Folding is 0EV, so it will always be a superior option to making any -EV play on any street regardless of how positive the expectation was of any previous play in the hand. If anything, your #3 option actually supports my point: it's possible for him to be so good so often on the turn that he can call, even if his expectation facing a bet on many rivers is negative ... which means he should call the turn and *fold* the river.

My motivation for making villain indifferent to calling or folding with his bluff catchers is only if I can't improve on that number.[1] If villain is thinking, "Ah, **** it, good players are gonna make me indifferent to calling or folding anyway, so I might as well just call to make myself feel better about my turn call," then he will end up calling 100% of his bluff-catchers, which is absolutely exploitable. So there is no reason for my motivation be to make him indifferent, and I would just focus on getting fat value with my value hands and making a ~0EV play by checking back my bluffs.

So villain can assume that it doesn't matter whether he calls or not all he wants, but if his actions are informed by this assumption, then the assumption will no longer be true.

I have recognized this further up ITT; I just don't see it as a "problem" for me in this hand at all. I might as well just vbet AK+ and nothing else; problem solved. The problem (if there still is one for Hero in this hand) shifts back to turn and whether we can get enough folds there for bluffing 4+ outs to make sense.

Though I obviously agree that every competent player will recognize that calling the turn doesn't guarantee that he'll make it to showdown without potentially facing another bet that is larger than the one he already faces. Where I strongly disagree is that his only option is to call that additional bet when it happens.

It sounds like you missed the point again, because you're describing #1, not #3.

#1 is, Villain assumes calling river is -EV, so he calls turn and folds river. This is definitely an option. We have no idea whether Villain is planning this.

#2 is obviously if Villain assumes you are bluffing too much on the river and calls down. We have no idea whether Villain is planning this.

#3 is different. This option is, Villain can't confidently make an assumption about how much you are bluffing river, even if he expects to frequently be good on the turn. But since he assumes a turn call is extremely profitable, he decides to call you all the way down because even if he loses EV on a river bet, his profit for the whole line is still higher than if he folded on the turn.

For example, let's say Villain thinks (correctly) that he will have the best hand on the river 60% of the time and that if you bet the river, you're betting $100 (into a pot of $200). Let's also assume you bet the river with all of your 40% that beats him and also some bluffs.

So when Villain is no good, he loses $150 by calling you down; but when he is good, he wins $150 when you don't bluff and $250 when you do.

Since Villain is good the majority of the time here, his call-down is +EV ($30 in this case) when you never bluff, and it only gets better when you do bluff. Notice that Villain only had to know how often he was good (and how much your river bet would be) to know that calling you down is better than folding the turn. He did not need to know your river bluffing percentage.

That is what option 3 is about. If Villain knows that you are capable of showing up with a range that AQ is well ahead of on the turn, but doesn't know how much you're bluffing the river, he may just decide that calling down is better than folding the turn and just close his eyes and call even if it means giving back some EV on a river bet he should have folded to. Of course we still don't know if Villain was actually planning this, but my only point is that it's an extra reason to think Villain might call the river.

By the way, one of the reasons Villain might decide to close his eyes and call here is if he knows you'll keep half-potting it, so his losses are capped. That's another reason to think about changing up your bet sizing, as others pointed out before.

Literally the only thing you are proving with this hypothetical situation is that it's possible for his turn call to be *SO* profitable that he can torch $100 on the river, and calling the turn would still be the right play. This says nothing about whether he should fold the river. That's great that his hand happened to be so good that there was almost no -EV way to play it in the long run, but in order to maximize his profits, he should not have lit that last $100 on fire.

You keep talking about, "Even if he loses EV on the river," not recognizing that this cannot possibly be a dismissive clause. IF CALLING A RIVER BET MEANS HE LOSES EV, THEN HE IS BETTER OFF FOLDING.

I feel like the way this conversation is getting confused is that you're talking about "options" or approaches "villain" might be taking and how this affects whether or not "I" can bluff this river. I have moved past whether or not "I" can bluff this river and am thrilled to find out that "I" can't (and that "I" can play the most straightforward, thoughtless exploitative strategy imaginable and print money).

For the purposes of this conversation, I have completely moved on to discussing UTG+1's river spot as though he is hero and advising what is best for him. I realize that he might just close his eyes and call regardless of whether or not UTG bluffs enough for that call to be >= 0EV, but I would not advise him to do that. If this were a HH and UTG+1 were OP, I would advise him to take the line that is the highest EV, and if calling is -EV, and raising is -EV, I would advise him to fold.

So what do you--as UTG+1--do when you think you are good often enough on the turn that you don't want to fold, but you have no idea what UTG's bluffing tendencies on the river are? Just guess?

By the way, that is not how the conversation is getting confused. I was perfectly aware of your point of view. And of course if we figure out what we don't want Villain to do, then obviously it is a good line with the roles reversed, in general.

What I'm saying is, if you're UTG+1 and you're sitting there on the turn with a bluff catcher that you think is too good to fold, you need to know what you're doing on the river.

If you call/fold when you should have call/called, your entire line from the turn onward could lose EV, or could be profitable, depending on Villain tendencies.

If you call/call when you should have call/folded, your entire line from the turn onward could lose EV, or could be profitable, depending on Villain tendencies.

I'm not trying to settle this discussion either way. I am just pointing out that the call/call option could still be better than folding turn even with incomplete information where we don't know how often Villain bluffs the river. I do not think the same could be said about the call/fold option. If we're going to fold to a river bet after calling turn, we *need* to know how often Villain bluffs the river (namely, we need to be confident it's small enough that we win a check-down often enough to justify the pot odds we're getting on the turn).

I think where the conversation is getting confused is that we're claiming different things that are both true and assuming we're arguing. You are claiming that from a general perspective, it must sometimes be correct to call turn and fold river (which clearly must be true). I am claiming that calling turn and folding river, while it is something that we have to do sometimes, is something that we need specific information to be confident about doing--and that we don't necessarily need that same information to choose the "call down" option instead of folding the turn (NOT instead of calling turn and folding river).

This is not a stable strategy though. It gets crushed by firing a lot of turn barrels and betting a pure value range on the river. He's not giving you a reason to bluff the river, which means he's not really giving himself a reason to call with a bluff-catcher.

If I were UTG+1, I would rather never call with AQ on this particular runout, and if I'm worried about exploitability, then:

1) Never 3! AK preflop, and often flat AA (it's fine to not have a 3!ing range at all here, especially if he thinks I'm spewy postflop and that others left to act behind are bad ... at least one player left to act behind is the most notorious spewer at this card room, btw).

2) Not have a raising range for flop and turn.

3) Double float some hands, some of which will improve to the nuts on this particular runout, and another ~4 of which can shove river as a bluff (since there are so many nut combos).

Obviously there could be different plans on different runouts (especially if the turn brought more backdoor draws than just a few SDs), but I think there are just a lot of better ways to use position here to put UTG in a tough spot than to make a crying call with a hand that only beat bluffs when so many of UTG's bluffs got there.

you do the same thing as in any other poker decision:
do i have player specific reads that inform this decision? if no->
do i have narrow pop reads that inform this decision (young LAG, etc)? if no->
do i have general pop reads that inform this decision? -> if no or useless->
wwgtod? ->play my half of the nash pairing that arrives here w/ ranges etc

its possible i'm misunderstanding, but it seems you are saying that sometimes we have hands that are so strong that we know call/call is +ev no matter what so we shouldn't fold them (and the ev of the turn still depends on his river strategies). yes, this is true, but that doesn't say much about the weaker hands. the consequences of being wrong about his river strategies with a marginal turn call are the same as with the stronger hand -> reduced ev, it just happens that in the second case this means ev goes below 0. we can still weight his possible river strategies and decide ev>0 with some measure of variance/uncertainty (using above method), or just play minimax and not care that it might be -ev with this hand.

continuing from above, we don't need to know, because if we decide we know nothing and play gto, then any strategy he chooses that makes our turn call -ev (assuming that call was part of the gto strat) gives enough ev back to the rest of our range for us not to care.

see above, and also i don't think its that important to be confident that the decision is correct (depends on your threshold for confidence though)

Not quite--see my subsequent posts. If someone is calling down too much, you still can't bluff too much on the turn because the value you get back on the river won't make up for all the times you bluff the turn and give up.

Calling down gets crushed when the turn AND river betting ranges are both more value-heavy than Villain is prepared for.

Not misunderstanding; that's what I'm saying. But what I'm also asking is, when someone starts the hand by calling an UTG raise from UTG+1, how often are they calling turn with those "weaker hands"? How often do they even HAVE "weaker hands"?

the stronger/weaker determination is a function of the strength of the range UTG bets on the turn, so sometimes always, sometimes never. ie if you think that AQ has 60% hot/cold eq or whatever measure we are using, then you could just imagine that UTG tightens up his turn betting range to lower that %. if AQ isnt the weakest hand that UTG1 has, just use that instead, etc.

Right, I agree. So the initial point I was trying to make in this thread is that if the original Villain in this hand is a good player, AND he has called the turn already, he probably (but not definitely) thinks his hand is strong enough to call the river also.

i agree that your conclusion is probably true in this hand (i advocated that UTG plays a strat that ~never bluffs turn or river).

i don't agree about the theory portion, though, in the context of above (speaking only about the weakest portion of UTG1 turn calling range). if the weakest hand UTG1 calls turn with is strong enough that he is correct to just call down, then clearly UTG is making a mistake. even if we dont allow UTG to go back and adjust his turn betting range, his river betting range should be adjusted such that UTG1 cannot call profitably with this weakest turn call. important notes: this doesn't mean his turn call was -ev, since he can win on x/x rivers; we are assuming a static equity model street to street here for simplicity sake (i don't think this assumption is too troublesome on this board).

While I agree with this, this is the other half of what I was saying: this is true with perfect information. But sometimes we can say, from UTG+1's perspective, "I don't know the EV of call turn/fold river, but I do know that (call turn/call river) > (fold turn)". And when that occurs we should expect the turn call to be followed by a river call.

OP is trying to claim, I think, that when we are looking at this from the perspective of UTG+1 this should never be informing our decision-making?

It depends on exactly how the villain constructs his calldown range, but it has to be the case that either:

A. Villain is calling with a "normal" amount of hands on the turn and then calling with all of them on the river;
B. Villain is calling with very few hands on the turn, calling with all of them on the river and ending up with a "normal" river calling range; or
C. Villain splits the difference and calls with fewer hands than normal on the turn but still ends up with more hands than normal on the river.

All of these strategies lose against barreling the turn wide and value betting only on the river. The basic point is that the villain takes everything he leaves the turn with to showdown, so either he has to overfold the turn to avoid being too stationy on the river. (Or he is just too stationy on the river.)

Like, sure, it's possible that our turn bets are so incredibly spewy that he's making so much money he can afford to give some of it back on the river. But note that the way he punishes spewy turn bluffs is actually by calling even wider than "normal," which is very hard for him to do since he doesn't want to fold the river. However wide he's calling, he's not going to take KK or A5s to showdown.

i dont think this necessarily follows:
unless this is only meant to say that at LLSNL this is generally what happens (descriptive).

i think the reduced form of what your argument here is (please correct me if you feel this is not accurate):
we know ev[call,call] has a lower bound of 0, and we don't know what ev distribution of ev[call,fold] is (could be that ev[call,fold]<0 100% of the time if UTG bets river 100%), so we should choose the option that has a lower bound of 0.

i don't think its fair to say we have no information about what the distribution of ev[call,fold] is, even if our confidence is low. i think implicit in this claim is that neither player has any information about the other player's ranges or strategies, in which case we should have just been playing our gto pair strat from the beginning. even the fact that we know that ev[call,call]>0 is some information about the ranges/strategies we face on both the turn and river. i guess another way of putting this is: you are forced to choose between A and B, and you know A has a minimum value>0 (and you know a few of the bounds we have been using in these examples). if you choose A, you are assuming something about the distribution of B (like, in this example, that B is distributed randomly or in a way that makes A better). the point is, by being forced to choose, you have to make some assumption.

i am a little unclear what "this" refers to (probably because i typed all that stuff inbetween these two paras), but if it means uncertainty then i think my above response answers. i don't want to put words in OP's mouth though, and i think the direction of the thread has changed several times so im not sure.

As others have said, that line of reasoning still has to include some assumptions about the river. One interesting option for an exploitative play would be to overbet shove the river to make that the dominant decision point in terms of ev. In this scenario, the stacks are pretty good for it shoving 400 into 200. I have seen this line before against some opponents who peel the flop light, but then tighten up significantly on the turn such that they are calling almost all rivers. In that case, this line of betting small on the flop and turn gets value and then folds out any marginal hands on the turn. By the river, his range has been strengthened enough that he isn't folding soo you should then get max value with your nutted hands.

I haven't read all the previous posts, but in live 2/5 don't triple in single raised pots on ace high dry boards. Even if you never do it, they will still think that you do it.

Very rarely should we be trying to make people fold top pair plus. If most of your villains range is top pair/overpair, knowing that they have 1 pair will not win you the hand. If they call the flop, they have a piece. If they call the turn they have tp+. End hand.

Keep your bluffs in small pots (most of the time) with an occasional bluff at a big pot vs. weak ranges, and value bet razor thin.