Live Cash - 2/5

Hero - 24 - ($450 Stack) 5-6 Orbits into the night, has been playing relatively snug nothing to note.

Villain - 20 (something) - Competent ($1.2k Stack) - Have recent history where we 5B ripped pre with TT previously ran into his AA for stacks. Assuming V thinks we are competent after little history.

Hero MP - T T

Raises $25 - Folds to BB (Calls)

Flop - ($52)

8 6 5

V Checks - Hero Bets ($30) - V Raises ($90) - Hero Calls (Standard?)

Turn - ($232)

6

V Bets ($125) - Hero ???

Against a really aggressive player, I can check flop sometimes. I expect a good aggressive regular to be able to put us in really tough spots on these kind of flops with pretty much everything except when we hold the top of our range. By checking flop we allow him to bluff with his complete air which we can bluffcatch in a smaller pot. We also eliminate situations like this on the turn where we have to seriously consider either playing for a large chunk of our stack with a marginal hand OR folding the best hand. However, a cbet here is by no means bad. Just something to consider and I would definitely cbet vs a passive player.

As played, this is a tough spot. Board pairs are usually bad cards to continue bluffing on. And the thing you have to consider here is, what rivers are you calling him down on, and what frequency do you think he is firing this turn bet? If you think he fires this turn at a near 100% I would call. If you think this is a bad card for him to bluff on and you give him credit for recognizing that, I would fold. Either way, super tough spot.

Yeah this is for sure a really difficult spot, I don't know what I would do. You don't seem to have enough info on villain to know what to do either. It takes a long time to see how people like to play their draws and their sets/two pair. On the one hand villain's line look super super strong, and could easily have a set. On the other hand, this flop doesn't connect with much of your range as the pre flop raiser, so he should be expecting to get a lot of folds.

In a terrible spot like this having know idea what to do and no reads I think it's probably best to just fold as early as possible, try to get villain to show his hand, and gather information for future spots. I don't think I would of folded the flop either, but probably would have ended up with a pretty disgusted fold on the turn.

I don`t know why we think that this is such a terrible spot. We are only 90bb deep and I really like this turn card. We don`t think that villain is calling pre with any six or a hand that flopped a straight, right?

-> 56, 76, 86, 97 are preflop folds for described competent villain, aren`t they?

55 and 66 could be folds as well (I would fold those). So his pure value range is all the combos of 88, one combo of 66 and (maybe) all the combos of 55.

I like folding OTF more than folding OTT. If we call OTF I think we need to call him down on good runouts.

shove flop. Probably shoving turn too since if I read him for the kind of player who auto-semi bluffs draws then he's not going to slow down on the turn even if we called because that's just the kind of player he is. It's kinda weird though to call flop then jam turn, as I would never call flop so I'm not sure how this impacts his perception of us. Regardless though I dont feel anything has changed and he still has a draw of some sort so I just go ahead and get it in any way I can.

hate that flop bet. either check it or bet bigger. the bet is so weak that it could appear to the V that we are just c-betting with air and that he needs to raise to protect his pair from overcards.

the problem is that the board is so connected with undercards that he could be crushing us, or he could have a big combo draw, or he could have air, and there is no way for us to differentiate what he might have because he just called our raise pre and that flop could have hit his range.

as played, dump it. you callled the flop and he still fired another barrel. his image is pretty clean and there is no reason to hero here.

The flop is where the decision should be made imo. I'm generally b/f'ing my entire value range here. If I have a read that he's aggro with his draws, then it's a b/shove.

I've toyed with calling flop, then folding turn if V continues to bet. It's been very spewy for me so far.

'competent' 5b shoves TT in a 2/5 cash game. unless he has the sickest read, these don't go together IMO.

I'm just putting it in OTT against a guy who seems to be pretty punty from your description.

Shove turn.

I think you can fold on the flop. This is one of those situations where you have to allow yourself to fold the likely best hand when the pot is small. The reason is the hands you are ahead of have a lot of equity against you. But when you are behind, you have almost no equity. Also, you will end up making bigger errors if you continue such as when the flush card hits and he bets turn, bets river with a pair and a straight draw or vice versa.

Sometimes you have to allow yourself to be run over. You can do the same to him when situation is reversed.

Caveat: this is advice for competing against a good and somewhat balanced player. it is instead somewhat way unbalanced toward bluffs, semibluffs, for example if this is a guy check raising with like a pair and a back door flush draw or like 43, then get it in and punish him.

Let's assume villain is playing a standard 12% flatting range:
JJ:0.75,TT,99,88,77,66,55,44,33,22,AK:0.5,AQs:0.75 ,AQo,AJs,ATs,A9s,A8s,A7s,A6s,A5s,A4s,A3s,A2s,KQs,K Js,KTs,QJs,QTs,JTs,J9s,T9s,98s,87s,76s:0.5

Should we bet the flop? Villain's pure air range is 30% of his hands, and they have 23% equity. Typically when we bet to fold out overcard equity, we need a rough 2:1 ratio of air:made (when air has 3-6 outs), so we aren't going to bet purely to fold out villain's equity.
So lets look at his calling range vs his raising range on this flop.
Calling: AK, AQ, any pair worse than 99 without a straight draw (32% of his range, 18% equity)
Raising: 99+, sets, A7s, pairs with 8 outs straight draws, most flush draws. 38% of his range, has 55% equity vs us, this is 56 combos, with 19.5 of them being sets or overpairs that beat us. Since we are beat equity wise here we don't really want to 3bet the flop.

So when he check/raises us, we have enough equity to continue. However, villain can easily blow us off our hand on later streets by dropping 17 bluff combos on the turn and 10 on the river (making him perfectly balanced and dropping our EV to 0). If he does this, when we call the flop he will bet the turn 70% of the time, and lets assume the remaining 30% of the time we win the pot. So EV of calling the raise is -60*.7+190*.3=15. But wait! He will hit his hand on the turn sometimes, giving him more value. What cards are safe for us? T+, 2, 3 without completing the flush, 21 cards, so over half the time he will gain an additional 12 combos of hands that beat us. He also beats us on some of our safe cards, but they only add 3 combos on average. With 12 additional value hands on the turn he can bet any two that he check/raised and make us fold, so our equition turns into (-60*.7+190*.3)*(26/47)+(-60*21/47)=-18.5. So because his 'bluffs' have so much equity, we can't really call this flop raise.
Basically, we have equity to continue but not if we are playing a talented player who will make us make big mistakes on upcoming streets.

.38*-30+.30*(60*.23)+.32*(30*.82)=.62 So +ev to bet. But doesn't mean it is maximally +ev to bet. Math gets real complicated here but if we run this situation through PIOSolver (giving hero a 15% opening range), we are checking back TT almost always on this flop, which is a good sign that we should probably check back against good opponents.

This is a problem situation. We have tens and our hand is super vulnerable on this flop. I mean let's just look at the turn cards that we don't want to see. A 9 or a 4 complete the open end straight, any diamond completes the flush, any card higher than a ten is an overcard to our pair and hits possible bluff holdings, an eight is bad and a six is probably bad as well, five seems fairly safe, but it's hard to tell. When you add it all up that's around 29 cards that we don't want to see on the turn, that's more than half the deck. For that reason I do not want to bet this flop.

That bet on the turn compounded for us quickly, because now we're faced with a bloated pot with a mediocre holding. Given the line villain is taking here I think we can condense his range to strong made hands and semibluffs. I don't think he's showing up with a lot of air given his line. I would take aces and kings out of his range (mostly anyway) because I think these would be a three bet preflop when out of position and check raising this particular flop would be a super non-standard play with them here. For that same reason I'd also take queens and jacks out. That leaves us with a value range of sets and made straights, of which 97s seems like the only likely combination as I can't see playing 74 out of position.

So that leaves us with 3 combos of eights, 3 combos of fives and 1 combo of sixes (on the turn) plus four combos of 97 suited, plus 2 combos of 76s which was a semibluffing hand that became a value hand. That's 13 combos.

For his semibluffing hands we have: 87s, AKd, AQd, and 77. That's 17 combos.

Even his semibluffing hands have a lot of equity against us. In fact, when I put that range in it gives us 38.91% equity, not good.

I think a check back on the flop would have been much better. I suppose it sort of turns our hand a bit face up, but I would rather play pot control with a marginal holding. As played I think we have to find a fold on the turn.

Preflop - Good.

Flop - Okay but I think either betting larger or checking may be better. Against a good player who will mix in around the right amount of bluffs in his flop raise range, betting a more polarized range on this flop may be best. I.e. If we bet a range like QQ-AA, sets, many flush draws, and many straight draws (including just inside straight draws) while checking behind 8-X, 6-X, and 99-JJ, this may perform better against villain's range. I'd aim to either call or shove against his flop raise with ~60% of my flop bet range. Also note that a good player will frequently check raise this flop due to it's wet texture and our difficulty in calling down with one pair.

Turn - Against a "Competent" player, I'd just aim to call his turn bet ~75-80% of the time. That means we should call his turn bet with around half of the hands we originally bet flop with. As good of a board as this is for 1010, I think putting it into the turn fold range is actually fine. I think calling with flush draws or pair+straight draws is MUCH better than calling with 1010 here. If behind, 1010 has almost no equity. Our flush draws and pair+straight draws probably have enough immediate odds to call turn getting 3-1, and we can bluff them on the river if he checks.

Conclusion - With 1010, flop is certainly never a fold to the check/raise. But on the turn, I'd fold.

I didn't consider an obvious choice in my analysis, which I should have. We should jam over villain's raise instead of folding on the flop. (112+395)*.45+-395*.55=10.9, vastly out performing calling. We need 43.8% equity to jam instead of folding, 44.1 with 5+1+1 rake/bbj/tip.

Thanks for all your replies.

I ended up shoving turn and he snapped with 55..

I like checking back flop or as played 100% should've folded turn as his turn bet looks like value & if it's not he out played us and move on..

Sorry i couldn't continue past "we 5b ripped 10s pre" and "V thinks we're competent".

+1

Fold flop, if not, fold turn. Flop call is maybe OK.

Kind of a gross spot. Decent chance we're ahead if we think he can semi-bluff c/raise. SPR is like 8.5 on the flop and we shouldn't be committed to an overpair here. It's probably best to fold on the flop here not because we think we're behind all the time but we've essentially been put in a spot where we're playing for stacks and we're not committed here. If we're behind we're absolutely crushed and if we're ahead, it's relatively slight.

I still dont like the fold. If all anybody ever has to do is check raise a wet flop and you fold everything but the nuts seems like you'll be highly exploitable. I dunno, maybe thats why I have tremendous success semi-bluffing. "Oh **** I got raised, could have a set, best to fold"

I would hate to know how often we get in on flops and turns with two outs or hero rivers with one pair going of this theory.

Well I just need a little bit more information that one single bet to know if my hand is good or not. I originally stated I dont know if I actually shove the turn since it doesnt make a lot of sense for villain to bluff half pot after we show that kind of strength calling. We've completely turned our hand face up at that point which lets him do whatever he wants. The real question is how often does the average reg raise a nut flush draw or an OESD. I think his 3x raise sizing puts him into the "reg" category more than the "fish" category (since a fish will just open jam his set here to make us fold a draw even before we've acted), and therefore I think a reg will in fact take a small stab like this to knock us off of overcards or vulnerable pairs. This is the perfect board to flop a set on of course.

I'm not going in much details but what I'm going to say is this:
You are the preflop raiser and he's taking the lead away from you. Obviously he's looking to build the pot up and playing for stacks (your stack). Unless he's a bluffer or some kind of maniac I would not call his $90 raise and be forced to reevaluate my TT on the turn and probably face another big bet that I cannot call because we don't want playing for stacks, also don't want to be committed to the pot and getting a good price to call on a small hand.

agree

I think the real take away from the thread should be: don't 5b rip TT pre against competents