Hi everyone, I'm sure everyone knows this spot.
You've raised pre with a premium or good pair 99-kk let's say. You get one caller, you may even of called a 3bet.
There flop comes all low let's say. 582 rainbow
Your IP and the aggressor/caller leads out 3/4 pot. you call. And for the examples sake you know the villain only has a pair in the same range as yours. The turn is a brick and he leads again you call. The river bricks and stacks go in. Of course i can get away from my 99 1010 and jj sometimes but I think qq-kk is always calling. Sometimes you face aces sometimes hands 88+ and your overpair is good. Is this just a cooler? Is there a way to lose less when you don't hold the overpair.? I hope this post makes sense. Thanks , Dylan

Maybe you could take the aggressive action at some point?

Very villain/board/action dependent, but I' usually three-betting many of these hands myself pre and/or raising at some point post.

So we don't know effective stack sizes, we don't have any reads, we have one of 7 different hands, somehow we put on opponent on one of 7 hands as well but who knows how, we either raised pre and got called or we called a 3bet, we don't know what the board is except that we have an overpair, we don't know if the villain is cbetting or donking.

Seems to me like the question ends up being 'how do I play poker'?

This is probably better answered with reference to actual hand examples because the decision tree is absolutely massive as stated.

I guess, some thoughts would be: if we have small pot and big stacks, be careful about getting it in with overpairs; small stacks and big pots commit us so be quicker to get it in; the better our hand the better we like our chances ldo and reads are critical because we need to range our villain.

This isn't a spot. Stack sizes, preflop play, if you raised or called preflop, villains play and the exact board all make different situations. If villain raised UTG and you called UTG+1 is very different from villain raised in LP and you called from BTN. Having 50BB is very different then having 200BB. Your talking about a huge range of fairly common situations.

In general though most of this is not just a cooler. A cooler implies you had a hand so good you couldn't fold. QQ/KK with a short stack is a cooler when you run into AA. The rest of the situations you should be able to get away from at least some of the time.

Different situations look the same to inexperienced hand readers. It's what you don't know you don't know that's hurting your game.

Put villain on a range based on your careful observation of his play or a population guesstimate if he's new to you.

Estimate your hand's equity vs that range.

Pick a course of action that maximises your expected value against that range.

Yes , I'm probably abit too vague here, I think ragequit99 sums it up best. I need to scrub up abit on working out my equity and ranges