Late night game. Mostly unknown players. Just got moved to this table.

BB is middle age Asian guy. Never seen him in the card room before.

BB has about $800
Hero has $650

2 limpers. Hero makes it $20 on button with AQ
BB calls. 2 limpers call.

Flop is A95 ($81)
Checked to hero. Hero bets $50. Only BB calls.

Turn is T ($181)
BB checks. Hero bets $120. BB thinks for a minute and calls.

River is 4 ($420)
BB checks. Hero bets $200

Feel a little bit dicey. AJ is def a snap check back. If the T were a low card I'd go for the value, but he might hero fold some weak Ax like A2/A3/A6-A8.

I think it's fine though, def not a super +EV spot. AK def tripling off.

Nh wp

Can this V call three streets with a weak Ace? OP says he’s an unknown. Readless I’m checking behind as all draws have whiffed. We’re blocking weak Aces, many logical FDs and straight draws too. Perhaps I’m leaving value in the table but something doesn’t make sense here. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten 3 streets from a weak Ace in 1/3.

Very nice. I may have sized river at $150-165 but I love going for three streets here.

I think I might have sized a little smaller on all streets to keep a weak ace in, but I’m not mad at your play either. NH, hope you took it down.

I'm not fond of the preflop result (bloated pot with a hand that is unlikely to make anything better than one pear) but it's sometimes difficult getting anything else. At least we have position.

I'm fine with flop.

I'm either/or on turn. We're ahead of draws but we're ahead of very few other hands that will consider possibly calling down this bet with the risk of a river bet behind. Against face up players who never get out-of-line, betting to fold is fine. Against trickier players checking back is ok to setup a river bluffcatcher.

By the river, we'd better hope we're up against the worst player in the room once we raise preflop, cbet 4ways, and barrel the runout to get paid off by worse when we're repping AK and actually have worse. Is this guy the worst player in the room?

Gthispotishugeforourverymediocrehand,imoG

I think betting this river is super thin. Will V call with AJ or A8? Many players won't call the turn with it, let alone the turn and river, especially with the ace on board being part of the flush draw. If the A wasn't a diamond and the 9 was a diamond, then V could easily have a pair of aces with the NFD.....but even then, will V call a river bet with Ace-rag and a bricked FD?

Sometimes you may get AK to fold the river, but otherwise you're never folding out a better hand. So checking the river is the correct play.

I like the turn bet, but I think it's too big. I think you only need to bet about $90. That would price out a flush draw.

Don't care for the sizing of the turn or river bet, what are we doing here if he shoves on us? We put 60% of our stack in already with Top Good Kicker against an unknown.

I'm checking behind here.

What would we do on this river if we had KdQd?
This is a clear valuebet otr, AINEC. We can probably go bigger as well.

I'd bet smaller on the flop though, around 30-35. Specially when we block the Qd.

I'd actually size down the turn just a touch -- and the river -- but the hand is basically played fine.

It might be a value bet, but regarding the "clear" and "AINEC", I'm not so convinced. I'd rather jam trying to fold T9 than "value bet" when I'm not sure at all I'm ahead and this guy so far has no fold button.

What's the point of H leaving 200 behind? Just jam it in and get the full benefit of FE if V has vulnerable two-pair combos. Also, it looks bluffier to his weak Aces.

If he has a busted combo flush, something like KdJd/8d7d, he's always mucking. Heaven forbid he has 3d2d....

I prefer to check behind, but jamming is better than a value bet here I think.

I'm in the camp that we bet this three streets, but smaller. He probably has AJ and tons o suited aces.

Particularly on the river, I don't like $200 even. There's a reason stores sell stuff for $9.99.

These arguments are silly. AJ or Ax are not inelastic between a bet size of $3 and a shove. They have a calling frequency of 100% at $3 that decreases as the bet gets larger. The goal is to find the bet size that results in the highest calling frequency at the greatest amount.

Cant imagine any thing we beat except for AJ and A3/A2 as people rarely limp call A8-A6 these days unless they are fish.

Sizes seem a bit too big if this hand is in our bet 3x range. If we wanna go bet bet bet I'd rather be around half pot on turn and river.

What would you suggest we do on the preflop?

There's no clear cut answer, imo. We could raise smaller to bloat the pot less. We could raise much larger to attempt to have a better chance at narrowing the field (but unless our raise size starts approaching "unreasonable" I'm not convinced this actually works). We could overlimp (insta-ban, amirite?).

I mean, the "standard" here is to definitely do as we've done, and I definitely can't hate on it too much especially in position (I often do it myself in real time at the table). But I've always been of the opinion (it's one of the few constants I've had in my strategy over the years, for better or worse) that the only point of a preflop raise is to thin the field (with possibly the sole exception being if stacks are all short and we're fine committing with TP in a bloated multiway pot). I actually think there is almost no reason to ever want to intentionally bloat the pot multiway with any hand (including AA) unless we are super confident that we are much better than our opponents postflop (which I'm not terribly confident of, tbh, so if you are then you might be a lot finer with this result). The overwhelming vast majority of the time we'll make a hand that wants a small pot, and yet thanks to preflop that will be very difficult to accomplish now (plus if we have an nitty image our range might be exposed a little; the less nitty image you have, the less you care about that). So if the pot is very likely to go very multiway, I typically wait until postflop to decide if I want to attempt to build the pot large (which I'll very rarely want to do). Very few people (if any) will agree with this idea, but that's how I look at the game.

GfullyexpectingnoonetoagreewiththatideaG

So let me address. There's many reasons why we want to make raises preflop

1) It gives us a chance to win immediately. This is a better generalization than to thin the field, because it's completely ok to take the money that's already out there. And yes, it does thin the field which is also something we like to do; it's a lot easier to take a hand to war versus 1 opponent than 3-4.

2) It charges people when their ranges are behind our holding. Example: say someone has ATo. He's willing to play ATo for as much as $30 here. If we make it anything less than $30, we are making a suboptimal play because we clearly want to put more money in right now to maximize our value.

3) It gives us a better chance to win a huge pot. Let's take the hypothetical scenario from above. Some guy limps ATo and we elect to overlimp AQo rather than make the big raise necessary to maximize a HU scenario or make a raise that doesn't clean up hands that limped in. We flop an ace (pretend it's a board where AQ is a clean top pair, like A84 or something). By keeping the pot small preflop, we are very unlikely to win a large pot off of AT. But by making it more, his stack is now in peril, especially if we get to reduce the SPR to below, like 5.

4) We have position: This is ultra important. Yes often times, we don't like the board and he continues. But because we were the aggressor preflop and have position, we can often see all 5 cards if we'd like to.

Example: We raise the limpers with AQo and one guy calls. Flop is K74 and he calls a cbet. Seems likely he either has a pair that isn't folding many turns, or has a draw around the 7 and 4 that we beat anyway. Turn is now a T. We can check back and try to hit the card we need to beat him. If we overlimp, he maybe bets the flop and we just fold: we lose a lot less $ sure, but we also never get a chance to win and potentially win a huge pot. And even against a hand as strong as KJs w/ BDFD (that we don't block), AQo has 12.1% equity on the K74r flop. Having stronger ranges and realizing all of your equity is a way to print money.

^^^^ I'll just address some of these point form:

- overall, raising actually has very little effect on how many people see a flop; if you think a raise has a good chance at thinning the field or stealing the pot preflop, then I'm all for it; the problem is, it just doesn't; this hand is a perfect example; the raise, at best, limited the field to 4way instead of perhaps 5way (i.e. eliminating the SB) which is virtually moot (and it mostly just targeted a very small subset of SBs hands which were in a very inbetween area of willing to see a flop for $2 more but not $18 more)

- I agree that position is ultra important, and so if we are going to build bloated multiway pots then I can't hate too much on doing it in position versus OOP; although, interestingly enough, in this hand we didn't utilize our position at all regarding pot control (as we bet both the flop and turn and now look like we're considering a river bet)

- it's not as simple as saying we'd like to charge ATo $30 to see a flop when we have AQo because the benefit of that (for very small percentages of our overall stack) is going to diminish quickly to the drawback of seeing a flop with a bunch of other players who can now make us play for the remaining huge percentages of stacks trivially postflop thanks to the low SPR (which me mostly rarely want to do)

- I absolutely agree that if we can get it HU against ATo with a low committing SPR that is a dream spot (and heck, even HU with a large SPR is fine too, but this goes back to my original thinking that the only point of a preflop raise is to thin the field); the problem is that with a $650 stack it is highly unlikely we're going to be able to do that, and now the problems of going multiway to small SPRs with a hand that rarely wants to build a big pot postflop begin to outweigh it

It's just my (perhaps) muddled thoughts on the matter.

Gyou'reallowedtodisagreewiththem,mostdoG

Sorry but this is flat out wrong. In a reductio ad absurdum, if we were to go all in, we would likely see very few people who are willing to see a flop. There exists a breaking point and just because the breaking point is large, doesn't mean we shouldn't go for it. If they're willing to call 20 bb raises with a huge range, we should be happy to oblige it with AQo.

Given that it's a defensible value bet and could even be standard against particular stationy opponents, I'm not sure why this is an issue.

That's fine. I'm not sure why you don't think that's fine. Let's appeal to the extremes again: if 4 people offered to go all in blind and you had AQo, would you oblige? You should, you're going to win over 30% of the time when investing 20% of the money. This is a common scenario in 100 bb stack PLO, where there's a raise to like 3.5 bb and 4 callers and you bomb it to 25.5 bb from the small blind with aces anticipating that everyone will call and that you'll hold often enough to jam the rest in when the SPR is like 0.6 on all but the most cancerous of flops.

That's an argument for the raise itself being sized improperly, not that we shouldn't make the raise to begin with. We go back to #1 where we say that if we aren't getting the situation we want because the price is too good for people to call, then we charge then more, not less. 7x maybe doesn't work against the limpers. Maybe next time we try 10x. Then 12x. Lowering the SPR is generally good when we have the better hand.

Also, LLSNL, threads like this are way more helpful to your win rate than "omg I flopped a set and the turn put 3 to a straight on board and the loose passive fish check raised all in what should I do?" threads. Being able to nail value bets on the river is huge and while I'm not sure if this value bet is working, I like that OP errs towards the side of going for it.

^^^^

- well, to clarify, I've always said that any "reasonable" raise has little effect on the number of people seeing a flop; so, yes, if you're making 20bb raises preflop then I'll admit that will likely make a difference; also, good luck having the best hand with AQo getting action to 20bb - shove raises sizes

- of course I'd love to get it all in with AQo preflop having an advantage over the calling ranges, or even setting up a spot where I setup a lol SPR < 1 with AA against multiple opponents, or even with a spot where everyone agrees to just check the hand down postflop; but that's not what we did here: we got in a *completely meaningless* 3% of stacks preflop with the ~favourite, which setup a situation where the remaining 97% could be played for postflop trivially thanks to SPR < 8 (where we'll mostly just have one pear)

- overall, it's simply a disagreement I have with the forum as a whole (and you're free to disagree, you really are), but the concept of raising slightly bigger to 5x vs 7x vs 10x or whatever is lolable at most LLSNL tables; it makes *no difference* to the amount of callers you will get (so long as the raise is not considered unreasonably large or unreasonably small), and often it just takes one first caller for the rest of the field to now figure they have odds to come along, all for lol meaningless 3% - 5% of stacks; heck, one strategy idea in deepstack poker is to actually raise the IO hands (like setmining pocket pairs, Axs, etc.) for this very reason (i.e. perfectly willing to take the worst of it for lol 3% of stacks preflop in order to easily get the best of it for the 97% of stacks postflop)

Gimo,andyou'refreetodisagreeG

You're just glossing over equity edge too much. It's not some sort of quadradic relationship where our EV goes down for awhile after 1 bb invested until a minima, where we proceed to skyrocket in EV until we hit our maximum at X where X is the size of our stack. The relationship is going to be far more linear.

If reasonable raises aren't accomplishing our goal when we have a good hand, we should make unreasonable raises. I love TPTK in shallow SPR situations. Remember that one of the biggest plusses of thinning the field is generating a bunch of dead money while retaining an equity edge against fewer players.

^ This. I mean I am curious to what he actually had because how does he call your turn bet here with a hand that loses. I mean maybe he had A/J and didn't think through that there was nothing he could beat in your range until the river card came but honestly I can't widen his range much beyond that unless he had K9 or similar.

I'd go maybe 1/2 pot ($90) on the turn and then perhaps another $90 on the river but overall nice hand and well played. The smaller bet sizing is strictly just to get calls from the weaker ace.

In response to the replies that say "what do you do if he raises..." well.. you fold. IMHO, you bet thin for value here and fold to aggression.