This is an interesting hand.. IMO this thread shows how some of my personal philosophies have changed as I have moved to the live cash arena. Now in ur standard online 100bb nlhe this is a 3 bet /shove any 9 high or lower/ k high or a high flop.

Having said that. This isn't that game. And the proper adjustments have to be made. While we can hypothesize(correctly) that our villains are calling our 3bet super wide here. That doesn't mean we should just auto donate our stack to one of the lucky bastards on the flop. We also can't give up either. So we basically have put ourselves in a very tough spot.


Given stack size, This is a flat PF. Or a shove PF

Flatting allows us to either target the flops which are great for our hand or fold cheaply when we miss.

Shoving allows us to get it in when we r fairly certain we r good. ( odds are we just scoop the pop as is which is a great result). and also allows us to maximize our equity by seeing all 5 cards if called.

One final thing about live donkeys. They love big multiway pots and feeling priced in with speculative holdings. When you go to 3bet and multiple players have called the first raise you have to factor in what type of odds the 2nd player will face if the initial raiser calls. Say we r deeper. And you 3bet to 110. Now even if v1 calls v2 still has a big decision to make. And since you really can't 3bet more than half your stack. That's why I vote shove ! Sorry longer than I intended.

I appreciate the advice and I agree with what you're saying about making the proper adjustments online vs live. One piece of valuable information I left out is, the poker room I play at has a high hand bonus of $599 for quads or better. So basically people play any suited connectors or low pocket pairs just to see the flop trying to hit a high hand. It's really a great room for action. For example, I played tonight and was dealt AA and I 3bet an open from middle position and one player moved in with AJ and the player who opened the pot called his stack off of 40BB with 86. They both were drawing dead on the turn. SHIP IT!

Agree with the you played it fine / have to shove pre crowd, so don't have much to add there. But for a little perspective...

If you just call pre ant the flop had come K 3 5 or K d d, and you end up losing all of your chips, how angry are you that you didn't raise?

You got two lesser hands to call. Don't be too result-oriented, long term this is a +EV play.

so to answer your question, it appears you played it perfectly.

only thing I would consider is a bigger raise size. $60 is pot, so that's not bad, but given awkward stacks, I think you can safely go bigger and expect to get action. also, picking up $30 with AKo isn't terrible either.

I say 3bet a little bigger PF and shove the flop. Possibly checking and giving up if you don't peel an A or K on the turn.

Hmm but as others have said, shoving PF might be the best play given the stack sizes. We are certainly not folding PF. We've put in a large percent of our stack PF and when we don't hit our hand we feel gross about shoving or check-folding.

i don't get those who are advocating shoving here preflop. ... i mean, there's like $30 in the pot and you want to shove for $200ish? if OP was 50 BBs or less, yeah, i'd probably just shove it in the middle, but not for a full stack.

Lol @ repping over pairs in soft live 1-2 games and lol @ shipping $150 in on the flop with Ace high and a bdfd. You can pick such better spots in a soft game like this.

I just hate the idea of 3betting PF and getting the SPR on the flop to around 1:1 or less and then check/folding if we miss after we've put in close to 1/3 of our stack. Or shoving the flop and hoping for folds (although in most situations this is profitable). The reason I was advocating a shove PF is because of our weird position post flop, we have no maneuverability so we are playing fit or fold on the flop. I guess this is an excellent argument for planning hands around commitment and for NOT ALWAYS 3betting AKs/os ??

This is really, really bad thinking imo..

First and foremost, you usually have at least 25% equity here when somebody shoves. So if you bet anything more than $21, you are automatically priced into a calling a shove. (111 to win 336). So cbetting something like $80 and folding to a shove when you're getting 7.6:1 is hugely, hugely unprofitable; just setting $$ on fire imo.

Second, making such an unprofitable play as bet/folding when the pot odds dictate otherwise and then justifying it because you opponents aren't paying attention to pot odds is pretty lol.

Furthermore, shoving gives you maximum fold equity against any small pairs that might be able to find a fold while at the same time disguising your value hands (e.g. you're shoving all of your value hands also.)

Finally, the only reason to ever have a range for betting less than all-in here is to snap call a shove. e.g. if you think one of your opponents can check/shove something like AJ or QK here, you might bet less than allin to induce him to do that. But that won't be the case most of the time.

In summary, this is a felt or check situation. Finding a fold on this flop after it has been checked to you is not an option.