Villain 1 (245) is a loose rec in his 50s. Passive preflop limping most hands, but bluffs postflop when checked to him and overplays hands.
Villain 2 (240) is rec in late 30s i guess. A bit more aggressive pre, but pretty passive postflop. A bit of a station. Not completely lost.
Hero (1k) kinda tight image

Limped pot, V1 is mp, V2 is sb, hero is in bb with 84
Flop (15) 665
sb checks, hero leads 10, both call.
Turn (45) 6657
sb checks, hero bets 35, V1 raises to 100, V2 tanks 30 sec and calls, hero?

Calling. Lots of ‘value’ hands or value + draw V’s could have. Folding to strong action from multiple V’s on river. I don’t think a fold OTT is indefensible but I’d have to know V by name and have a great history with him to fold.

Although your flop bet is 2/3, I think, since live sizings are much bigger than online, you’re going to get flatted here by any two cards and be in a bad spot on turns.

As played easy turn call, we beat plenty of value and he could be semi bluffing.

Don't lead the flop. I would actually just fold now, this is super ugly facing raise-call, and we can't improve. We beat A6, maybe K6s? We don't even have the nut straight either.

Main takeaway for me is that leading this flop seems quite bad.
I wouldn’t feel attached to this hand at all.

I agree that leading flop was bad for several reasons and that 89 is the hand that we’re most likely losing to.

I agree that flop lead isnt great, but mostly because we are playing against calling stations, making it hard to win the pot if we dont improve.

OTTH:
We plan to 3b jam if V2 folds. We block 98 and he is never raising a fullhouse so he most likely has a 6. V2 calls and now hero really wants to fold but knows that V1 never has a better hand. Worried about V2 slowplaying a fullhouse we call knowing he is sticky and thinking (or hoping) V2 could have 43, 87 or also just a 6.

River (345) 66573
V2 donks allin 135, hero?

Not to be harsh, but it’s really just bad in general.

Why does V1 not have boats and V2 does?

Hard disagree. Flop lead is pretty good in theory. We are in BB so we have the uncapped range. We have all the 6s. We have so much value, we can bet flop liberally.

I’m not really worried about V1, I think he has just a 6 here quite often. But V2s lead looks like a 4x or 89 or a slow played boat. It’s not that hard for V2 to have a 4. He can have all combos of 34 and 45. We can’t fold given the amazing price and the fact we beat a decent chunk of V2s value.

Flop bet is good. No clue why no one wants to bet here. They will both just have nothing and fold a lot. I don't mind checking some straight draws with the intent to x/r also, but I'd rather do that with better ones than this.

GII on the turn. V2 doesn't sound like the type to be able to get away from any 6x here, so he should have all combos of that, as well as 43, 84 and of course the hands that beat you. If he's a pretty bad station he may have draws as well. I don't see the point in flatting with 1/3 PSB left.

I don’t think betting 10 into a 15 pot is getting folds from a fish with KT or A8, and there are 2 fish to get through.

This is different from betting 40 into 60

Against 2 villains in a limped pot, a bet is marginal on the flop. With just a gut shot straight draw and 8 high, we don't have much equity and neither player is inclined to fold to one bet. You already have one check, so checking behind gives you a decent chance to see a free card.

As played on the turn, you have a straight, but not the nuts. Need to bet out. This is a less than 50bb hand, so a straight is too good to fold. Just get it in against the raise. Lots of weaker hands can be betting and calling.

I assume you and Browni are more up on your theory than I am, and I have no delusions about being correct 100%. Can we really profitably just fire ATC on this flop though? Seems like the kind of play that might fine in theory, but in reality doesn’t work often at all and just leads us down a slippery slope.
There are so many combos I’d rather fire on the flop than this one, it’s a limped pot, and both V’s are less than 50 bb’s effective which that also seems like an issue to me.

It's not about theory to me and I wouldn't be firing 100%. We just have a pretty decent hand on a board which is hard to hit.

SB has worse than a random hand since he checked pre. A completely random hand only has a pair or better 26% of the time, and A-high+ or some type of straight draw 51%. Our equity is still 32% if he continues with A-high+ or any draw. That's not a perfect continuing range, but they have nothing most of the time.

MP is not much better. He'll have a hand which connects with the board slightly less often, but pocket pairs or ace-high slightly more often.

We only need to get both of them to fold 40% of the time to auto-profit, which might not happen, but we still have around 30% equity when called, it's not a big deal to be forced to fold to a raise and checking is +EV too, but facing a bet isn't ideal, although we're not check/folding to a normal sizing.

What other combos would you rather bet and why does it matter that they're half stacks? We're still pretty deep.

Thanks for the feedback Browni. That all makes sense. I feel like if anything I’m generally firing too often more than not enough, so I’m surprised that I’m off here. I was thinking it matters that we’re only 50 bb deep because there’s less maneuvering possible on later streets as the SPR gets shallow and also that we’re going to run into some spots where we hit our hand and it becomes difficult to find a fold (like the situation that presented itself here).

Hands I’d rather fire here would be: most 6x, all 5x, all 78o and 78s, all 47, and then the other 3 combos of 48s even seem fine to fire with BDFD as well. Even something like A7 suited with BDFD seems better to me than this, but that could definitely be incorrect. Some players would probably even have 77 to bet here too, but I would probably attack pre with that.

Again, not at all assuming I’m correct here and appreciate the feedback.

I guess I would even rather bet 89 suited with BDFD here, but I realize we’re talking negligible differences in EV with hands like that.

I think if you only bet those hands you're hardly ever bluffing. I guess it's fine if you think bluffing is really bad here, but realize {74, 87, 84s (3), 98s (3)} is betting 38 combos of bluffs out of a range of 852 combos if you're squeezing top 25% pre, vs. 240 combos of pair+. Of course you can check some pair+ also, but you almost always have value here if you bluff so little.

We could also range check and check raise aggressively if we expect MP to stab very frequently, although it's not clear how often he bets here from OP.

I think we need to consider the CO and SB ranges, and which of those players are most likely to have a strong hand.

Before that, consider our range: Our preflop range is close to 80% of all hands (assuming we raise the top 20% from the BB.) So we enter the flop with close to 1000 combos of hands. In particular, we have every single combo of 6x in our range. There are 8 combos of A6, 8 combos of K6, etc. Altogether, 88 combos of trip 6s. Then we have boats: 6 combos of 65 and 3 combos of 55. Then 1 combo of quad 6s. Altogether, we have 98 combos of trip 6s or better.

So, 10% of our preflop range is the nuts on this board.

Now, given that, what is the SB range here? Assume he completes with a 40% range. That's 500 combos. Now he has a boats and quads like we do, But he's only playing suited combos of 6x, plus 67o, 56o. I haven't done the math, but he probably has less than half as many value combos that we do.

CO is irrelevant to this hand. His limping range doesn't contain many 6x.

So both our range and SB range is equally strong on a relative scale (10% nuts). But we have position against SB, so we have the advantage here! We also must consider that SB will be leading here often with a 6 in a limped pot. So his flop check further reduces his value range. We truly dominate SB, and so we are justified to bet with a high frequency.

Now, my understanding of bluffing frequencies dictates that we should be betting a bluff:value ratio of 2:1 on the flop. Given that we have 100 combos of value, we need to find 200 combos of bluffs. To achieve that we must bet all of our strongest draws, i.e., all our gutshots an overcard, and our OESDs. So: {89,78,79,84,74,73,34} = 112 combos. Then we can mix in a bet with the 80ish combos of BDFD + two overcards. That still leaves us with 10 combos short of that optimal 2:1 bluff:value ratio.

Tl;dr: Yes, we can afford to bet frequently in this spot.

I don’t think this is correct. Pretty sure you have this backwards and we want 2:1 value:bluffs. Also, I think this is mainly a HU concept.

Either way, enjoying the convo and can see where you both are coming from.

If we're also betting 5x on this board (as we should), we have can afford to include even more combos of bluffs. In fact, we have about 100 combos of 5x. That will allow us an additional 200 combos of bluffs. In fact, we might be justified to simply bet our entire range on this board.

I'm fairly confident that we're allowed to have more bluffs than value on the flop.

Maybe you're thinking about betting with a polarized range on the river? That's a different story. Then we're never allowed to have more bluffs than value. For a PSB on the river, we want a 1:2 bluff: value ratio.

But betting the flop is a completely different story.

I learned about this from Matthew Janda's No Limit Hold 'Em For Advanced Players.If you're betting a pure polarized range on flop/turn/river, for a PSB on each street (so opponent is just bluffcatching), the optimal bluffing ratios are as follows:

2:1 bluff:value on flop
1:1 bluff:value on turn
1:2 bluff value on river (this is the stat we are all familiar with -- we lay opponent 2:1 on a call with a PSB)

Again, if you want a rigorous derivation of those bluffing frequencies (for simplified model of betting polarized range HU on each street), read Janda's book.

I actually recently started reading it, but got super busy with life stuff so i haven’t got too far yet. The decision became continue reading/studying or give up hand volume.
Not doubting that you are correct on all of this though. Thanks Chaos + Browni!

We don't have a perfectly polarized range, though. Those rarely come up outside of toy games. Lots of our flop value will become turn checks or can get drawn out on by villain. 2:1 bluffs is too much as a standard on the flop, IMO, although I think it's ok to bluff a lot here especially vs. villains who won't raise enough.

For some reason I was braindead in my first post and forgot that SB checked. Of course that makes a bluff more profitable since he's less likely to have a very strong hand.

Also remember that it's 5|5, so SB didn't have to complete to see a flop. His range is 100% of hands minus those he'd raise.