Before talking turns/actions, there are still 4 people yet to act, not to mention the UTG player who donked into 5 players. The hand is clearly difficult to navigate, with many scenarios before future action.

One scenario might be (after Hero flats) there is one more caller. So, 3-way to a non-heart turn. UTG checks, Hero could B/F 1/2 PSB.

Raising may accelerate the decision process, though it might not necessarily be the optimal choice.

Correct, but we’re still not “confident” of our hand then, even when others behind us fold and we go HU vs UTG. So the dilemma remains...

In general, calling bets when we aren't confidant in our hand (and we have a made hand) is a bad way to play poker. Raise or fold is better.

GG Gil this is the correct approach of course.

We flat and everyone folds behind us...I'm probably calling a brick turn and folding river if an old dude goes for 3 streets

We flat and it gets raised behind us...I think we can comfortably fold.

We flat and get called in one or more spots behind us...I am probably c/f turn unimproved unless I have strong read that someone behind is getting out of line.

I am confident enough to call with Hero's hand, see what happens, then go from there.

UTG lead into 5 players with a 40% PSB. From my experience, KK+ less likely than QQ/77/33/FD. Totaling those combos are at best 50/50. Imho, too thin to raise for value.

why aren't you confident in your hand?

Fact: No one calls behind us more than a third of the time. This leaves us in position against a flop donk better with a range that's heavy with Qx.

Fact: We get just one caller more 40%. So we'll be playing in between a donk better with lots of Qx, and a caller behind with lot's of flush draws.

See post #99 for the math behind both of these claims.

That covers more than 75% of the possible outcomes. Both seem like pretty straightforward, +EV, easy-to-navigate poker hands.

Why no confidence?

Also Mike, haven't you been the one clamoring for "proof" that calling is better. You got it. Now we're falling back on "in general.....". I don't get it man.

Anyway, now it's you're turn. Show your work and prove that raising is better.

Let's range UTG and calling ranges behind us as the hand progresses rather than just talk about our confidence.

UTG should be pretty strong here. Old guy leading into the field he should have sets, AQ, KQ, QJs, maybe some weaker suited Q. I guess there is a small chance he has an overpair

Continuing ranges behind us should be similar with added draws. The strongest of those draws are not folding 45hh, etc. So we fare better against continuing ranges than we do against UTG

However, if we raise their continuing ranges obv shrink and include only the hands that rate to fare extremely well against AQ here.

So let;s keep the weaker part of their continuing range in the hand and not isolate on the strongest parts of their ranges.

Our hand is above average but not by a lot on this board. If everyone had $500 stacks we still should not be committing here. The fact that others have $1k stacks effective should provide further pause.

Sure, i can do that.

Is it any particular scenarios you want to know my opinion on? Any spesific turncards like if the flushdraw comes in? Its a myriad of different scenarios that can come up regarding the amount of villains and amount of turn cards, so its gonna be alot to cover if you dont have any spesific suggestions.

I am not assuming every decision gets correct later on, thats was not what i wrote either-so trying to twist it that way is kind of a strawman argument by you.What i did say is that the odds of us (me if i put myself in OPs shoes) making more correct decisions is bigger later on in the hand when we have accumulated more information than we have on the flop with players left to act behind us. The likelyhood is alot higher for us to make correct decisions later on in the hand if we feel we have an edge on the field.

For example does most players play very honestly on the turn in spots like this when the pot is quickly growing, where the bets that goes in will take us towards a stackoff. A good amount of players will simply slow down and check with a draw or bet a small amount to give themself a good price for drawing. If they are nutted like a set, they will often come out bombing the turn with a big bet in order to try get the stacks in. Also many players gives off body language tells, tells regarding how they put in the chips, or a certain energy when they are nutted and betting big on the turn- wich is personally important for me to get to see before making a difficult decision. Basically i am looking to be 100 percent focused towards betting patterns,betsizing correlated to likely hand strength and the unbalanced nature of our villains to try and pick up anything i can.

Giving ourself a chance to make a better more precise decision by getting such information before we put in significant money is essential to me in spots like this.

I cant prove raising is better. In fact the more I think about this hand I think folding is best. Everyone's style is different. My style doesnt have me calling bets very often at all unless Im pretty sure Im ahead and I think calling will get more value later in the hand than raising.

Based on Samo's range for UTG that has him ahead of us 50% of the time and behind us 50% of the time...and your "fact" that someone else calls behind us around 33%, I dont see us being in a great position.

Its a high variance hand for sure. That much we know. The rest is up for debate.

Mike, i dont think flat out folding the flop is very bad either considering all factors. An unexperienced liveplayer or a not comfortable postflopplayer would probably be best of by folding the flop here, just to avoid all potenial big errors on later streets due to the lack of experience.

If i had KQ here instead of AQ i would possibly actually lean towards folding right here on the flop.

AQ is likely too strong though, and would justify that i try to navigate through the hand, but i aggree with your main point of this being a complexe spot.

That's this hand. That's right now, we're pretty sure we're ahead and think calling will get more value. Even if we stipulate that we're 50/50 against the donk lead, there's money in the pot so we're very much +EV there.

And against a hand that would over-call, which are mostly flush draws, we're +EV there.

That covers more than 75% of possible outcomes from calling. They're +EV. Very much so. So there simply is no viable argument for folding. Just none. If you're gonna open that debate, then you need to cite something compelling and concrete. The fact that it doesn't fit a chosen "style" isn't really a good start.

Like I said earlier, Snowie shows calling and raising to both be -EV. It shows raising to be worse.

Having said that, multiway pots in live poker with a variety of playing styles and skill levels will never be solved so I take Snowie with a grain of salt. Just something to ponder.

Citation? Who's snowie?

Its an artificial intelligence GTO computer program.

Then I presume it produces some sort of output that you could post here.

Yea, I'd like to see Snowie results. Is this tool something I should have?

I really enjoyed this thread, I think it illustrates clear divisions in different sets of winning poker strategy and the logic behind them. The thing Snowie will undoubtedly be missing is how players adjust to each other.

My friend has the program, not me. I dont fully understand the ins and outs of it, but I texted him the hand and he said that it showed calling the $65 to be a -5.21BB error (which is huge) and raising to be a -7.42BB error so it thinks raising is worse than calling and a fold is correct. Im leaning towards agreeing that folding is best. Most of us know the bread and butter situations where we make our money. This isn't one of them.

Again, Snowie is a GTO program that plays millions of simulations against other GTO players. We dont play against GTO players, or even good ones most of the time so there are tons of times I disagree with Snowie in the real world.

In a HU situation Snowie is very good although Im not 100% sold that its recommendations are always best against our live donks. Multiway...maybe not so much.

That's a hell of a citation Mike.

Think about what this is saying. -5.21 BB is $26. Let's run some rudimentary EV calcs and see what it would take for us to lose $26 on this call.

Assume for now that no one calls behind. We're just calling 65 into a pot that currently has 215. In order to lose $26 on that play, we would have to lose the $65 86% of the time. Meaning, if we have more than 14% equity here....then snowie is full of ****.

If we give the donk bettor a range of just sets, KhQh, and one other combo of KQ, we get to 16% equity.

We can go through the rest of the scenarios if you want, but there's just no way this snowie thing is working properly.

LOL, so after two optimistic cases out of the tons of scenarios you're ready to say "no way"? What if there's one raise behind? What if there's one call behind? What if there is multiple action behind? If you're willing to back that assertion up as you say, I'm willing to read it...

Does snowie calculate implied odds of future losses in this call?
Like if GTO, does it play the whole hand out?
That might be why???

Agreed, discussion could be a LITTLE less heated, but very informative.

I believe post #99 answers most of your questions.

There aren't "tons" of scenarios.

35% of the time, no one calls behind us. I've already outlined the math of that scenario. And that represents more than a third of all possible scenarios.

Another 40+% of the time, we get one caller behind us. (Again see post #99 for explanation of this). In that instance we would need 65/345 = 19% equity to break even. I don't think I need to go further down this road. I can't fathom realistic ranges for both villains that leave us with less than 19%.

So that's more than three quarters of what you've described as "tons" of scenarios. In any scenario where someone raises behind us...fold. We're toast.

In scenarios with more than 1 caller, we're probably approaching break-even equity situations. This isn't great, but it's far less frequent than other scenarios, and it's not catastrophic. It's more than made up for by the +EV illustrated above.

Where are you coming up with these percentages? Did you forget OP said this guy was in the hand?
"20s euro dude, weird bet sizing splashy, played 2 hours, reloaded twice 1000"
That alone seems like > 40% chance of one caller behind. Standard spot for splashy spaz IME. I guess we just ran into that 25% of times where there's a raise behind us here? Still quite a stretch for me to say "no way" but it's possible you're correct.

I cited my source TWICE in that post man. All the math is in post #99.

Look man, you can point to anecdotal stuff like this all day long. Give that player a pre-flop calling range. Name all the hands in that range, and count them up. Let's call that total R (range).

Now from that range, select the hands that will continue past the flop. Count them up. Let's call that R2.

Then, just do the math. (1-R2)/R = Frequency of that guy folding.

You can do this for all four players behind us, and then calculate how often you'll continue against 1, 2, 3, or 4 players.

I've done this in post #99.

I didn't say that there would be a raise 25% of the time. I said 25% of the time we'll get more than one player behind us continuing. Getting raised is far less likely than 25%

Snowie doesn’t have a live read on utg range. If it assumes that utg 65 is a GTO action then the range may be tight and nutted, hence my AQ drops significantly in value.

If however snowie assigns a range weighted to AQ KQ QJ and all flush draws, in a nonstandard pre non GTO utg range that includes all three gappers down to 36s and perhaps T9o, then we’re getting closer to rl.

Cliffs: I’d like to know snowie range for utg 65 lead

Im not an expert on Snowie at all and I do disagree with it quite a bit, but I do know that it assigns a very tight range for an UTG player because it has run millions of simulations and clearly playing very tight UTG is best. The problem is that we know not everyone does that.