Villain is hard to describe. He has a good business putting in pools or something and plays to blow-off steam and have a couple beers, it seems. But he's not a straight donator. He takes the game seriously, trys his best to win at it. Does game select etc.

But still, he's not great at it. Picking up his exact tendencies and ways to exploit him, I haven't done yet. I just know that his poker skill is like a B-, where A+ and beyond are the actually winning players.

He views me as a solid winning player. He makes frequent comments to that effect.

We've played lots of pots together but aside from some small bluffs here and there, neither have us has shown down anything hugely out of line. We pretty much just play our hands and aren't seeking to play huge pots w/ each other with marginal holdings.


We're both sitting on about $1k at 2/5

Straddled pot, 6 people throw in the $10 and we take a flop.

9 4 3

He bets $30 (into $60) on the flop, everybody folds to me. I have 9 8

I call.

HU turn T

He bets $45 (into 120)

I raise to $145

I don't know what he had but given his past tendencies, I don't think he's continuing with most of his range. He would probably need an overpair at least. All of the other random pairs and draws and overcards and air, he is folding.

So I decided to try to rob him, for no apparent reason as I thought that would be the more +EV long term play than calling down or even possibly folding.

Describe positions and action a little better. If he's betting into 6 people on the flop this all seems pretty bad, starting with the flop call. Not many draws he can have.

what position are you in? Limping a straddle w 89o is usually bad.

Save it for when you have outs against his continuing range. If we're in LP, we have plenty of spades in our range, as well as QJdd type hands to pull something with here.

Did you consider the option of calling with the intention of robbing him on the river if you don't hate the last card?

You are clicking buttons here.

I am not opposed to turn turning a one-pair hand into a bluff, but I usually have a specific reason for doing so. If he is x/f all of his air on the turn, you are only going to run into value here with maybe the exception of a hand like 65 that he keeps barreling.

That is just a 1000ft view of the hand. The original post is missing so much information that is hard to provide much more info than that.

I think it would help a lot to know what position V is in. Given your reads, though, this is a good spot to bluff. It's really tough for him to have a hand better than 9x, and if you think he'll never continue with such a hand to a big turn c/r, then you fold out a ton of J9+ hands that beat you.

Also, A9, K9, Q9, J9 is probably over 50% of his range here.

I like it however...raise more.

I guess id really like it if i knew i could jam river...any reads on this? How are his double barrel tendencies?

Which is why 98 is one of the nut-worst hands to run this bluf with ...

I meant over 50% of his hands after accounting for the ones we block, which still makes raising profitable even though 78 or something like that would be a better bluffing candidate. The thing is, though, if V will fold anything worse than an overpair, we should probably be raising even if we were dealt two Pokemon cards, since V is folding so much of his range.

You could probably make this same case in a vacuum for any spot where a player who's capable of folding is underbetting. I'm all for raising here (or in spots like this) a lot, but doing it 100% of the time is a strategy akin to playing scissors every time in RPS. So I'd rather do it in a spot where at least a few of the following don't apply: villain just lead into 6 players on the flop, we block their folding range, we have draws in our range, we have the worst/dirtiest outs of just about any hand in our range.

This seems fine assuming you raised to get him to fold a better 9.

you seem to know him well, so yeah, he's raising TT+ pre, if he has a set your paying him off otr anyway, though he's never betting 1/4 pot ott w/ a monster like that. The only draw back is if you lose value from 55-88 that would call a normalish river bet but are folding to the turn raise.

O wait...i thought we turned a sd...

Meh...to this line

Im sure its slightly +ev but its thin

disagree. This vill seems the type that isn't going to die with a one pair hand.(middle pair after the turn)

6 way to the flop, relatively dry, he's making a horrid bet w/ regard to sizing. Seems like a standard spot to make him fold better. Unless he has history of weak leading to induce, this is a good spot to exploit.

When we're playing RPS against someone who plays paper 40% of the time, we should play scissors 100% of the time until he adjusts. V is very exploitable (folds way too often) in this spot, and we should continually exploit him until he starts adjusting, and unlike playing paper 100% of the time in RPS, it's not that easy for V to figure out what we're doing, since this particular spot doesn't come up that often and he will almost never see our cards when we do this. Raising is better than folding or calling against this opponent in this spot, since he has a very large bet/folding range that we lose against at showdown.

Results: he folded T2 face up, pretty much instantly and said "I guess my ten is no good"

Assuming we're playing RPS against a human, the proper strategy is to exploit him by playing scissors an amount that's exploitative without the opponent knowing that they're being exploited. In other words, he's already playing poorly; we don't want him to adjust, or else it just becomes a typical RPS scenario or guessing games and leveling wars. We prefer. In a vacuum, playing scissors is always going to be better, but we're better off playing them no more than 50% of the time and mixing in enough rock that the opponent thinks he's doing okay.

Anyway, I'd agree with you're post if we were talking about a super specific exploitation in a super specific spot. My point is, though, that underbets happen all the time and you can pretty much always print money against them by making them face pressure. It would be terribad to raise underbets every time because after the first time he'll probably start calling down lighter (not totally disastrous for us, but it makes things more difficult for us, especially if we're doing this without outs), and after the second or third time, he's going to either stop underbetting into us altogether (bad because his underbets were exploitable) or start mixing in the nuts (really bad because the main reason they were exploitable was because they turned his hand face up, and now his counter strategy is actually exploitative to our).

So we're just better off folding the worst hand we could possibly make this play with and planning bluffing over his underbets only when we have somewhat decent opportunities to do so.

I see what you're saying, you can't do it too often or it wont work anymore. That wont be an issue for me. Bluffing is something I don't do nearly enough as it is, because I'm bad at identifying good spots to do it. So here I think I've identified one. And yes, I can't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and go bat**** raising anybody I think has one pair they'll probably fold to a raise.

I think I'll aim for like once per session, and hopefully on a different player each time.

I almost did it tonight on a different player:

Limped PF he bet 30 from SB on 924cc I called in BB
HU turn 7 he 60 i called
River 5c (flush got there) he tanked for awhile and then bet 120. Seemed pretty clear the club scared him and he's not the kind to bet hard like that twice with the draw, especially against me (he likes to avoid me). So I think if I pop him to $350 right there, i take it down.

I decided to fold my J9 instead.

There def shouldnt be a limited amount of bluffs (i play a lag style so you just burnt my ears)

Most of your bluffs shouldnt include some sort of continuation equity...ie on flops were you have backdoor fd sd pair draws etc where you can improve.

In this hand you were left with little improvement...

Dont get me wrong at the table its diff theres live tells where picking up on weakness is essential and some points atc works...

But as a general rule i follow the previous

Side note: its a real mistake to say...i will only bluff once each opportunity is diff.

Another side note: bluffing early has a higher % chance of working...