So this young Asian guy in hoodie sat at the table with a full stack (300) around half an hour back and doubled up two drunk/fishy guys already and has been getting aggro because he's been raising quite a lot preflop.. but he's kind of intimidating because he knows what he's doing.. one time he called the fish's all in with AQ and lost to 10s so it's not like he's bad.. he's good obv

I, on the other hand, am playing tight and straight forward, sitting second to his left.. but unfortunately, in the below hand, I am SB and he has position on me.. My stack is 600-700 btw..

So he makes it 12 in LP, and I make it 35 with QQ.. he calls obv

Flop: Ah Kc 8h

Now what??? I hate being exploited OOP.

I would bet $40-45 here as a pure bluff and give up if he calls.

If he wasn't a good player we could consider checking and evaluating but against this guy checking will turn our hand face up and we won't know if his bets mean he has us beat or he's turning something into a bluff.

Exactly. I checked flop after 10 seconds and he insta bet 55, making me fold, and flipped over Q9 of clubs saying "YOUR QUEENS ARE GOOD MAN"... Superuser much?

But do you think a good player (esp one who's lost a couple of big pots just few mins back) is capable of floating or minraising my bet on flop?

It's not impossible, but it would be rare, unless you've been very aggressive. When a tight player 3 bets out of the SB, then fires an AK flop, players will typically give them credit.

True dat, thanks.

Btw, does his flop cbet make any sense? He'd check back if he hit the A right? Can we call him down or is this always a fold once we check?

Betting this flop is a bad idea because you almost never get calls from worse hands. Flush draws will only make up a small part of his range here.

Checking obviously turns our hand face up, but without a good read on his post flop tendencies, its really not terrible to just c/f and wait for a better spot against this player. If he is being too aggressive, you can exploit that later on in better spots than this one.

If you want to continue, though, on this hand, you need better reads of how he'll respond to certain plays with certain hands. Like if he'll bluff too wide, if he'll continue bluffing turn/river, if he'll bet/fold hands like weak aces and kings... There is a lot to consider, but its probably best - without more info - to just give up here.

3bet bigger pre (~40-46). As played bet/fold small (~40). The board hits your 3bet range very well and he can't really continue without having a strong Holding or a very good read on you.

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You said betting flop is a bad idea because you never get called by worse. But we're not betting flop to get a call here, are we? We're just making a standard cbet bluff to get him to fold, right? Just a thought..

He's never folding any of his Ax hands to a c-bet. Maybe he folds Kx but since he's so aggressive, we can't be sure of that.

He has a lot of air in his range, and if we bet, he can just play perfectly with his entire range. Fold his weak hands that we beat, call with his strong hands that beat us.

We don't want him to fold when he has Q9. If hero knows villain will always bluff Q9 type hands, he can c/c flop possibly... But then turn and river can get tricky. But its also tricky because theres a lot of Ax in villains range too along with air. So my argument is to not even play that marginal-EV guessing game, just c/f this hand and wait until we have something like AK on this board or for a better run out with our QQ to exploit his overly aggressive tendencies.

I'd either check/fold the flop or check/call all 3 streets. Turning our hand into a bluff would be ok against some players but he's never folding Ax here and probably peeling with Kx.

How about giving up after he calls our cbet instead of giving up just like that without cbetting? Because our range has more A/Ks than his + we've been playing tight so the chance he gets tricky here is marginal.

Cbetting is just so pointless here. Why would we bet when we're only getting called by better hands and folding out all worse hands? We allow him to play perfectly which makes it -EV for us.

C/f and c/c are much better than betting because when we c/f we're folding the worst hand without giving him any value. C/c can be good too depending on how much we know about villains bluffing frequency and his turn/river tendancies. But I don't think hero had any reliable reads to justify a c/c. In reality, even a lot of aggro villains will not bluff this flop in a 3bet flop.

I get your logic but when we check this flop, we're turning our hand face up almost always and THAT ALSO ALLOWS HIM TO PLAY PERFECTLY AGAINST ME. Doesn't it?

No because as I said, even a lot of aggro players will have a hard time bluffing an AKxhh board in a 3bet pot

But what range are you putting a tight oop 3bettor on? AA-QQ/AK imo and that's about it. All of that except QQ pounded this board so why would I ever check this board? Ofcourse, villain can have Axs here, but my point is that my range smashes this board + I can hope he doesn't have an A.