Six-handed 2/5 game late at night. Hero has about 900. Villain A is a likely pro. Villain B is a smart LAG who has come from playing a significantly larger game. Villains both have at least 2K.

Hero raises in the HJ to 20 with K9. Villain A 3bets to 60 in CO. Villain B calls in the BB. Hero calls.

Flop is KK6 with two spades. Villain B checks. Hero checks. Villain A bets 100. Villain B check-raises to 250.

I am fairly certain that Villain B interprets A's flop bet as A not having a king. I think he is correct in his assessment. Villain B is capable of check-raising with air or a semibluff. I think he has the case king here, though. Likely KQ/KJ/KT.

My image is tight and competent, bordering on super-nit. I know they view me as more tight-passive than I actually am because of a hand where I called on the river with a strong hand in an attempt to win an overcall, when the rest of the table would raise with the same hand. I am clearly the tightest player at the table in a short-handed, aggressive game.

I spend some time thinking about the hand and decide that Villain A is folding and Villain B will see my range as AK/KQ/66 if I shove (he appears to think about hands in terms of ranges) and he will fold a king often enough for my bet to work as a bluff. If I had more chips, I believe I could float with the intention of jamming the turn and getting him to fold. I don't have more money on the table, so I decide to turn my hand into a bluff and jam the flop.

I believe my opponent is smart enough to understand the story that I am trying to tell. My main concern is that he will believe that he is beat but call anyways because the stakes are relatively small for him.

I've been working on looking for spots to turn a hand with showdown value into a bluff. Was I crazy to pick this spot or does it make sense to try it here?

Fold pre to the 3 bet.

Call the CR on the flop.

I don't think I can make a habit of folding to 3bets in an aggressive short-handed game. If I should fold pre, then I shouldn't be opening with that hand.

I felt that I am behind so often that my options on the flop are fold or turn my hand into a bluff and shove. Calling didn't make sense to me at those stack depths.

"I will fold you off trips in a 3b pot on a flushdraw board when you are getting like 2.5:1 with two streets to come"

is not a good strategy. I laughed when I saw the thread title and harder when I actually read the thread. Sorry to be a dick, but this is just a terrible thought process.

Then open tighter. K9 plays horribly as a open call OOP hand vs almost any 3bet ranges. If your logic is that you can't make it a habit to fold to 3 bets then I have no advice for you.

None of this makes much sense and seems to be based on nothing. Why does Villain B interpret Villain A's bet that way? Why if he's "capable of c/ring with air" do you put him on the case King? What KX hands do you put a "smart" player on when he cold calls a 12bb 3bet out of position? Why do you "decide" Villain A is folding? Why is Villain B putting AK in your range (which is a standard 4b in your position) but not putting KJ or KT? You're just making arbitrary declarations based on feelings rather than breaking down the hand logically and systematically.

You are the one who should be thinking about ranges. What is Villain A's range for 3bing? What about Villain B's range for cold calling? Does Villain A cbet with his entire preflop range on this flop or does he do it with a more limited range? If Villain B can c/r air, what air hands in his preflop range would he do this with? Does he have enough air that K9 is ahead of his range? Etc. This is the way you should be thinking about the hand, and you should be basing your decisions on the answers to these questions.

I remember when I first started playing poker and tried to rep quads. It didn't work.

Classic FPS.

Preflop, I think fold>>4bet>>>>call depending how wide V is 3betting IP.

I think flop is clearly just a call if V is truly a LAG who will continue bluffing OTT.

Although cold calling a 2bet OTF is really strong here, (and what bluffs does LAG have?) so do we really get any more value from the LAG?

fold to the 3bet pre. if we had position and villains were bad we can call. OOP against a "pro" (i always stick it in quotes cuz professional poker players are rare AF) and a smart big-game LAG it's poor. at least we're deep. if the game plays so aggro that you feel you shouldn't be folding to 3bets then you should be including light 4bets when OOP with hands like this in your repertoire.

flop, he's not likely to be light here (just look at the action and texture). trying to fold out better kings is pretty suicidal. i would have led flop. AP we can fold or call depending on how LAG villain B actually is. villain A still to act to our left skews towards a fold.

I probably would have open-folded at a full table or at least folded to a raise. This was kind of a tough table and it is possible that 4 out of my 5 opponents were pros. There were some players who clearly knew each other well and were engaging in some degree of leveling while having open discussions of what their ranges might be on hands. I went into this session with the idea that I would look for spots to loosen up my play and this was one of them.

Villain A's range is likely hands that a TAG pro would 3bet for value against a tight player, given that I had probably folded the previous 4 orbits. AK is the only hand in his range that is likely to feel comfortable against a check-raise. He was giving the impression that he was considering checking behind for pot control, like he might only get action from Kx and he might want to keep his opponents' ranges wider. I didn't think that was a fake tell and I thought that Villain B was noticing it, too. Once he raised, I think he had a sincere reaction of unhappiness. He was likely folding to that bet and he was definitely folding if I shoved. I'm being a bit cagey here because there are some ideas I have that I don't want to discuss in detail, but let's say I had some physical tells that I was relying on.

AK may be a standard 4bet, but I play more passive than standard. I flat more often than 4bet in that spot. I was unsure if Villain B had figured that out about me yet. Villain B would 4bet AK, though, so I could remove that hand from his range.

One thing that isn't part of my game is the all-in coup where I determine that my opponents have ranges where so little of their range can call a bet that shoving with any two cards is profitable. As a tight player, I often have a hand strong enough to have showdown value in that spot, so I don't turn my made hand into a bluff when I should.

Since I have a tight image, I am fairly certain that I am not getting any more money out of his air hands by flatting, unless he hits a miracle card, so I don't want to flat if I know he has air because I am not inducing another bluff. The same thing goes if he has a pocket pair. He only puts more money in if he has a two-outer. If he has a flush draw, he may or may not decide to call. Whatever. I'm fine either way, but I'd probably just ship it if I knew he had a flush draw.

So, I considered his Kx value range. The question I asked myself was whether I had fold equity against this part of his range. If I did, I thought I should jam. If I didn't, I thought I should fold.

I spend quite a while, probably 30 seconds, thinking about his range, but I had already been thinking about this while Villain A was deciding whether to bet or not and while Villain B was deciding to call or raise and even before then, when deciding whether to check or donk the flop. Most of this had already gone through my head by then and I was mostly watching my opponents to see if they would give off tells that would let me narrow their ranges.

So, really, the question is: is it possible to have a tight enough image to have fold equity against trips with a good kicker on this board?

I'd call him a smart LAG who can aggressively run over weaker players but can competently switch gears when in a pot against someone good. He's capable of check-raising with air here, but I think you have to discount it because of who he is in the pot with. There is always some small chance he is making a move because the stakes might be small enough to him that he gets careless.

There is no way he thinks I have anything other than Kx/66 if I just call the flop. If I call the flop, I have to fold the turn unless I boat up because he is never bluffing against such an obviously strong range.

I do not see how these two paragraphs can both be true.

If this table is so tough that you are leveling yourself, you should reconsider the skill of table/game selection and find another table.

if this is true, unless this was a one-off exercise in challenging yourself in adverse game conditions, we should just pick up

not really relevant to the hand but professional players don't give off this much information in physical tells. or if they do it's intentional.

sure. i think the response that you'll mostly get ITT is that you can talk up your image to yourself to the point where shoving can be profitable all you want, that the only person who truly knows is you because you were there, and that from a qualified external perspective, without having been there, it's unlikely you had that image.

You flopped trips with your terrible hand and are so unhappy about it that you think you need to bluff raise. Lol! This is why you should just fold pre.

Now that you've come so far, just GII and suck out on AK by rivering a 9.

fold pre, as played fold to the 3 bet. as played, flat the flop bet.

after the hand, go to the pharmacy, ask what they have for FPS and then triple the maximum dosage

Preflop (1st time): Fold pre. This is a hand we can open in the CO but it's not a hand we should be opening from the HJ. The bottom of our HJ opening range should be KJo and KTs.

Preflop (2nd time): Fold pre. When you're at the very bottom of your range and you face a raise, then you can happily let it go. We're not going to be exploited by folding the bottom of our range. Also, this particular hand has very poor RIO, since we will often get straight over straight (think K9 vs AK on a QJT), flush over flush (think K9hh vs AXhh) and lose to a better 1pr (think any Kxx board where we run into KQ+ and think any 9xx board where we run into TT+).

Flop: This is actually a really close spot, but we can consiser a fold here. Jamming is okay, but we're only doing it to get value off flush draws, never to fold out a better hand. Calling is okay too, but expect to lose more often than you win. This is why you don't play K9s in 3bet pots in the first place.

Let's stop and think about the BB's range for a bit: when he cold calls a 3bet, he's going to have a very narrow range (if he's competent) or a fairly wide range (if he's a fish).

Assumption 1: BB is a fish
If we assume that BB is a fish and can show up with hands like KT/KJ here, then we have no reason to believe that he's going to fold these hands against a jam. Fish hate folding. Fish will never fold trips unless there's a 4 straight or 4 flush on board, and this board doesn't even have a 3 straight or 3 flush. In addition to that, villain's x/r is a massive sign of strength. Villain won't always x/r weak trips like KT/KJ. This means his range is heavily weighted towards KQ+, which certainly isn't folding.

Assumption 2: BB is a competent TAG
The worst hand that the BB can ever show up with here when he cold calls a 3bet then x/raises the flop is 3 combos of flush draws (ATss, AJss, AQss) and 1 combo of KQs. Villain won't have KJs or KQo if he's competent, since those hands should never cold call 3bets pre OOP. So now we're looking at a range that has 4 combos of monsters (AK) and 4 combos of pretty good hands (KQ, nut flush draws), and you think that villain is going to fold some of these combos, given now that it's only $650 more to be involved in a 2.1k pot? If villain does fold anything here, it will only be his nut flush draws and never his KQ/AK.

The more that I think about it, the more that we should be folding the flop. Which means at all 3 decision points in this hand, we should've folded.

It was an exercise in challenging myself so that I feel confident in playing in bigger games. I hope to take a shot at my first 5/T game soon.

The tells thing is a bit complex. It's not really a tell in terms of strong vs. weak. Part of it involves being able to tell how many different points they are considering and figuring out which hands in their range would require that complexity of thought. Sometimes, the stronger hand requires more thought, sometimes less. I don't want this to be the focus of the discussion, though. It really only matters if my opponent is a deep thinker and has hands in his range where tanking is necessary for him to figure out what to do and he tanks when he doesn't need to think as much for balance.

I'm tight enough that I occasionally get a good player to fold and show kings preflop against me or to have players flat my early position raise with KK when they 3bet everyone else. I don't have it in me to exploit that image by throwing out a lot of light 3bets. I'm always going to stay in my lane and play mostly nitty with a few moves thrown in. I am never going to LAG it up.

I'm not sure if I made this clear, but I think BB is a competent LAG who probably plays too loose preflop but plays well post-flop. Imagine someone who could be a winning player at 10/20 and higher but is dicking around at a 2/5 table that is mostly deep-stacked. He's calling too many preflop raises, but he's got the sort of table image that fools some people into paying him off big too often when he hits. He may only be playing too loose because the preflop raise size feels relatively insignificant to him.

If he's a competent LAG, then he's certainly not cold calling a 3bet OOP with KJo or worse. His range should be very KQ/AK/NFD heavy and I doubt you'll get much fold equity from that.

Also, don't neglect your preflop mistakes. Even if you're the best postflop player in the world, it's extremely hard to win money on a 2/5 table by flatting a 3bet OOP with K9s. I'd rather see you do this with 98s tbh.

You aren't deep enough to get anyone to fold a King here. You have $840 left when it gets back to you and the pot is $532 ($182 pre + $100 + $250). When you call $250, the pot will be $782 and your shove will be for $690 more so any V with a King is betting more than 2-1 to call. Nobody competent folds trips on a FD board getting that price (especially since they likely have a BETTER King than you).

I think you are so lost in this hand because it should’ve been folded tonthe pre flop 3bet. As played, call on the flop. Jamming causes too many problems.

Villain tanked for a long time, said he didn't think I had AK and unhappily called. Turn 8, river 6 and he was sure he was losing to quads. That makes it seem like he put me on KQ/66/small chance of something weird and he would fold KJ and he would have folded KQ if he thought that I would play AK that way.

I think I was the opposite of lost and knew exactly where I was at all times. I made a loose preflop call with the intention of trying to find a spot to practice bluffing with air if I flopped the right board texture.

is this a troll?

No it's obviously the opposite of a troll.