Hey guys, just want some input on a line I took at parx casino PA in a 1/2 game.

This is about 6 hours into the session. Villain is late 20's early 30's white guy who from what I have seen is better than the average 1-2 player. Knows the terminology but I had seen him takes some lines that were just bad plays, however at the same time he made some good folds but inconsistent. He did over-value some hands he had played against previous villains. He had 3 bet me from button at least 5 times during the session. Also had a bad habit of fancy play syndrome which isn't profitable at these limts. He was sitting directly to the left of me. We had some previous battles but nothing dramatic, he had won every 3 bet pot against me up to this point. Aggressive villain. We are both approximately 350BB Deep.

UTG+1 limps
HERO-54 raises-$10
Villain- 3 bets to $25
UTG-folds
Hero-calls $25

POT=$55

FLOP: K84

HERO- Checks
Villain-Checks Back

This threw me off villain had cbet every 3 bet pot we had played

Turn- Q

Hero-Checks
Villain-bets $25

I sensed a lot of weakness coming from the villain. I started ranging him on hands. At the time I felt if he had connected with flop he c bets a board like that AA AK KK KQ. I Didn't think my raise on turn was going to get a fold but I knew a lot of scary river cards could hit that I could rep. I obv turn my hand into a bluff and start playing range vs range.

Hero-raises $70
Villain tanks calls $70

Pot-$195

River-J

At first I thought this was an amazing card but the more I went into the tank I realized it wasn't as good as I thought. I do believe it connects more with my range and I felt I couldn't just check back this river. He also connect with this board a lot of his 2 pair combos are there but I know he would have c bet with a flush draw since I have played 6 hours with him I know he plays draws aggressively. Like I stated earlier he can make big folds.

Hero- bets $150
Villain tanks for about 3 minutes...starts saying how the turn screwed him and everything got there.

Villain - Mucks AA face up

Thoughts and feed back

I don't know if I really like my line help me out guys THANKS!!

Even without knowing your hand villain should definitely have called based on your line not making sense. Generally if you plan to bluff in this spot a strong turn bet is better than c/r. With a c/r you are essentially trying to rep KQ or a set and not very believable because nobody takes that line, especially when a villain showed weakness and you should have no expectation that he bet. On the river things fall apart again. If you routinely bet draws strongly it can kinda make sense but such a large river bet really only reps a flush. Sets or 2p would almost always bet less in hopes of a call. The hands that you turn rep largely disagree with the ones you rep on river so as a line it is bad. That being said, few 1/2 players notice or care about if a line makes sense. If this were 2/5 I'd expect the better players to look you up regularly.

Also a c/r represents immediate strength, not future strength. It actually makes less cards help your repped range. If you were trying to range vs range him a turn lead would be the way to go since you would logically check 100% of your range to him on the flop and barring tricky play his range should be capped by checking back. Essentially you could easily have all TP and draw hands while he normally shouldn't have them

Don't open 54s from EP.

As played, villain has been 3-betting us light, I don't like our chances of profitably outplaying him OOP and his small 3bet suggests weakness so I like this hand as a candidate for a light 4-bet to 90 expecting him to fold a lot of the time. Calling is not terrible but we're hoping to flop a miracle and his range is so wide, we can't put this guy on premium hands and expect he is unable to fold TPTK or an overpair when we make gin. We'll be playing in the dark.

On the turn the standard line with bottom pair weak kicker and no draw is to check/fold. Check raising seems quite spewy. Villain's line on the flop suggests he has a one pair hand that wants to make it to showdown.

On the river I'm rather indifferent about continuing the bluff. It might be ev neutral. Not sure.

Having seen the hand, villain's fold seems a little bad.

Fold pre twice.

Bluffing this turn is insanely stupid

Villain should have been aware that his flop check and turn bet of 25 into 55 would sometimes induce bluffs and would we really check a flush draw on the turn?

Obviously this assessment was wrong. I agree with NewClintEastwood about what the c/r represents. However, let's face it. V just didn't play his hand well and what contributed to that was that your line was confusing to V. Looks like V was trying to play a smallish pot and lost control of hand as a result. V underestimated you.

Don't give V's cards or action beyond your decision point. Once we know V's hand, it's almost impossible (at least for me) to give unbiased advice. In this case, stop action after you lead 150 OTR, before we know whether he folded.

350 BB deep, I don't mind the open or the call of the small 3b.

After that, I think things start to come off the rails.

Based on the pot size, you raised to 70 (rather than raising 70). That meant he had to call 45 with a pot of 150. Not much is going to fold for that small a raise. That said, the tiny x/r and the big river lead could look really value-heavy to V. Or it might go completely over his head. No way to know.

My guess is that V couldn't figure out what you'd play that way and folded because he just didn't think LLSNL V's would be bluffing 43%+ in this spot.

I think it turned out the Jh was a good card for you, since it gave V flushes and straights to worry about. But the parlay of getting a good bluffing card and then actually having V fold means that you're not getting positive EV from the 70 x/r.

I wouldn't make this line a regular part of your playing style.

Fold pf. The deeper you are, the stronger you hand needs to be to open in early position, not weaker.

I clearly need to come and play at PARX if this villain is better than average at 1/2. He wanted to trap with his rockets and got burned. Hope nobody tells him about this HH, because he'll get better after the grief everyone will give him.

Yikes.

Ok, so let me go thru my laundry list here.

1) villan who 3 bet you 5 times from the button directly IP to you at these stakes... SEAT CHANGE ASAP. 350 BB deep? by god seat change! get up! leave! Even for a good player this is not an EV+ situation.

2) if for some bizarre reason you are gonna stay, you need to tighten up (so dont play 54s from the CO), bluff 4 bet him as well as 4 bet with a wide value range if he is regukarly calling your 4 bets. I mean, battling this is not something that you can learn overnight, and honestly isnt a skill you really need at these stakes (i was crushing 1/3 and had no idea how to combat this exact thing until i moved up in stakes a few months ago and started facing it regularly) but thats the basics. You went 0/5 (and hell, shouldve been 0/6) in 3 bet pots, thats a disaster.

3) villan 3 bets and then cbets 5 times in a row and then checks this time. That makes you sense weakness????? obviously he is BETTING his weak hands! he is 3 betting SO wide that he clearly has a ton of junk, and then he comes out with a bet every time, and his junk couldnt have hit every time. You should be looking to check raise his flop cbet on certain boards, not to try and take over the pot on the turn when he checks back flop. Most of the time, a flop check is a medium made hand or a draw. id expect 8x, K with a weak kicker, 56, 67. Villans fancy play syndrome means he couldve (stupidly) tried to slowplay a monster like a set, or a perceived monster like the AA he had on a draw heavy board (seriously terrible check back by him).

4) you have a pair. you know that right? like, just call turn, you got 5 outs to a pretty big hand that you can lead out for value on the river, and you can call bets on blank rivers to bluffcatch and scoop a good pot from poorly played draws a lot of the time.

5) what a complete river spaz. so what, you check raised turn with a flush draw? you wouldve led turn almost always if you were gonna semibluff. If i were V, id put you on a flush draw almost never when you check raise me.

6) here is how you CAN rep the flush. If you had called the turn like i suggested, your hand is dead on the river (the draws got there so you cant bluffcatch, and the meduim made hands have you beat). You could legitimately rep the flush from a check/call turn lead river line, so betting near pot, maybe $90 into the $105 pot on river would likely take it down enough to earn you a bit of money, folding all the 8x, some of the Kx/rando mid PPs.

I agree that we need to be opening a different range when we're this deep, but I would argue that "stronger" and "weaker" start to have different meanings.

We're in agreement that deeper stacks make skill differential and position even more important. Being OOP deeper sucks even more than it does normally.

Premium pairs do well deep, short, OOP, IP, on Fridays, when it's raining, etc. So those are opens from all positions. I'm guessing there isn't much discussion there.

But hands like AK can really run into problems OOP and deep stacked. Opponent can put a lot of pressure on us over all three streets and we're often going to be faced with either laying down a likely best hand or putting in way too much money when we're beaten. I'm not suggesting that we fold them, but we need to be planning pot control from the moment we pick up the hand. (This assume V's capable of putting pressure on us, and a skill differential small enough or favorable enough that we don't just have to get up from the table.)

OOP really deep stacked I think something like a SCs or small PP can play better than AKo. My goal has changed: I'm not looking to flop something like TP and get some value from a weaker TP, I'm looking to flop something large and throbbing (or at least a draw to it) and win a huge pot from something not quite to monstrous. Playing a TP hand OOP deep can be very challenging. Position and the deeper stacks allow opponent to repeatedly face us with difficult decisions, and that's where big mistakes live. Small PP mostly either hit or miss OTF and speculative hands mostly either flop a draw worth continuing with or they don't.

I think it's OK to manipulate the game to minimize the difficult positions V can put us in post flop.

I'm folding AQo without a second thought here.

Suited aces, SCs, S1Gs and PP all start to look attractive, as long as I can get in for a small fraction of stacks. Those hands are typically considered "weaker" preflop, but can flop hands that withstand pressure much better than TP hands.

That doesn't mean I'm opening every one of these for a raise, that would make our range much too weak. But I'd select hands from those categories to round out my premiums when picking EP raises.

Thoughts?

I think this is a great post. All i would add is that the deeper you are the more important balance is, which actually means your range should be wider, not smaller (although you may be playing the same percentage of hands, youd jist play more hands less often)

Correct if I am wrong but suited connecters and Ax suited play better deep stack then they would with 100-200 bb.

Hypothetically speaking if I was on left of villain and he 3 bet an UTG is it plus ev to call on button with 98c 76d Ax suited with position?

If we were 100-200 bb I would fold.

Thoughts ???

Also if someone could post a link to some good cash game deepstack material that would be great thanks

You're mixing up concepts. In deep games, hand values equalize pf. So you are correct that 76s plays better than in a shallower game. However, position becomes more important, not less. Position outweighs hand value. So when you start raising with 76s in the UTG, your odds of hitting a strong hand doesn't change. Most of the time you'll nothing and the person behind you will be able to just take the hand away from you because they'll have a big informational advantage.

I apologize I forgot to mention I was not utg UTG limped I was in Highjack and made it 10$ villain was in button and 3 bet UTG folded pre

I'm enjoying this thread derail discussion about the relative ev of opening suited connectors and small pocket pairs in EP when effective stacks are deep.

Generally speaking, I agree that having a very tight opening range from EP is usually going to be better regardless of how deep the stacks are.

I also agree that speculative hands work best in position when we can often control whether there will be a river bet or not.

What I would not want to happen with deep effective stacks is for opponents to think "on this low flop, the best he can have is an overpair and he'll never stack off here with one pair this deep".

I can get behind very occasionally raising ace-rag suited, middle suited connectors and small pairs from EP. Particularly, if its a tight table and we have an extremely tight image i.e. they'll put us on JJ+/AK. But 87s and lower from EP feels particularly spewy.

As long as stacks are deep, 87s and lower are so much more profitable when we can get in for cheap against multiple opponents in position or if we can use them to 3-bet one or two weak opponents who we can outplay postflop.

When we're raising speculative hands in EP, it's not so much because we're trying to steal the blinds or get a couple calls and then move them off their hands (or, as a last resort, outflop them).

It's more for pot size manipulation (with a whiff of deception thrown in).

If the pot is limped, we're not going to be able to use our full stack on those rare occasions we do hit a monster. We might as well be playing with more normal-sized stacks.

The raise loses us some EV because we're putting more money in the pot in a marginal situation. If, however, we can create a gigantic pot once in a great while when the conditions are right, we can make up that lost EV.

This depends for success on having a skill advantage over our opponents. But at a LLSNL table that has happened to become deep stacked by chance, that should often be true.

The raise preflop is the least of your worries.