Very tight friendly/quiet older asain player opens from MP

Hero has AJo on the BTN

Folds to MP
MP opens for $20
Hero calls

($45) Flop J84 rainbow
MP bets $40
Hero calls

($125)
CO bets $85
Hero tank folds

Threebet or fold pre. If "very tight" then fold. I mean you can see the problem with calling in how the rest of the hand played out. You have a hand which aims to flop top pair, but anytime you do that and your opponent actually wants to put money in, you fold.

that is very weak, flatting IP with AJo is extremely reasonable. Given the reads, 3 betting is lighting money on fire.

Do we get to know the turn?

Loll sorry
Turn was a low blank
3c I think

I mean honestly the turn doesn't matter much if your read is correct. If you really trust your read go ahead and fold the turn but calling without a solid read.

He ended up showing me QQ and I felt good about the laydown. Maybe the answer, tho, is just to fold pre because his range is quite strong and actually just dominating us?

Like even if an ace comes I'm not feeling good about my hand. If my goal is to steal pots when he misses I'm better doing this with suited connectors and folding AJ and AT hands?

I like calling pre against tight weak players that never bluff, but I feel like AJ may just be the worst possible reasonable hand to do it with tbh

No, actually, it's not. We're behind a standard open range, and when we both whiff the flop we generally lose even if we have the best hand. AJs can be a flat, AJo should be 3! or fold.

If V's range is tight enough that threebetting is really bad then calling doesn't help. Let's say V's range is { TT+, AQ+ }. We're a 27% underdog against that preflop. After we hit our jack though, we're probably a HUGE FAVE. Right? Actually, we're only a 60% fave. By the time V is betting again OTT, he almost certainly has a range advantage against AJ. Where exactly is our profit coming from when even when we flop our TPTK we're barely making money?

It just isn't possible to take an easily-dominated hand which aims to flop top pair up against a very tight range. The way you beat very tight ranges is not to play hands against them, or to play the sort of hands which make very strong hands when they hit (like pocket pairs, most obviously).

3b/fold pre
Mostly folding

you have position and that means a lot if you aren't calling AJoff you aren't calling a top 8.5% of hands. That is absurd to simply fold to a 4x open when you have full position in the hand. You don't need to have a goal of "stealing hands when he misses" to simply defend a very reasonable hand pre IP. Are you folding KQoff to the open?

Why in the world would you 3 bet a nit? That seems incredibly counter productive with this hand.

Just snap fold pre if he's that tight. AJ is hard enough to play

You have this thing called position and you can make decisions post flop. Are you folding KQoff? QJs? You realize your hands can be slightly behind V's if you have position and that is fine since you can over realize your equity IP? It is really hard for flatting AJ IP to an open to be a mistake and even if it is the mistake would be much smaller compared to 3betting and playing a weak hand vs a nit putting significantly more money in the pot. As long as it wasn't an UTG or UTG+1 (which hero said it was MP) open it is pretty hard to believe a fold is optimal.

you realize how horrible that line of logic is right?

You realise nobody ITT is advocating threebetting, everyone wants to fold. What we're saying is that if threebetting is no good here - and it isn't - there's no reason to expect calling to be good either. It has the same problem that the raiser's range is too tight. This is to do with the nature of AJo as a hand. There are hands it's OK to call in this spot but you don't just sort by equity against ATC to come up with them.

While you're railing against threebetting here, you're also saying "I intend to make money by bluffing the nit postflop". That's what over-realizing equity means, there's nothing else it can mean.

Your replies so far are just general poker tropes ("you can have weaker hands in position") and personal incredulity ("omg you can't fold AJ, it's top 8.5% of hands") whereas I'm posting specifics - such as that we're nearly a 3 to 1 underdog against a tight range preflop and that even a Jxx flop isn't that great for us. I mean look at my join date, yes I know that positional advantage is a thing, but it's not enough of a thing to handle being this big an underdog with a hand whose whole reason for existing is to flop one pair.

Edit: If being a 27% underdog and not really having any good flops you can hit were acceptable just because we're in position, we would be calling basically every hand on the button. Like, AJo is 27.8% against that range I posted and 32o is 24.1%. You don't want to fight tight ranges.

Oh and I'm insta-folding KQo, that isn't even close. QJs I'm pretty indifferent about, call or fold are both reasonable. Even in circumstances where a hand is worth calling it's never going to be a fistpump spot, except maybe when setmining.

BTW, QJs has higher equity against the range I posted earlier (31.6%) as well as good equity on more runouts. AJ is flop top pair or have garbage equity.

+1 to everything Chris said, this is an easy fold pre. AJo isn't just behind, it's also easily dominated so it sucks when villain likes his hand.

If our plan is to leverage position and bluff a nit, pick some suited connectors instead which cover boards this villain doesn't have a piece of, and are much more likely to pick up draws on those boards, so we can bluff with equity rather than air.

Stack sizes matter as well when we're selecting our calling hands, like obviously calling 87s 40bb deep is pretty bad.

2 people argued it is a 3 bet or fold spot,....

I don't really particularly care what your join date it, what I am arguing is you can't overreact to a player being tight and completely abandon a reasonable strategy. You certainly don't want to go broke to a nit on a J high board but abandoning ship preflop is putting the cart way before the horse. You want to play your range reasonably and allow the hand to play out to an extent. If you deviate too far from your normal optimal strategy you will over correct to a point where you no longer have the ability to make decisions or make plays vs someone.

If you are unable to fold a decent hand when you actually hit the jack when you face multiple streets of aggression sure you might as well fold pre, but i don't develop a strategy around the idea that i can't play somewhat reasonably on later streets. Each step you want to make a reasonable decision and re-evaluate on later streets (as you well know).

What range are you flatting preflop with vs said nit? Where do you delineate your fold range and your call range. Vs a nit we hardly have a raising range so we don't really need to discuss that.

My flatting range would be roughly QQ-88, AQs-ATs, KTs+, QJs, AQo+ and would possibly add a small a few more PPs like 7's and 6's if I thought he was very tight but very sticky as well with the intention of trying to set mine a slightly higher % of the time. It is hard to imagine we have worse than 36% equity here so we don't need to make up that much post flop.

I'd rather call with 22 than AJ against this V

would you guys ever call with a hand like 78s here? and if yes, then how deep would you want to be pre-flop?

if range is very strong , then we can expect to have High IO I would think, and IP

set mining is the easier calculation, i'm curious how you feel about SC's that likely don't intersect with V's opening range

Obviously would want to be very deep and IP

this is just me but IMO SCs are massively overrated for these situations. Often you hit a piece of the board but don't have a monster and you have to either call to try and realize equity or semi-bluff raise which is lighting money on fire against LLSNL opponents (not necessarily this V in particular). Basically you end up in sh*tty spots and lose a ton of money.

You must have an 80 IQ,.. that makes zero sense. Would you like to try and justify this or no?

If you are flatting hands like 78s you wouldn't be constructing a linear range pre at all. Having a 35% call frequency seems insanely loose vs a tighter player, plus he 4Xed which should discourage calling slightly. if you are being selective you can call with a range similar to: QQ-55, AQs-ATs, KTs+, QTs+, JTs, T9s, 98s, 87s, AJo+, KQo but you would want to reduce some combos of weaker hands since semi bluffing a nit is not too viable. You don't want to be in a situation where your outs may or may not be clean postflop if you can help it. The value of having a high card in your hands helps more from a removal standpoint plus it isn't impossible the nit flops an underpair to you or you could still have outs to catch up if you keep the range on the tighter side.

I would looks to make small adjustments like folding 78s, 89s to slightly cut down on the number of difficult situations we could be in. Those hands in particular can be in a rough spot where you have equity but no reasonable way to realize, hard to make him fold, and you might not be drawing to a nutted hand some % of the time. It wouldn't be the end of the world but those would be combinations I would cut out of my range vs a tight player. Hands like AJ off are going to be a little easier to play vs a nit and we have slightly better removal vs some of the stronger hands he does have in his range. Not a bad thought, but I wouldn't do it.

Very much agree deeper effective we are or the more a game is aggressive the more this type of hand goes up in value.

FWIW "normal optimal strategy" is not to cold-call AJo. It's definitely not an overreaction to fold it vs. a nit open because it's a standard fold anyway.

Perhaps live conditions make it an acceptable cold-call, but that's a special adjustment for games with very little 3-betting and very poor post-flop play.