Effective stacks: $400 (Hero)

Pre flop UTG bets 15...2 callers

Action gets to me with AKs, I re-raise to 45, button calls, UTG folds, UTG+1 folds, middle calls the 30 more who was already in for 15

POT 170

Flop is K,__,__ rainbow...no draws and I forgot the other cards

MP 40, I raise to 100, button calls, MP folds

Pot 410 now heads up

Turn is a blank but now 2 suited cards on board

Hero?

At this point, I'm really only worried about was AA or sets of the other 2 flop cards but being he took awhile to act when calling the 100 I wasn’t suspicious of those 2 b/c that should be an easy decision

In short, getting AI with 80bb w TPTK is standard and fine. I would raise slightly bigger pre and would've made it 140 on the flop and jammed all turns

Welcome to the forum, OP. Please don't post results until after discussion has died down, as it biases people's analysis. I edited them out.

Also, please tell us something about V, about what your table image is, and don't make us do math to figure out effective stacks. I edited them in.

Not always, but making this a 3bet pot makes it tough.

Being afraid of the flush draw is silly because that means he called a bet and raise on the flop with nothing but a backdoor flushdraw. I guess if the K was not one of the 2 flush cards and you dont have the K of that suit its a bit more possible that he has AKs or KQs and now has a backdoor draw.

Im checking the turn here. He is probably never folding but since there are no real draws he can have, Im not worried about a free card. If you jam the turn maybe he finds a fold with KQ, but if you check he could bet it or be more likely to call the river.

thanks for doing the edit. I never posted one of these before and i will reference this for future posts.

I really didn’t have much of a table image nor did I have much info on the table. BTW I took my 1/2 profits plus starting stack and when it was getting action-less and towards the end of my night I jumped in this game.

I wasn’t there for that much time before this hand. I usually play 1/2 but I wanted to dabble in 2/5, and see the difference between both and to play more selective poker instead of having guys cracking my good hands with J 3 off; even if I tried to protect them etc.

This was my 2nd 2/5 table I played at... Table 1 a small percentage of hands I saw made it to the river and showdown; Table 2 played tight like that at times but at times it played like a 1/2 with limping in for the 5 and having half the table in the hand; as Table 1 never did that at all, but both had 20-40 avg pre flop raising with big bets to follow.

Side note....I’ve been searching the forums for a book to help me with 2/5 No Limit only; so far I’m considering Professional No Limit Holdem - Ed Miller and Angel Largay’s book

Also people recommend Sklansky too...I have The Theory of Poker, His small stakes hold em, and tournament book and I found them to be tough reads.

Years ago I read...Winning low limit holdem - Lee Jones & Pot limit & no limit poker - Stewart Reuben & Bob Ciaffone and found those easy to read. I really don’t like to read books, I’m more of a hands on person but I listed those books to give you some background

The playing vs. the donks really helped me. I read the trilogy last spring.

More pre flop


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I agree with making it bigger pre. With a raise and 2 callers, plus the portion of your bet that is a call, there is already $60 in the pot, and you raised it $30 more, or only by half pot. If the original raiser calls (and even though that didn't happen this time, it's pretty likely, as his range should be pretty strong to open UTG and it's only a half-pot more) then the callers will be getting ridiculously good pot odds to call too, and next thing you know you're playing a 4-way pot (actually 5-way in this example, with BTN also calling). That's not the end of the world, but it's not ideal either, as even with position, you'll pretty much have to give up if you don't hit.

As played, you have TPTK in a 3-bet pot and a stack-to-pot ratio (a concept about which you'll read in Professional No-Limit Hold Em) of only 2:1. You're definitely happy to get it in here, and if someone flopped a set or slow-played AA, it's just a cooler. The question is, what is the best way to GII? It's a dry board, so we have a lot of choices, as giving free cards is really no big deal. On the other hand, our hand is not crushing the board so much that we want to slow-play to try to give them a chance to catch something they can call with. Your Vs will be expecting you to c-bet, and you'll get calls from basically all Ks and a lot of PPs, as long as you don't make the bet huge. If it checked to us, I'd bet about half pot.

It didn't check to us on the flop, though. MP made a silly tiny donk bet. How do we respond? On the one hand, the bet is annoyingly small and we want value. On the other hand, small donk bets are often weak made hands betting to see where they are at, especially on dry boards, which eliminates the other most common reason for small donk bets: trying to set a price for a draw. If we raise here, we likely lose MP. Plus it is a strong enough move that BTN can only continue with a very strong range, so we likely lose him too. As annoying as the bet-size is, I just call MP here. BTN will come along with almost anything, given the great price he's getting, so we'll still end up with a pot of $290 with just under a pot-sized stack left. It shouldn't be too hard to get that in over two streets.

As played with the raise, alarm bells are going off when BTN cold-calls our raise on that dry board. What can he have here? AA is possible. It should be a bit discounted, as it will often 4-bet pre. You block 3 combos of AA since you hold one, and let's discount one off, giving him 2 AA combos. KK is even more likely to 4-bet pre, as a lot of players will be afraid to let it go multi-way and see their KK get cracked by a random ace. Plus, with one in your hand and one on the board, only one combo is possible. Let's say he plays it this way about half the time, so we'll call it half a combo. The lower sets play like this if they called pre. We don't know what the cards were or much about our V, so it's hard to guess how often the PPs required cold call a 3-bet, but let's estimate that he calls pre 3/4 of the time. There are 6 combos of the lower sets available (3 of each), so let's give him 4.5 of them.

That means that V has 7 combos you lose to. How about chops and hands we beat? AK plays like this pretty much all the time. Let's give him the remaining AK combos, of which there are 6 (2 unaccounted for Ks can each go with one of the 3 unaccounted for Aces). The big question then is, how often can he have a worse K? This is extremely Villain dependent. For a some loose-passive Vs, pretty much all 12 KQ combos are in his range, for others, even given the likely nice pot odds, they are never calling a 3-bet pre with even KQs. Without having any info (even demographics) on BTN, we just can't estimate.

Still, even though alarm bells are going off, we chop almost as often as we lose; we win some unknown amount of the time; and the pot is now very large. Even if we say we never win outright, if the rest of the money goes in, it will cost us $255 more which we will lose 53.8% of the time (EV = -$137.31) and 46.2% of the time we will get it back, plus half of the current pot (EV= +$94.62), for an overall average loss of $42.69. That means we'd have to win the whole pot less than 5% of the time to make up for that lost EV. Surely the chance of KQ and/or weird spazziness is over 5%, so we obviously can't fold now.

That said, there is no reason for us to put the last $255 in the pot if we don't have to. There are no draws to defend against except a very unlikely BDFD that could only come from one combo of AKs and maybe one of KQs, and that only applies if you or the board don't block it. He's never folding a chop here, so there's no point in trying to bet him off it, and he might occasionally fold KQ, losing you value. Lastly, the chance that he tries to bluff you off your hand go up (though admittedly not by much) if you check to him. Therefore, I would check turn and call any bet, and do the same on the river.

$80 pre, shovel money in post on Kxx. Profit?