2/3 live . Hero TAG 650 in TdTh. V 500 (Super loose and bluffy; never folds pre and new player; seen play 3 to 4 orbits; one hand called down with 72o in a raised pot).

V in UTG+1 limps. BU limps. SB complete. H (TdTh in BB) raises to 15. V calls. Everyone else folds.

Pot 36. Flop. Tc6c2c. H bets 20. V calls.
Pot 76. Turn. 7d. H c. V c.
Pot 76. River. 9c. H checks. V bets 40.

Call or fold?

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Call for multiple reasons to me but main one being to keep him happy and have him pay you off bigger later on.

Why didn't you lead turn? Man that's probably a lot of lost value.

But I'd be surprised if I'm ever good here.

I thought about leading but checked to try and keep the pot small.

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KEEP THE POT SMALL? You have top set against a guy who never folds!

Quarantine this thread immediately, nasty case of MUBS.

Bet more on the flop, bet lots on the turn. As played, call, you only need to be good 1 in 4, there's no reason this player as described can't have like QJhh or something here.

Okay so let me ask. Since we are quite "deep" here and if you know V will never fold. Suppose you keep betting and building the pot and the 4th club hits on the river and now V pushes you all in. What do you do? You have pot committed yourself.

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"Pot control" is generally just shorthand for the idea that hands are only worth a certain number of bets. If I raise A4s and flop top pair bad kicker, I might opt to check behind for "pot control", but what I mean there is that if lots of bets start going in - say a value bet on every street - my hand is unlikely to be good. It's not that large pots are inherently bad, it's that if I end up involved in a large pot with top pair 4 kicker, something has probably gone wrong. "Big pots for big hands" as the saying goes.

Here you have a big hand and there's no reason at all, when you check, to suppose that your opponent has a bigger one. We don't check just because we fear tough decisions later in the hand. I mean why raise AA preflop? What if you raise, bet the flop, and then on the turn the opponent makes a big bet and you don't know what to do? zomg should have kept the pot small! This is the kind of thinking that a lot of live players subscribe to. I frequently see players whose risk aversion cripples their game so much that it's virtually impossible for them to win in a session, let alone in the long run.

One theoretical thing to understand is that large pots do not mean that your opponent gets to wizard you out of EV later in the hand. If your opponent bets, you call if you think you'll win often enough to justify the call and fold if not. This holds true whether the pot is $5 or $50,000. If he rivers a four-flush, you might lose more physical dollars making a call if the pot is bigger, but you don't lose EV. What increases is variance. By saying you don't want to be in a big pot when a fourth club comes, you're really just saying you don't like having to make tough decisions with substantial money on the line. Unfortunately that's what poker consists of. The only way to avoid tough decisions is to light money on fire, which is what you're doing by checking top set vs this guy.

You are far from being pot committed...

If you start taking a default of check/call against aggro villains, you've lost the metagame. Just bet your strong hands, bluff catch your medium strength hands, and bluff or fold your weak hands. Easy game. You've flopped a strong hand, so bet flop, bet turn. On river, I might even continue betting to try to get villain to fold a straight or low flush (villain dependent).

So in this scenario do you call a river shove from V (I had seen whom move all in on the river on scary boards like that)?

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Chris put this hand into prospective the best. So I'm not going to pile on how bad that ck turn is. River as play should be an easy call I guess, since I guess u achieve KEEPING THE POT SMALL. Your hand is really under rep, so calling is pretty standard in this scenario with the price that being laid and against a perceive nut case.

As for what would you do if you got shove on when you do build the pot. We can't really answer that unless we know your bet sizing on the turn and how would the Villian react to the bet. If I was at your shoes, i will bet 55 on the turn and bet 80 on the river. If he shoves over my 80 then I can fold due to the fact that the price that's being laid, and our hand is pretty polarized so, he really couldn't raise you without the nuts.

As a general rule I'm not inclined to fold to players like this on boards like this. It's futile to try to work out exactly what he might have, but we can work out whether he's likely to bluff too much or too little.

His value hands are let's say any club 7 or bigger, he probably checks smaller ones, so 6 cards in the deck. Additionally, he may have been inclined to raise or bet on earlier streets if he had the A or K.

What are his bluffing hands? Well, just about anything. Due to our holding we can be pretty sure he doesn't have top pair, so anytime he doesn't hold a club he could decide to launch a bluff.

The conclusion is that a bluff-happy player here is going to have way too many bluffs in his range. When he bets $40 OTR his optimal bluffing frequency should be roughly 25%. The analysis above suggests he's bluffing a lot more than that. The analysis doesn't change much if he bets bigger. The bigger bet means he can bluff more often, but it also narrows the range of value hands he'd be willing to bet with (i.e. he's probably not jamming 1.5x pot with the 7c).

Not a fan of the suggestions to bet the river, OK he calls loose but he basically can't have top pair, are we expecting him to call second pair on a 4 flush board? Like, maybe he will, but I'd much rather exploit his tendency to bluff too much.

Lead turn.

River is meh.
Probably a call, but it's close imo.

btw, also worth considering what your hand looks like from V's perspective, which is "nothing". You cbet the flop and then checked turn and river. For all he knows you could have AQhh here.

The reason I advocate betting the river after we bet the turn is that we probably have to call the river bet. So I want to price the river polar our self a little. I just don't think he can bluff us with the line that we took.

Raise pre, bet the flop and give up?
Seems like a good spot to bluff imo.

Building a bloated pot OOP deep to a tricky player with a hand that is mostly going to flop horrible, is really meh, imo. I would just see a flop.

I'm cool with our flop bet.

Why did we not bet the turn? I'm assuming we're attempting to induce a bluff? I'd probably just bet it myself.

By the river, everything gets there. Is he really turning a showdownable pair into a bluff, especially when it looks like we have A high after checking the turn? I check/fold.

GcluelessNLnoobG

TT is ages and aeons ahead of every villain's range here. not raising pre is lighting money on fire.

if anything we should be raising more than $15 to try to get it heads up, since even though it's 5bb (zomg!) I never expect it to fold around or even get to heads up. I bet you could make it $30 and still get a caller.

flop bet should also be bigger. turn bet should be bigger.

as played I agree that river is fine to bluff-catch, though we mostly lose when we call down here.

Well here we flopped pretty much the best hand we could have (ok, admittedly we could probably do without the monotone board), and yet OP still had no clue what to do postflop when the real money started going in. How's that going to work for him against this guy on A/K/Q/J high boards (which, is what, most of the time)?

Getting in $15 preflop with $485 behind OOP to a tricky player is hardly a coup, especially if it sounds like he is capable of stealing big pots from us postflop. The fact that we happen to be ahead of his range preflop is almost irrelevant.

GimoG

Bet turn. B/call turn. AP fold river. There's a four liner, correct?


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Note that I said he should have bet more than $15 PF, to thin the field to heads up or take it down, rather than playing OOP 4 handed. I agree that playing OOP 4 handed with TT isn't great. but getting heads up against a limp/call range of a spewy player with TT is absolutely a coup and a highly profitable situation.

Also it's not a crime to raise pre with way the best of it and check/fold terrible flops (2+ overs, 3straight etc.) when we go 4 ways. I'm not as scared of flops with 1 over as you appear to be. by raising pre we increase our odds of winning the pot and we also increase the size of the pot we do win. that's a win/win

The reason we have problems here is because the hand was misplayed post-flop. flop bet was too small and turn bet was infinitely too small.

maybe raising isn't great for OP who is going to make significant errors later, but in general it is optimal to raise this hand pre and thin the field (or have the largest equity share in a bigger multi-way pot).

Still, we don't have results in this hand. Did the Author learn anything from what we said?