tl;dr: more analysis of tight old lady villains for those interested, from a hand i played Friday.

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played for the first time in several years the other night. thought this hand was interesting in terms of profiling tight old-lady villains similar to the villain ITT.

1/2 250 EFF

Reads:

V: white lady probably late 60s, slender, bought in full stack. it's a new table, we're only a few hands deep. but you bet your azz i already have some ideas about how she might play.

EP: young quiet guy, got the sense he might not really know how to play (love 1/2!).

Hand:

Preflop: EP limp directly to my right. I limp behind with 44. Folds to V who makes it $12 OTB (standard raise size in these games). SB folds, BB calls, call, call.

Flop: 923r ($45)

Checks to V who bets $20, BB folds, EP calls $20, I call $20.

Turn: 9236 ($105)

Checks to V who bets $20, EP calls $20, I call $20.

River: 92369 ($165)

Checks to V who bets $20, EP calls $20 (interesting).

At this point I expect to lose at showdown to EP, but having picked up on him possibly being clueless and his flat/flat/flat, and the pot odds I'm getting, I called, because I knew I was winning against V (more on why later).

EP ended up having a boat so, there's that. But the interesting part here is V. We can put a villain like this squarely on high cards here, strongly skewed towards AK.

Let's look at her bet sizing: she makes a standard late position open with a couple of limpers. OK. Then she continues $20 into about $45 OTF. At this point she has all her overpairs still in. With another caller, we can flat to draw to our set (and maybe pick up equity OTT) and to see what she does OTT.

Then the key turning point is when she bets the same amount on the turn. $20 into $105. Old lady villains like this are never doing this with overpairs. I think there might have been a suit picked up with the 6, but it doesn't even matter. Bone dry flop or not, she's betting at least 1/2-2/3 pot here with overpairs, often more. The greatest fear of old ladies at poker (except the somewhat rare gambool type ones) is getting sucked out on.

Now the interesting question is, if she has AK, why does she bet at all? The answer is because she has AK.

In an ideal world, old ladies like this would reduce poker to a purely pre-flop game, where all the money has to go in pre, and you just see what the runout is after. This eliminates almost all complex, difficult decisions, and mostly eliminates suckouts because these ladies' strategy has them playing only a narrow range of premium hands. So they'd rather just get their KK in with someone who's less disciplined and win most of the time. Post flop poker is mostly a boil on this lady's ass. She has to face bluffs, scare cards, draws, multi-way action, all kinds of scary shyt that messes up her game plan. This is why players like this play tight in the front, loose in the back. They play so few hands, they don't want to let go of them post flop, because in their heads, they should win. They know they had the better hand pre. So they call it down all the way and then bytch about how you sucked out.

So when she wakes up with AK she just bets $20 every street, pot size be damned. Because if she checks, she's giving up on the hand. Now if someone bets she has to fold and wonder. But if she maintains the betting lead, she can feel good about how she played and get to the river without risking too much $. It eliminates the need for her to make any decisions whatsoever. If she's raised at any point she's folding. It makes it so post flop plays itself, and she prolly gets to see a showdown. Not that she should want to with A-high, but in her weird logic, it completes her ideal narrative, which is the best preflop hand should win.

Only just saw this thread. At first I didn't know wtf OP was talking about because I missed that she limp-called pre and therefore doesn't have QQ/JJ. Maybe this is AQ, but there are only three combos of that. I think it's a fold and don't even think it's close, frankly.

One thing to note is the cognitive trick your mind is playing on you here that we are putting this woman on "one specific hand", because that's a misleading way to think. People fairly routinely lay down overpairs to tight-passive players when they represent having flopped a set. But on an unpaired flop, the number of combos available of sets is only 9. Here there are 16 combos of KT available. So putting someone on a flopped set is actually about twice as specific a read as putting this woman on exactly KT.

This is a good post. I hadn't thought about it in these terms, but I'm familiar with pain-avoidance strategies in other LLSNL contexts. For example, a lot of players raise giant amounts with AK and TT/JJ preflop, because they hate it when they get a couple callers, flop badly and don't know what to do, so they play in a way which avoids being in those situations. Frankly, I think pain-avoidance advice is rampant on this forum as well. Very frequently see difficult spots replied to with stuff like "fold pre and you won't get into these spots", which is just a variant on the AK/TT/JJ behaviour described above.

true as well as doing various things to prevent getting raised. the same mentality is often applied to charging for draws (the idea that we're scared of certain cards peeling).

Last edited by 8o8; Yesterday at 08:08 PM.

Numbers don't lie.

I can't remember myself folding top set second nuts on the turn ever really in my life, but honestly this doesn't seem like a bad spot to do it, and maybe it's a leak for me to not have found some folds in similar spots.

The math is laid out pretty well. Like, I think it's fair to say that a player we have only played with for 4 hours could have tendencies that don't line up with our read. She might have JJ QQ some frequency, she might occasionally play QJ or AJ or something like this. Yeah it's all possible, but the math is pretty straightforward in terms of how often she needs to play those hands like this.

When AA is blocked and JJ QQ is highly discounted, first preflop, then flop and turn, there are, as noted, a lot of KT combos, and just not enough combos of other things. I think folding is absolutely a reasonable play here, and I don't know why people are so hard on OP.

Realistically I've never found a fold in these spots though.

Yup. Even with the math laid out, I still think I call here because I'm a terrible player xD