I'm confused. Isn't this the opposite of GTO? Aren't you advocating for an exploit?

Regardless of what venice10 said, personally this is the perfect GTO river decision for me. I checked turn specifically for GTO defense, which means I need to find a lot of calls on a river shove, regardless of what the opponent is doing. I'm already snapping off diamonds, Aces, and Queens, and had decided to stack off on bricks like 2s,3s,4s, board pairing 5s,8s,and 9s. So, I already have plenty of calls here. In that sense, Ks, Js and Ts are the worst cards for my calling range.

Anyway thank you all for your responses. I agree mostly that I could have taken a different line on the flop. I think almost everyone says that this is a fold on the river as played. I agree with that as well.

So now onto the results:
Hero agonized over the decision and came to the same conclusion and folded because it was an offsuit K on the river, reasoning that more of his bluffs got there.

Villain of course flips over A8 in my face.

Ding ding ding. This is something basically all LLSNL players worry about way too much. Draws aren't large percentages of people ranges in 90% of situations. It should not be at the top of our list for reasons to do something.

I cbet around 50% of flops (at least that's what my online stats were) which is on the lower end for winning players even for online play and like 45% less than standard live regs. Live players play terribly vs checks. Worse than vs bets, especially large bets (large bets are generally easier to play well against than small bets)

Keep pots small on dynamic draw heavy boards that will have nut/positional equity changing turns and rivers. You take a few more beats but your win rate will benifit a lot. You're variance will also drop dramatically

I'm not fond of building big pots preflop when there is a very good chance I'll be OOP and deep to a difficult player. I would limp/evaluate, and I actually think it is fine to nitty fold this hand in EP if I'm often going to be put in a difficult situation.

We're cbetting 80% of the time here regardless of whether we hit 4ways? That's torching money, imo. With this difficult guy in position on me, I think I check/evaluate (almost always continuing unless big action breaks out behind me). I'm mostly looking to underrep and get to showdown for as cheap as possible.

Turn is really gross cuz a bunch of draws get there and Villain showed huge strength by calling the flop cbet with 2 others still to react behind him (he can't just willy nilly float anything here). I would actually strongly consider check/folding at this point.

I don't get to the river, but I fold if I do.

Overall, I really just try aim to get myself in better spots. Difficult spots are... difficult, and I think it is a good strategy to simply attempt to avoid them.

GcluelessNLnoobG

I mean, not to be results oriented, but do you think someone described as the best player in the casino is going to take that line with a single pair King? Especially if he thinks you are weaker than you are given your action. It's always the question of what action does he want from you, and the way the hand plays out, it's very unlikely he has sets or two pairs. And the way you played, it is very unlikely you have a straight or flush, and you block a lot of his flushes that might have gotten there at the turn.

I think you kneecapped yourself and your range with the check turn, and he realized it. Despite the king, and not as a rule in general but in this particular hand, I really don't see how you call turn and fold river, especially when you yourself say you want V to bluff at turn.

I am going to ignore the part of you suggesting AQo is a fold pre, and just focus on the bolded. No, they aren't. If your strategy is to play as low variance as possible and never improve...fine. But that is awful advice to avoid hard decisions if the goal is to get better at poker. They will find you.

And you are welcome to just throw variance to the win and nut peddle, but at that point, you are better off playing blackjack and trying to get your 21s and double on 11s

It’s GG, this is just him manufacturing reasons as to why he has the magic postflop skills to play a limp strat, even though somehow everyone else at the table can profitably cold call raises with Q8o, but he can’t.

Position and skill are things, right? Villain owned everyone in this thread thanks to having it (although his flop float with others behind is insane). I've decided I'm not going to do very well overall in spots like this, so I avoid it (or at the very least attempt to keep the pot small to limit the size of my mistakes when I realize I'm already going to have a handful of things working against me thru out the hand). Everyone else who has everything figured out can obviously do whatever they want, with anything, from anywhere, against anyone; me, I'm not that good to be able to do that.

GcluelesshowtowinmoneyplayingpokernoobG

They sure are. And the goal for most players is to get to a point in our game where we don't just fold any two when we aren't on the button.

Why are you strawmanning? Is there not a middle ground between raising Aces on the button or folding (or lol limping) AQo in EP? No one is saying you are wrong for not wanting to play Q5o into 1 raiser. We are just trying to figure out if this is a spot we can realize value and if this is a spot where we should be making more money. I personally think everything was fine until the turn. But I only have the information the op gave, and the river given the turn action was a mistake.

My belief is that one component of improving is doing better at recognizing spots that may not be profitable / learning that avoiding poor spots is actually a good thing.

GfullyawarethatisnotacoolanswerG

So your method of avoiding -EV plays is to limp instead of fold. You realize that makes no sense, right?

If something is -EV to play, why are you even playing it?

GG I don’t mean to pile on (or derail thread) but you have been an active participant here and obviously have been playing poker for years. You have over 30K posts.

You have never seemed to progress beyond a “trying not to lose” strategy. Even looser and more aggressive winning players do not necessarily advocate putting themselves in reverse implied odds, out of position, terribly difficult scenarios but you seem to avoid the slightest bit of discomfort like the plague.

Advocating folding a top 5% hand because you may end up playing poker without the nuts out of position is not helpful. If you prefer a low variance, nut peddling, only in position strategy you will not lose very much money but you are also leaving your self exploitable and certainly leaving value on the table. Feel free to continue this but it may be detrimental to recommend these strategies to others.

Agree with this. I also agree, let’s get back on topic and not derail this thread with more preflop limp bickering.

Agree and I want to add that I enjoy GG’s contributions for the most part and I had a tendency towards nittiness early on which has evolved so I’m hoping this will be helpful for him. Don’t mean to bicker or insult

Ok, so an attempt to get back on topic.

I'll let someone else breakdown our massive equity we had against this dood on each and every street. And yet we somehow managed to lose a bunch of $$$. Certainly some debate whether OP played it great postflop (especially on the flop), but I don't think too many of us think OP completely butchered it (fair?).

And that was in a case where our opponent had like almost no equity whatsoever on a lotta streets. Now just imagine the difficulty he puts us in when he actually does have some equity. Or the times he actually makes a better hand. Or we don't flop TP~TK (which, if we do make a hand, is typically the best one we'll make in most cases). Or it doesn't get HU after the flop. If we're losing this much $$$ here, how are we faring in the worst of times?

So I already play an admittedly tight range in EP; 77+/AQo+/ATs+/KQs. This is probably tighter than the range you typically play, and that's fair enough; we'll all have to decide for ourselves what we think is profitable for us in our game. But in this case here, I've got some extra information (a tough LAG in position, deep) that suggests that maybe I should considering lopping of the bottom end of my range preflop (which AQo is for me). Or (addressing JDR above) if I'm a little unsure of whether it is -EV versus +EV, if I don't want to fold I can take the conservative route and limp/evaluate; if it does turn out to be -EV, I'll be making much less of a mistake simply because I'm playing a much smaller pot (instead of bloating one massively like we did here and giftwrapping it to our opponent, which is clearly much more -EV).

ETA: And I didn't mean that post to suggest "we must/should fold preflop". All I'm suggesting is that folding is perfect fine. If you want to do something different, that's fine too, although you better have the skillz to back it up otherwise it isn't going to be nearly as profitable as you think it is (cuz "top 5% hand" quickly becomes much less meaningful due to position, deepness and skill).

GcluelessNLnoobG

Well, so much for getting on topic. Let me give it a try:

I think he completely butchered turn. I think without the Ad, checking here is fine. But I don't really think there is any balance here to checking. No flush, especially one without the nuts is going to risk checking down turn for a fourth diamond showing up. This is also against an aggressive player who based on description, knows how to bluff at scare cards, as is the case with this results. Imo, Hero completely capped himself here. V knew H never has a flush when turn checks in. And that's fine since hero himself is saying he is checking to induce a bet. The problem is that when you do this, V put you on exactly what you had: a single pair hand, and he is going to fire every river, blank or not.

Now, if this is the best player at the casino, he is going to have value here on occasion as well, but the question we fall back to is that are we going to be good here most of the time? Based on how bluffy V is described do we think 2nd pair is going to be good here more than 50% of the time, when most of the V's action was before the king shows up? I think the answer is yes, but you need the BR to ride the variance train.

If we don't make TPTK, we can check and fold when he bets. Does this answer change if we are in position and bets in to us? What about when the flop is QQQ, or AQ9r does our answer of how to play change as well?

No different than if we open AKs and the flop completely misses us, or QQ on an AK flop: We lose what we bet pre, and can usually keep ourselves from throwing the rest of our money into the abyss when a villain shows interest.


Folding is fine if every other hand you are getting is AKs, or pocket pairs. For some of us though, maybe you get 1 good open a hand a rotation if you're lucky. Limping in EP is just super icky, and I can't think of a worse idea. You have no idea what you are ahead of when you call the raise (I don't think you intend this to be a backraised 3 bet, based on your posts), you are rarely closing the action, and if your goal is to fold to a raise, why waste the BB unless you are playing with a bunch of lose passives?

This is insanity that a hand as strong as AQo, with no pressure on it is even considered to be a fold. Whether you do so or not.

Yeah, I agree mostly that I should have continued betting on the turn. Not doing so was a mistake. That would have ended the hand then and there and would have been pretty standard (if we're being results oriented).

Overall though, there's a little more going on. Since I fire 80% of the flops myself, it incentivizes opponents to float more often like villain did in this hand. And again since I fire 80% of the flops myself, I need a strong checking range on the turn to balance the times I will check turn after firing the flop with overcards.

All that being said, once I got to the river like I did, I really should be calling nearly 100% of the time, which I do against most opponents betting a reasonable amount. This dude shoving on the river is probably the only bet sizing that gets me to fold there and if he had the game to do it with third pair, more respect to him. It doesn't happen often against regular opposition.

All that being said, I guess venice10's point about pot odds is true and fundamentally solid. I was getting 2:1 on my river call. Am I good against this guy 33% of the time. Heck yeah. And that would have been a profitable call. I guess I just froze up in the moment, played a little GTO on the flop and turn and inexplicably decided to not play GTO on the river. I also overthought this hand and put myself in this situation.

So, I agree with thread that I should have bet turn myself. But I'm also kicking myself for not calling on the river. This was good insight. Thank you all for posting.

Lol, GG is tilting the shyt out of the whole forum again. What else is new? Thanks for good entertainment this evening with this thread.

Advocating to fold AQ pre without any action before us, just because a lag _maybe_ is gonna give us some trouble on certain boards later on in the hand.

You just cant make this stuff up- you just cant. Especially not coming from an experienced poster with freaking 32 000 posts on this forum.

I'd say checking this on the flop with 3 players behind us is pretty terrible.

If we consider villain to be a good payer (which I honestly seriously doubt from the little info you've given on him) why would he ever start bluffing into 3 people?

So yes, I'd want to bet here for value.
Assuming most draws have no reason to start betting multi-way.


I solved this spot (GTO+, so HU solve) with a tight BB range and a semi-wide villain call range.
The solver is choosing to bet this flop 60% of the time and 71% of the time with our combo specifically.

Given the option between 33%, 50%, 66% and 100% pot,
the solver is going with 33% - 29% of the time
and with 50% - 28% of the time
So I think sizing 50% pot here is just fine.

I think we have even more reason to bet multi-way, so I'm definitely betting here.


On the turn I think both checking and betting is fine.
I might prefer checking against our opponent, since we know he's just going to start bluffing into us, so if we check it's with the intention of calling.

The solver is actually only checking 25% of the time on the turn here.
And only 5% of the time with AQ

So against an opponent who isn't a total maniac, like the one we're playing, betting is probably better.

Solver likes betting 33% or 66% pot. With a slight preference for 33%

Once we check and villain bets, solver is calling our combo and most other AQ combos, raising with AQo where the Q is a diamond.
I've assumed we check range for the solver.

(Solver villain is never betting A8s on the turn, in fact he's only betting 12% of the time.)


On the river against the opponent you've described I think we have an easy check/call again.
You've described a player who is constantly playing with a range that is too wide and then turns a large part of that range into big bluffs.
That's exactly what's happening here, so why would we ever fold against this player with a good bluff catcher?

Don't get me wrong, I'd snap fold this against any other player.
But against the player you've described, I'm never folding my bluff catchers.
I know several of these players in my live games, and I'm NOT folding to them, NEVER!

Solver is folding our combo 100% of the time, so folding is probably not a huge mistake.


It's calling and folding some weird stuff though.

- Calling any flush
- Calling with a JTs straight 92% of the time
- Folding a set (KK/QQ/99/88) 44% of the time, mostly 99 at 83% for some reason.
- Folding two pair (KQo, 98s) 75% of the time.
- Calling TP (AKo) 100% of the time.
- Folding middle pair (AQo, AQs, QJs, QTs) 90% of the time, only calling QJs 43% of the time.
- Calling weak pair JJ 100% of the time
- Folding weak pair TT 89% of the time

Do you really think folding this much against this villain is optimal?
Where would you find your calls?

What I absolutely love about this thread is now we've had multiple people state how both checking this flop is a big mistake and how betting this flop is a big mistake.

Both camps can't be right if this situation is indeed a black & white one.

So one of those camps is dead wrong.

Therefore, the camp that is dead wrong is likely making far bigger postflop mistakes OOP to difficult players deep than they are even aware of. So lol at the thought of them folding preflop being terrible, because in their case it is likely more EV than continuing.

So those who have correctly identified themselves as the experts they indeed are can probably do whatever they want preflop. But for those who are a little unsure of exactly how great they are, maybe it ain't such a bad idea to consider doing something different?

Gcluelesshowtomakemoneyatpokerwithoutbeingthegreat estnoobG

I like it with some frequenzy. Especially facing a lag that can very well bluff us off the best hand with position. We can "walk the dog" and let him barrell off on all streets with other more nutted hands that we are more comfortable calling him down with all the way, and thus not risking being blown off the best hand by villain.

Having the A is very powerful in this spot, because it functions a couple of ways at the same time.

-For starters it makes us being in decent shape against almost anything if we get called drawing to the nutz. That makes it a solid candidate to a turn semibluff rip.

-Second, villain cant show up with the nutz when we hold this card wich makes his possible range weaker.

This pretty much sums up the river decision imo.
And the way you described villain, I think this is a call.


Villain is described as a good LAG, so he wouldn't be bluffing random air into 3 people right?

Also, if villain is bluffing the turn too often, we force him to play correctly when we x/r AI, he can just fold all his bluffs and call with the top of his range.

If we're going to make him bluff, we're way better of just calling with the plan of calling again on the river not?

Sometimes I wonder if you’re straight up trolling at this point, or if you seriously believe what you’re saying makes anything resembling logical sense.

If you think I'm trolling, report me.

Otherwise, I'd love to hear why the above thoughts are so illogical.

GcluelessillogicallythinkingnoobG

HU is so so so different than multiway; the more players in the hand, the more snug you 're supposed to play.

It seems to me that AQ is a showdown value hand 4 way in this board texture in which we are up against made straights, two pairs and strong draws. The fact that we hold the Ad makes it more interesting so I can see this being a factor weighing us towards betting.

I don't know what's the right way to play, I am more comfortable betting the turn than the flop though.