9-handed
Hero $240 stack
Main Villain has me covered
My hand: TT

Preflop: One player limps, I raise to 10 from hijack, button calls, SB (main villain) calls, BB calls, limper calls

Flop ($40): 5 T Q rainbow

Checks to me, I bet 22
Button calls
MV check-raises to 50
Folds to me
Hero ????

Also, how should my play differ if there was a flush draw on the board?

Click it back to $100, jam turn. Probably just jam over the raise if fd.

I don't think you should do anything else here other than call.

I'd call. If a FD were on that board, raise.

Sorry, but I passionately dislike this flop sizing. 50% pot is almost always an incorrect size, you should either go small or big. Use 70-100% size if you expect to get called often, use 20-40% if you don't expect to get called often. 50% makes our high frequency cbets unnecessarily expensive, and we miss out on fat value/fold equity on more coordinated textures.

I see so many posters on this forum use 50% as a standard sizing, for no apparent reason. Probably because they saw Johnny Chan do it in some episode of Poker after Dark in 2006, i guess. I'm sure there is some equilibrium where 50% pot is a good bet, but in practice it doesn't have the advantages that more 'extreme' sizings have imhe.

End rant. Apologies, i'll try to say something meaningful about your actual hand/question now.



In my experience these flop ~minraises mean 1 of 3 things. Villain is 1) trying to see where he is at with a weakish Qx, AKA a raise for information. 2) villain has a draw and is trying to induce a turn check/free river card. Or occasionally 3) villain has a monster, in which case it doesn't really matter much, the money will go in sooner or later.

My preferred action in all three of these scenario's would be to flat flop and bet (or lead when oop) most turns small, 20-40%. We can deny villain the ability to see a river cheaply, and villains flop raise has inflated the pot already so we don't miss out on much value with our smaller turn bet. I you care about being balanced, we could do this as a block bet with some Qx hands as well.

I don't really care whether or not there is a flush draw available, we have a clear equity advantage vs FD's and will always have outs, even on unfortunate turncards, and have such a massive equity advantage vs his actual range that getting him to fold any part of that range would just be bad.
I guess we could just 3b/gii on some uber-wet flop textures, but i think in practice that might still be a mistake if villain manages to fold his top pair type hands. Id still rather just flat and size up on the turn.

Because Hero doesn't want to give the button good odds to draw, hero raises all in. Fortunately for him, villain has 55 for bottom set. Looking over it, I realized I probably didn't play optimally. Bottom set is probably the only thing that is calling me, and maybe top 2 pair.

I flat IP on this relatively dry board and try to get it in on the turn.

+1

Stack sizes is what makes me lean to flatting here. We have $180 behind if we flat, and pot will be roughly $150. What we are looking to do is figure out how to get his stack. If he had some more, we might want to think about raising now, but this is a really good set up for our hand. No need to raise now because most of the time a check raise is followed by a bet and we usually just get it in on turn. If he checks turn, maybe bet smallish hoping to induce a bluff. Dont worry about draws with this texture, and dont worry about QQ either. He has way more QXs than anything here. Like all of them, and hopefully QT. If we click back to a check raise it's pretty strong and we lose QJ, QK and even AQ which is disastrous. Flat. Dont raise....