Golden advice my friend thank you. That's a good thing to remember.

Whoa, that is an excellent example. I remember over the summer being in that very situation and responded to a short stack when i had AA with a bet putting him all in on a 567 flop. He checked to me and I made it 40 on the flop. He called and turned over 89. Yes, that is an excellent example of a flop you should check. Good point.

Thank you all for the awesome discussion on this thread I have not thought of before. It seems like 40% of the hands i post are JJ.

Your own example is a lot worse. Obviously the money is going in against a short stack...

Checking flop is correct. Villain has a range advantage on this board. You should also be checking your strong hands like sets and 2 pair, and strong draws like Th9h or AhKh, with the intention of check-raising. Check-call overpairs and medium strength draws, JsTs for example.

Against an unknown who looks like a losing player, I would normally call the raise and see how he reacts to the turn

Is there still hesitation, confusion, etc..


Some of the arguments for checking back the flop seem misplaced against weak opponents in a low stakes game

Cbeting is not a bad play

+100

The only thing I would add is "especially in the Midwest".

No.

Checking may be fine as part of some playing styles but it is certainly not the "correct" play.

Some of us were happy to stack off on this board remember.

Villain played 4 of his first 5 hands. He may think he can represent the nuts. But he might also be prone to spazzing with the T6o. If anyone is going to put in the last bet on this flop, I want it to be hero and we can only achieve that by betting our hand which has excellent equity vs villain's range but is nevertheless vulnerable.

With these stack sizes, I want to set things up so that we can put in the last bet and we can leave villain to wonder about whether its profitable for him to call a shove with 56, 4h3h, Q6o etc... there are just so many hands that villain could choose to play aggressively on this flop. Sets, two pair and made straights only make up a small proportion of his overall range. And we have equity against 2-pair!

Stacks are not deep enough and we don't know enough about villain for me to want to play pot control by going into check/call mode.

Funny, and this is where we differ. I want to know more about an opponent before randomly stacking off with one pair, and I don't think a sample of 5 hands is enough for me. Different styles I guess.

This begs the question though: is this variance avoidance or +EV thinking? Surely we would always want to know as much about our opponents as we can, but sometimes we just don't. Shouldn't there still be an optimal strategy against an unknown (which admittedly might be high variance)?

It is an interesting point and one I struggle with a decent amount. It very well could be variance avoidance as you say due to style. I certainly need to work on being more aggressive in a lot of spots, no doubt. And I am certainly not saying that my way is right and the other is wrong. It might very well be GTO to stack off with JJ on this board. However, I am not sure I (not anyone really) can empirically answer your question about EV given that we would actually need this spot 100's of times to get a good sample. So perhaps my comment on that front was ill advised.

Honestly I don't see any difference in how races play.

Also it's a very small sample size and being loose is not the same as being aggressive.

Fair points.

I'll admit, this is certainly not a slam dunk spot but the fact that he played 4 of his first 5 hands significantly increases the chance that he is doing this with some kind of draw - particularly on this board.

I don't think its a great spot to be in and frankly almost all plays are justifiable. But given that most players are passive I think we should be betting this board until we get a sense for his stye. I'm far more likely to check when I'm up against a bluffy player with a weak range and I'm happy to let him bluff at the pot.

In any case, I think its a bit too categoric to imply that checking is obviously the correct play.

It would help if we knew anything about how villain actually played those hands.

Fair points again and in re-reading my comments I don't think I ever stated that checking was obviously the correct play (maybe that was directed at someone else). Again, my style biases me towards less aggro play so my comments should be viewed in that context. Clearly I agree that there is rarely ever one way to play a specific spot.

Anyway good discussion and why I like this forum as players of all styles are willing to share thoughts and reasoning....helps make me a much better thinker about the game.

Dry JJ gets too much value from protection to check back here. It's possibly the very first hand in your value betting bucket, given how fat the value is while still being vulnerable. We also don't want to overthink it too much IP against a random middle-aged dude and are looking for him to passively give us a lot of value with pair+SD type stuff before all the cards are out.

Obviously not a bad thought for a lot of hands on this board in general, but just don't think now's the time with this hand against this opponent with these positions.

You're not protecting by betting, because villain isn't folding anything on the flop that has good equity against you anyway.

The reason to check here, theoretically, is because villain has a heavy range advantage.

Everything has equity against us. A4o has 29.4% equity; KxQh has 28% equity. And "good" equity is just rhetorical. Even if he folds KTo with no hearts (which is one of a very small subset of hands that are doing as poorly as it is against us), we've protected 15% of the pot.

The polarity disadvantage is the reason we're checking a lot in general, but we can't just blanket use this reason to never bet ever. And as I said, this is the very first non-nutted hand that goes in our value betting bucket.

To first clarify, villain doesn't have a range advantage here. Equity-wise, his range is behind ours. It's even easy to overstate his polarity advantage because he doesn't have more nutted hands, he just has a narrower range so that those nutted hands make up a larger proportion of his overall range. It's not like it's the sort of spot where we're trying to guarantee four bets never go in or anything.

And this is getting deep in the weeds of theory land. Villain is a middle-aged rando defending his BB. Let's not give him too much credit for maximally leveraging the hypothetical advantages he would have on certain branches of the decision tree or anything. b/f'ing as much as possible is still the best tool in our kit against this population (not to imply we're necessarily folding flop here).

Again, I agree that you and Avarita are barking up the right tree of what to consider in this sorta spot in a general sense, but checking back 100% on low coordinated boards is overcompensating.

This is an interesting point.

In this forum, we're often discussing individual hand spots and the way to make the most money over time in that one particular spot.

What we don't discuss is how certain hands played in certain ways will affect the dynamic and flow of the table on a night. I believe low stakes live is far more diverse than people give it credit. Often players are aware of what's happening and will overadjust.

Sometimes nonchalantly putting the chips in when our equity against his range feels like 47% is going to fit well with our overall plan for the session and the opponents at the table.

I like to focus on the other deepstacks particularly if there are loose players amongst them. I typically don't mind them thinking that I will stack off light with one pair given that I know I am someone who is easily bluffed by aggression from other deepstacks.

Even in theory, I wouldn't check back 100% of my range here. In theory, I'd probably check back JJ, TT, 99, and 8x, bet KK+ and play a mixed strategy with QQ. In practice, I'd probably bet JJ+, as well as TT some of the time, against most live low stakes players.

There were some good points in this post by TenHighCallDown. I do like a check on this board if stacks are deep and we're up against a proven aggressive player who is capable of making a play against us.