can make mistakes against.

If we are confident in our read that we are up against AK, why not just take our equity edge now? especially if there’s a good chance we can get dead $ in the pot. And if the other guy wants to call off all his money with a range that includes 85o, we should go ahead and let him do it.

So instead of giving one game branch for us to go down, we want to call and potentially open up near infinite game branches, just to maximally exploit one opponent? And totally disregard the other two? Like if we can totally annihilate this dude, fine, but we’re still risking massive FPS. Our death read alone isn’t justifying it.


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i don't think we should ever shove preflop because we are at best flipping and he is always calling.

If he is as bad as you say ie fit or fold then I am fine with a call (no A/K on flop; he checks with AK/AQ and we can jam)

he should be jamming a ton on this flop with 1 spr...

So, you have $40 invested, it's another $80 to you and you know the pot is going to be $480, you have a read on V1, and you know 90% (closer to 100% because V2 is deep and will almost never fold now) of the time you are going to at least double up if you hit -- what is your calling range or does everyone just shove or fold? I honestly don't know of a hand I'd raise to $40 with and fold here. I flatted because I knew V3 would call and I had a read on V1 (and V2). It just doesn't seem that crazy to me.

But Java, there's lottsa branches.

One branch is V1 shoves the flop when we whiff (a branch that likely occurs far more often than any other branch) and that costs us 1/3rd of our stack.

Another branch is V1 face up checks the flop when we both whiff (this will probably happen the next most amount of the time). Then we get a bunch of subbranches. What are we doing on Overcardxx flops when it is checked to us? What are we doing on these flops when V2 bets? And only one of those subbranches is the branch that ended up happening (which, overall, very rarely happens), in that we get a beauty flop and it is checked to us and we shove and someone else hasn't flopped the nuts and we actually get a call from worse. But even in this best case whiffed scenario, it isn't as if we just win the pot + dude's stack 100% of the time; he most likely got it in with some sorta equity (overs has about 25% equity, pair + gutshot has about 30% equity, etc.); yeah, we win some money (this small percentage of the time this subbranch occurs) but we're not just printing stacks.

Another branch is we flop a set and poker is ez. Course that's only going to happen 1 in 8 times and it cost us 1/3rd of our stack to do so (plus keeping in mind that V1's AA still manages to suck out on us about 10% of the time even in these best case scenarios).

And sometimes there are other branches, such as V1 checking Qxx flops with his QQ, or maybe even once and a while tricky/scared checking (to never fold) certain flops with AA, or once in a blue moon shoving 9xx flops with his AK.

I have zero problem with our flop play. I just think we paid far too much preflop to be profitable overall, and basically are being too results oriented on a rare subbranch (both in terms of not accounting for how rare that subbranch is as well overestimating our actual profitability on that subbranch).

GimoG

There are always branches in poker. I was thinking about the branches in this hand. If V1 bets flop, I fold, but I'm almost 100% positive he bets if he hits or if he has an over pair and checks AK/AQs. Heck, he might even check/fold JJ/QQ.

GG, I love ya, but you never change your playing style, so it's hard to take your advice on any hand that's not AA/KK, etc., and played straightforward.

Edit: You rarely take "branches" into account.

GG, in all honesty, what would you have done pre? My guess is call the $10 straddle and fold to V1's 3bet, even if it was $30 more and you knew what I knew about the players. What would you do on that flop if you did call the $30?

That's all well and good, but the question is have you payed too high a price to get to this evaluation point? Let's say V1 raised to $349 of his $350, leaving us $1 behind to play with postflop. Well, we can certainly play that $1 perfectly based on his flop play (ok, fair enough, bad example as obviously we getting good enough odds to get in the $1 regardless of what he does), but the point being that obviously we paid too much preflop to get to that obviously profitable postflop decision. I'm not exactly sure where the obvious profitable point is preflop, but I doubt it's anywhere remotely close to 1/3rd of stacks (even in spite of decent dead money and some IO postflop against these jokers).

GcluelessNLnoobG

As was brought up above, even calling the $10 straddle is a fairly meh given these stacks and the fact that V1 is obviously going to raise, so we're really banking on some poor sizing. So if we limp in and he raises to a semi-appropriate $60, we're probably going to have to sigh fold. But I'm willing to make a small mistake for less than 3% of my stack to speculate and see what happens by limping in.

If we limp in and he raises for $30 more (i.e. $40 total), that means we'd be getting about 14:1 IO against him (plus can hopefully add on a little bit more against one of the others). Certainly not great, but not horrendous. I wouldn't fault continuing or folding. ETA: Forgot to address the postflop part: we'd have $310 left in a $160 pot, I'd probably bet when checked to me and likely get the rest in against one of the whales by the turn (keeping in mind I have zero issues with your postflop play in this hand).

But I will say I find the original raise pretty bad given the reads. I mean, the whole point of this thread seems to be with regards to making exploitable plays against poor face up opponents, and yet we missed the most obvious adjustment right off the bat (i.e. we shouldn't be opening when the nit in the blinds is excited about his hand and could 3bet us off our equity).

GimoG