Just wanted to get opinions on how you guys would play this hand. What you would do differently or wouldn't?

1/3 NL Effective stacks around 500

Villain- early 30's don't have any reads on him as I just table changed to this table after mine broke. He doubled up about 30 mins ago after going all in with AK. Has around 500

Hero- I have been at the table for a little under an hour. Have had a couple of strong hands that I have raised and 3bet pre but nothing has gone to show down yet. I am sitting on about 700.

Villain is utg+2 and opens to 12 which is fairly small because the table standard has been 18+. Folds around to the button who calls. Sb folds, I am in the big blind and look down at QQ and make it 40 to go. Villain calls, button folds. Pot 91.

Flop comes Ks10c4d. I lead out for 50. Villain insta calls. Pot 191.

Turn is 6s. I reach for chips then pause and decide to check with intent to check call if he bets. Villain thinks and decides to check back. Pot 191.

River a 2d. I reach for chips again with the intent to bet out about 60 but notice villain counting his chips to call as a I am counting so I decide to check. He then pulls back the 60 he counted and decides to make it 100. I call.

What do you guys think about the hand? Thought on how the streets were played.

I think you made the right call. I'm guessing he had AJ.

The small bet preflop was him saying "ehhhh I got a pretty hand, but I don't like it in early position."

His snap call on the flop indicates a drawing hand, because people like to snap call with drawing hands.

He checked back the turn, because he had nothing.

On the river he pretended to let you know ahead of time that he was going to call you to try to prevent you from betting so he could bluff.

Just my wild guess and a lot of people who post after me might bash me on my stupid analysis, but oh well.

He had AK, and Im done with the hand after he calls the flop unless I improve.

Being in BB with this hand, and the early position of original raiser I likely 3! A little more to say $50-55. Not crazy about the K on the flop, but with only one over, I lead flop for 80% of pot. Once he calls flop and doesn't re-raise I think I lead non A/K turns for about the same bet as flop to see if he spazzes or he could give it up at this point. As played once he checks back turn I am betting the river for thin value. As played I am snapping off his river bet. And definitely making him show first to build a read on him, what did his little "chip play" on the river really mean, and can we use this read again to pwn him?!

River spot is player dependent so without any reads...check calling turn and river is the safe route. LAG player....you played it fine. Tight passive player...you should be betting out $120-$140 on river...

How do we have no reads after 30 mins? That is a huge part of poker and is probably a way bigger problem than play in any individual hand.

Really without any reads it is just random button clicking but when he calls a 3 bet pre and calls 50 on the flop we are not beating the range of most players in the 1/2 pool.

The same goes for the river.

3-bet should be 40 more, not 40 all day! Taking down the pot preflop with QQ when OOP is not a bad result at all so I would not lay such appetizing odds for villains to come along in position.

Flop I would probably b/f for around 70-75. I could range the opponent much more effectively by the river with a bigger bet otf.

Turn is a standard c/f.

On river, it's tough to tell because your hand is a little bit under-repped here. You've checked on back to back streets, so he could easily be betting for value with a lesser hand like JJ/Tx or even like 99-77. He could also be airballing here with something like AJ/AQ/QJ, although you having two queens takes quite a bit of wind out of that sail. He could also have AK/KQ/KJ or a slowly played nutty hand. With this many possibilties, I think you probably have to call and see what is going on.

Overall, I think the undersized 3-bet exacerbated by the undersized flop bet led to a tough river decision where the action on previous streets had done little to define your opponent's range and now has left you completely lost in the hand and calling down 100 bucks on a guess.

Yeah, but the benefits of accurately ranging him don't come close to outweighing the cost of putting in a bunch of extra money when behind. This is basically the "raise for info" line which is almost never valid.

How did he get it all in with AK on the previous hand? That is very important information for interpreting his actions on this hand. For example, was it a 4- or 5-bet preflop shove? If so, then we can pretty much take out the stronger part of his range here. If it was calling down three streets on a K-high rainbow board, then we should be snap-folding.

Also, why did you bet the flop? Because I think most players (subconscious)reasoning for betting here is pretty awful. They are basically scared of being bluffed.

While checking the flop may be best, betting a higher amount is surely an improvement over betting a smallish amount that does nothing but balloon the pot without giving the hero much guidance as to how to play the rest of the hand. I would rather bet 25 more OTF and easily c/f the river than bet too small and end up calling off a hundred OTR.

Thirty minutes is nothing--maybe 15 hands, in which time an average villain might have played less than a handful of nondescript hands. Relying on "reads" here may be worse than having no reads.

Sent from my BNTV400 using 2+2 Forums

May be worse or is worse?

If you mean we will sometimes make a worse decision based on a bad read than if we were readless I completely agree.

However that doesn't mean that our average decision isn't better with limited reads that readless, therefore not using them = bad.

I really strongly believe you can pick up a tonne of info very quickly in a live environment through a combo of action and talk/appearance etc.

Oh, and we've been there an hour.

3! more pre. cbet flop. c/f turn and river. but really it is V dependent.

Can anybody explain why c-betting here is so standard and good?

To me the two main benefits seem to be denying hands with 3/7 outs their equity and narrowing ranges.

In other words

1. Betting to protect your equity
2. Betting to find out where we are at.

Both of these concepts are frequently ridiculed many posters but somehow don't seem to apply to flop cbets.

I'd argue that one thing at play is that online it would be a standard cbet (I think, don't play full ring online) because balance is sooooooooooooooooooooooooo much more important.

I might just flat preflop, flame away. We're going to be OOP to a guy we don't seem to have much of a handle on, so I'm not thrilled about building a hugenormous pot in this spot. We're getting deepish, so preflop hand values start going down and it's more about postflop. We're going to only go 3way to the flop (which is fine for a TP hand). There's not exactly a crapload of dead money in the pot. And it's still facing an EP raise, where getting 4bet here would suck. I see a flop for a mere 2.4% of effective stack and try to figure out if there's real money to be made postflop. But I'm passive like that.

I check the flop. A bunch of hands that raise/call preflop have now moved in front of us (AK/KQ-/TT). The board isn't particularly drawy. This is pretty close to WA/WB here (is a worse hand really calling, or a better hand folding?). I guess a bet could simply end things here and we can drag this large pot and move on, but meh. I check/evaluate.

Once our flop bet is called, I've kinda given up. I like the check on the turn. For anyone who can read tells, I usually only use the fake-stack-chips-as-if-I-want-to-bet as a reverse tell when I actually have a monster; don't do that, imo.

River I find tricky. Without better reads, it's difficult. Could he turn JJ/99 into a bluff or think he's betting them for value? For me a lot of this comes back to preflop: I don't like playing big pots OOP to someone I don't have a solid handle on (unless I can comfortably set up a stack off situation postflop).

GcluelessNLnoobG

To above poster: I actually wouldn't mind flatting if button hadn't called initial raise. If we were guaranteed to be HU, under-repping can be quite profitable if he hits top pair against our overpair. But in this case, I strongly prefer to be HU rather than first to act in a 3 way pot.

C-betting is good for a few reasons:

1. Charge a price for a legitimate drawing hand to continue.
2. Extract value from a made hand.
3. Allows you to worry less about the stranger "drawing" hands in his range later on in the hand; in this case, a 99 that gets a free card makes a hand on the turn that we have a hard time putting villain on. Of course this would be an even greater predicament if we had a bigger hand ourselves.

The most important piece of info we're missing here is villain's preflop raising range from EP. All we know is that he made a smallish raise and flat called a 3bet, flatcalled a KT4r flop, checked behind on a 6s turn, and bet 1/2 pot on a 2d river.

We can break his range down as follows:

a) Hands that beat us:
1. AK. I think I discount this hand a little bit given his line, esp if he had jammed with it to double up in a previous spot. I think a lot of players raise for value in this spot on the flop or at least bet something on the turn for value.
2. KQ. A possibility, but card removal for our QQ makes this 50% less likely (there are 6 combos available rather than 12). Again, checking behind on the turn makes this less likely as our turn check signals to him that we probably can't beat top pair.
3. KJ. Seems to be the most likely K that takes this line.
4. K9-K2. A pretty bad play for UTG + 2.
5. AA. Doesn't make a lot of sense preflop for him to call a 3bet and then hope for button to fold, unless he just likes 3 way pots with a guy to act behind him.
6. KT. If he hasn't been making a lot of EP raises then we can probably discount this quite a bit. Very player dependent. Would also be very strange for him not to bet the turn.
7. TT/44. Plausible for flop, since these hands prefer to call the 3bet from the blinds and see a flop and then might slow play for deception. However, sets don't happen too often, and they definitely should be betting the turn.
8. T4. Unlikely if he's sober. This would be a cooler.
9. 64s. Plausible if he has this big of a pf raising range. On the flop he calls thinking that he's ahead of AQ and that he has 5 outs plus a backdoor flush draw if he is behind, and then hits bingo on the turn. Also a cooler.

b) Made hands that we beat:
1. AT. Surprised no one has mentioned this yet, because it fits his line pretty well. Smallish raise for a smaller ace, calls a 3bet, then, "Oh, I've got a piece, so I should probably call," on flop. Unwilling to put money in on turn, but after river check starts to think that he beats 99/88/77 and goes for thin value.
2. JTs/T9s. Same general logic as above; depends on whether he likes to raise from EP with these sort of holdings.
3. QT. Less likely to be out there because of card removal and the fact that it's a poor hand to raise from UTG+2, but villain dependent.
4. JJ. Seems somewhat plausible to me. Doesn't love flop, but knows he's ahead of AQ and smaller pairs. By river starts to think he's good and can extract value from 99/88/77.
5. 99/88/77. Less likely, since these hands should want a showdown. They can't get value against AQ, and probably can't push off any hands that they beat unless we had overplayed a hand like AT.
6. 54s/43s. If he's loose enough to make this pf raise in UTG+2, then he could call flop thinking he's ahead of AQ and he has 5 outs plus a backdoor flush draw. Sees weakness on turn and river and decides to try and push off QQ/99/88/77.

c) Draws that didn't get there and bluff after sensing weakness:
1. AQ. With overcard and gutshot this hand doesn't mind continuing for a 1/2 pot bet on the flop. As stated previously, less likely due to card removal.
2. AJ. Same reasoning as above.
3. QJs. Depends a lot on whether he likes to make raises with this hand in UTG+2; again, card removal makes it less likely.
4. J9s. Again, depends on how wide his pf raising range is. This hand doesn't have an overcard but may still see the gutshot and think, "Implied odds ftw."

Overall, I think check/call is a good line for the river when he bets 1/2 pot. You only need to win 1/3 of the time and I think you do so rather easily against his range. For what it's worth, I think he holds AK/KQ/KJ or some other hand that beats us about 40% of the time, thinks AT is good against 99/88/77 and bets for thin value 30% of the time, and bluffs with a missed draw the other 30% of the time.

There's not exactly a lotta draws out on this board. Gutshots are ~10.5:1 to hit, and smaller pocket pairs are on a ~22:1 shot; we're worried about those?

And are we looking to extract 3 postflop streets worth of value from worse hands? Are there worse hands that we can extract 3 postflop streets worth of value from? If not, we're probably better off checking the flop, keeping the pot smaller, showing weakness, and possibly getting a street or two of value later.

GcluelessNLnoobG

AQ and QJ have 7 outs and 8 outs respectively; do you think we never see those hands in this spot? What about Ts with backdoor combos? I think his preflop range has more than just Ks, so there is value to be extracted here.

I'm not sure where you're pulling 3 streets of value from my post. I don't mind the line of b, k, k/c. Where are you getting that?

Fair enough, there are some gutshot/over combos.

We're not guaranteed a check thru on the turn, and now thanks to the flop bet we're potentially playing 3 streets worth of betting (for stacks). Admittedly, a flop check doesn't guarantee a check back either, but at least it has a chance at keeping the pot small (whereas a bet guarantees the pot gets large).

AT, JJ, KQ/J at river seem most likely, I'd call.

I would add a fourth reason for this particular hand. We don't want to go more than one street of value here with an unknown at 1/3. (It would be different at a 3-5 table or in Vegas.) C/c underreps our hand and villain may blow us off ours w/ J-x or low pp's if he perceives us as weak or drawing.

Think of it this way. Villain has one of three hands:
1) K-x or better, which beat us and may bet for 2 or three streets of v,
2) J-x and low pp's, which we beat and will check the turn and river if V thinks we might have a king. (V probably will perceive these as bluff catcher hands if we bet the flop.)
3) air.

The flop hits our perceived range. If we bet 3/4 pot, we should fold out air against the vast majority of 1/3 non-Vegas opponents. A majority of 1/3 opponents will also check the turn and river with bluff catchers after we put a little fear into them on the flop. The stronger hands will bet, and we should mitigate the damage by folding our mediocre hand.

(Vegas is different b/c each table contains a much larger mix of villains who don't know how to value hands and pro's who know how to bluff.)

I thought this was a solid and detailed response. I agree the 3 bet needed to be much larger, maybe even 50 more due to the button calling. How it was played I say it's a very tough river decision. I think the chip angle makes this a call, could be very useful info later on in the session plus like mentioned above we are beating all bluffs and a few value betting hands. I'd be willing to say its a profitable call in the long run. New to actually posting on 2p2 so I could use any feed back as well. Thx & gl

55 or 60 pre, check flop

QQ is almost a hand to play for "set value" for early position but I agree your pre-flop 3 bet was to small. Without knowing V, the smaller than normal raise pre was more like a value bet so I would put him on a strongish starting hand that could include a K and you're still FTA for the rest of the hand. I fold this hand pretty easily.