2/5 NL

Not too much history on villain. Seems somewhat aggressive but hasn't gotten too out of line. Splashing around a bit with a wideish range.

Hero is the effective stack with $700. Villain has previously noted that hero has been playing a tight range.

UTG blind raises to $15
Villain blind calls UTG1 $15
Hero makes it $70 in the HJ with AQo/AKo. I'm curious about people's answer to both scenarios.


Villain calls.

Pot:155

Flop AJ8r.

Check, hero continues for 80. Villain raises to $240.

Raise seems to make no sense. It would be a really weird spot for him to bluff but I would usually expect him to slow play his strong value. I usually rely on taking a bet/fold line but the games here have a lot more action and weird shoves from top pair decent kicker than I would expect.

Not that it's a huge concern but AK is about halfway up my distribution of hands here. I do have JJ 88 and probably all the AJ. I would probably check it back with AA.

Call.

I call and call turns.

easy fold. AK/AQ are the same hand here.

Don't check back with AA. You need to build pots with your big hands (and results show you exactly why you bet AA)

Bet snap fold AQ. Bet sigh fold AK. They are not the same hand.

You didn't mention if you were certain he blind called, be aware this is a common angle. You also didn't mention if he checked his cards when you 3bet or if he still acted as if he was calling blind.

i.e., if he showed up wth 88,JJ, or AJs, he wasn't blind.

It doesn't really matter though. Fold.

It wasn't an angle, i saw him throw it out before the cards were dealt. I agree they aren't the same hand. For this price I don't think his range is super wide here so having one more hand we beat or chop with matters.

I agree that AQ is a fold. I still feel really really torn about AK.

If you're going to call the raise, you can't fold on the turn. The pot will be $610 and you'll have $390 left. The question I'd ask is if he could be doing this with AT (if you had AK) or A7 (if you had AQ). I'm with Avarita on this. AK is harder, but I don't see the villain doing this with either hand.

Only bluffs are 9T. Since he was in for $15 already he probably talks himself into calling with all 16 combos.

It's hard to make a pair in this game and I think he's far more likely to call with a hand like 9T than A8 or J8. I would call and call on a non-7 turn. We gotta call on Q turns as well cuz occasionally he will have worse two pair.

Pretty unlucky if he's got 88 and it's a bad call preflop getting only 13:1 implied and you aren't always stacking off.

Against a range of 88,AJs,A8s,J8s,T9s,AJo,T9o we've got ~48%. If we give him all J8o it drops to 44% but I think he'd be more likely to play T9o and only the J8s combos.



Versus J8/A8 we've got 29% equity.

A ten on the turn (double gutter) will give us 36% equity going into the river needing 27.5% to call off the last $390.

The only hand we are in rough shape against is 88 at 6% equity but that's just damn unlucky if that's the case.

This also doesn't include any spazz like KQs/KTs/QTs with BDFD's. If we just give him the KQs combos with BDFD's (cuz he "blocks" your Ax 3! combos) our equity is back up to 50%. If we give him all Broadway gutters + BDFD's our equity is at 54%. His QTs combos are double gutters so not the worst spot to x/r.

If he's got all QTo we're at 57%.

Bet smaller on the flop or check.

I like a flop check back. We pretty much always get to showdown, don't put our stack at risk with one pair and can get value from more of his range (including bluffs that would fold on the flop).

We really don't beat many Aces in his continuing range besides ATs. Might as well check it back and get value from a much wider range.

Hero had AK. Hero was definitely calling turn if he called flop.

I considered a flop check, but I figured there were a lot of hands I could get value from and I wasn't going to get bluff raised here very often.

Well, I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I tank folded and he showed KJs BDFD.

Thanks for the feedback everyone and thanks for the breakdown Johnnybuz.

Some background is I've been getting massacred all week and this was at the end of a day where I was finally up. I wanted to post the hand because I wasn't sure if I could be objective about it.

I hope I'm not being results oriented when I say in hindsight I do think a call is correct.

-We lose to very few combos of hands (88, AA, JJ, AJ, A8s)
-He just blind called a blind raise preflop, someone like that has a spazz factor.
-Maybe this is a stretch but most players would bet a lot more than $80 with AK but would bet like that with say KK or QQ so my bet could be interpreted as weak.

On the other hand, exploitatively taking bet/fold lines is usually really good in LLSNL.

I think it's close but I think the next time I'm in this spot against a similar villain I would call.

No. No no no no no. Do not see spew results and start back-adjusting. Still bet fold. Always. They are not playing back at you, not enough. Make a mental note against this specific villain and don't ever fold again, but back to general population, bet fold. Bet fold until a specific villain gives you a reason to bet call.

You will always see spew playing live poker. Every session. Mind blowing spew. they aren't doing it enough though. Not for their collective range and sizing. Put another way, a villains range always has a spaz factor. Sometimes it's as high as 10%. But they still play the majority of the rest of their range (even T9 here) passively. You burn money bet/calling single pairs in live poker.

Half pot is fine. I 1/3 here often but it's not like you are making a mistake half potting AK on AJ8r in live poker in a 3b pot. Don't check AK.

That bet sizing from the villain smells like 2-pair. At least that's what I would expect of low stakes villains here. I don't think he calls $70 with A8o, so it's very likely AJ.

Maybe bottom set, maybe...88 would call $70 I think.

Your bet was fine, but this is a fold in my book, unless you wanna play for stacks here (I think we're flipping at best so meh)

@Ava - that seems like a pretty gross oversimplification. It's hard to make a pair and we are fairly high up in our range. If we are folding AK- then we are way over folding this spot.

I intentionally oversimplify for this forum and there are spots where we should not be bet folding (I bet/called down A high a few weeks back) but the fact of the matter is you will not be making a big mistake bet/folding your entire value range that isn't the nuts.

We are definitely overfolding, that is because villains are underbluffing.

I was watching a very good/aggressive msnl player the other day at $200NL and he bet snap folded AK on K72r to a small flop raise which blew my mind but he just casually said "yea that's never a bluff" and carried on to the next hand. This is the mentality we should have, especially in live poker.

^^yeah folding one pair to a raise is pretty much always the right play at LLSNL. in fact you can be making super exploitative folds. last night i saw a guy raise on the river and his hand

The only way AK/AQ are not the same hand here is if our opponent shows up with one of those hands. Not gonna happen. Again most villains aren't raising TPTK or TP2K. It's a bluff or its 2pr+.

slight chance V has AK and no chance V has AQ. so slightly dif hands but basically the same and they can and should be played the same in this spot.

The difference between AK and AQ here is AK has a chance to tie sometimes AQ doesnt. BASICALLY THE SAME NO POINT DIFFERENTIATING.

We're playing against a villain who just blind called a blind raise (he put the chips before he got his cards) so he's clearly not a nit and a bit gambly/spewy. He would likely limp jam/reraise JJ and possibly AJ/88. So we're only afraid of A8, J8, sometimes AJ and sometimes 88. We're only 46bb effective and there's extra dead money in the pot from the blind raiser and normal blinds.

I agree bet flop smaller but we can't fold to the raise yet as played. AKo is a stackoff hand on AJ8r 46bb deep HU and esp vs this villain and esp as played.

I also agree this spot isn't a fistpump by any means, and even though it's "46bbs" it's still ~140 bbs for your stakes and there might be roll considerations. Sometimes you just gotta lose that money.

Avaritia, I don't see why you're advocating this fold vs this villain. I'd agree with you on all your points against other player types; why are we lumping him into a category of we should fold 90%+ of our range when raised?

I'd have all AJ/sets with this line and check back AQ very often, so I wouldnt be bet/folding 90% of my range here.

You make a fair point that readless, a guy calling twice blind is not gonna follow gen pop tendencies...but I would still argue that people are loose/spewy on the passive
/calling too much side.

Anecdotally, I shoved $600 into a $150 pot the other day and got called by a bare T high flush draw on the turn. But that same guy flatted my flop bet, on a pretty great flop to raise. People are spewy by stationing...aggressive spew, at least in my games, is becoming somewhat rare.

I dont think we are making a massive mistake not folding AK here, but we would be with AQ.

To answer that posters question, the difference isnt as much hand strength (AK beats AQ) as much as it is us deciding how often we want to call. By saying we fold AQ and call AK, we artificially create a way for us to decide what % of our range we are defending.

High level: If we ONLY had AK and AQ here, when we call both we fold 0% of the time. When we call AK only we fold 50% of the time. Match this up with your equity vs. villain range and decide how often you want to fold. When you want to split your range into call/fold you should call the top part of your range and fold the bottom part. That is the difference between AK and AQ here.

To be fair I never analyzed this hand as if we had AQ, only AK, and I'm discussing the hand as if we had AK like OP actually had.

FWIW I'm calling AQ here OTF as well. If anything, I'd be more likely to try to increase my calling frequency vs this player type rather than trying to make "hero" folds; calling AQ is not increasing your calling frequency above the "norm" btw.

Like you said, a player has to give me a reason to do something outside my strategy (against the gen pop or otherwise) and blind calling a 3bb blind raise UTG+1 is one of those reasons to at least slightly adjust.

You make really good points I just don't think they are applicable in this spot.

There is a big problem with what's happening above because somehow we're not accounting for how abnormally wide we actually are/should be pre given the dead money. AQ (let alone AK) is now a mandatory call down/flop shove at these stacks in a 3b pot.

Gen pop exploits are quite reliable, but maneuvering the fold threshold this far up has to be a mistake. Factoring in whatever we can about V, there is also big difference getting ckr on AJ8 by a range that closed action pre+called blind than one that flatted in the light no matter how poor the player.

Right. We've got so many worse value hands here and I don't necessarily know that we should be folding (m)any of the Aces.

I don't know what exactly villain was trying to do here, but it seems likely he viewed hero as tight/nitty and x/r as a bluff with some backdoor possibilities. I would think villain x/c his Ax combos, so his x/r becomes very polarized to (semi)-bluffs of which there are many and value hands of which there are few. If that's the case we are probably fine to call with any of our Ax hands and can put the top of our folding range at Jx-.

1. V could have double gutshot with QT
2. When adding 'ish' to 'wide' you drop the 'e' in wide, i.e., widish.

Readability takes precedent - wide-ish is the most correct.