. when grunching goes wrong

Thank you all for your opinions - some food for thought certainly.

I might leave this for another couple of hours before posting the river action/result.

Anyone else feel strongly re: check call vs bet fold vs bet call?

This is a very valid point. Analysing the hand afterwards I felt I should have 3bet pre rather than calling but never thought about folding. Aa you say,under the specific circumstances maybe folding would have been something I could have considered.

How has nobody mentioned Buttons speech at the start of the hand? OP - is this regular behavior for V? If not, alarm bells should be going off. Barring info to the contrary, this is very strong and I flat pre.

I’d lead the flop for 1/2-2/3 pot.

I'm certainly open to being proven wrong or convinced to bet/fold

To me this decision boils down to sticking to your range assessments. What did the main V raise flop with? If we stick with our read that he's solid, it should be massively value oriented: 2P, sets and flushes. We have the nut flush so he can only have smaller flushes, which all bet on the turn unless he's a nit. That really leaves sets and 2P, many of which are now boats, so we should x/c instead of targeting a thin range of like KQ, (which may bet anyways?)?. x/c also lets him bluff on a scary board, which is how we can make a lot of money in this spot.

Yeah, x/c sucks, but to me it's not being MUBSY it's a lesson that being OOP sucks ass and we shouldn't jump to the opportunity to play A7s from the blinds, or when we do, we should temper our expectations. For even when we hit the nuts in a multiway pot, we often won't make as much as we like, as evidenced in this hand

All that needs to be said. It's kind of like flopping AA2 with AA, you just dont get paid off without a miracle. Flatting preflop is what I'd do just because I always want to play multiway with a NFD. I like a 3bet on the flop because it widens our range to beyond just the nuts. If V has a set or 2 pair he can easily put us on a draw and jam on us. But by the river you're out of position and this is the penalty you pay. I especially wonder what calls a river lead. At least if you check he can bluff.

V2 is quite a jovial, talkative guy at the table. Comments like this would be extremely normal for him. I agree that against most villains this would be strong. I have seen him make comments like "let's raise it up a bit" and "I have to raise such a beautiful hand" so many times over the years and it rarely means anything about his hand.

Very interesting re leading flop. I don't think I ever lead here but maybe I should be sometimes

Thank you very much I think this is an excellent point. And yes, I think it has me convinced that check call is the best line here.

Results:

Board KQJJ7 (Pot 191)

I think for ~30 seconds about the virtues of bet folding vs check calling and decide to bet biggish and fold to a raise.

Hero bets 150. V2 raises to 500.

Hero squirms for a while, calls and is shown KK


Chalk it down to tiredness combined with entitlement tilt - yes I bet with the intention of folding and then changed my mind when he raised. Literally the moment I called I knew I was beat and that it was a bad call. In the moment I remember thinking "he's good enough to turn KQ into a bluff here, that would be the best bluffing hand" but in reality I think I was fooling myself.

Thanks for all your comments, much appreciated. Feel free to flame my river line/give any opinions on it also.

Nitpick but I think we should be 3-betting polarized in the BB here. At this stack depth it’s kind of hard to construct a range but basically I’dhands that have an easy decision vs a small 4-bet (2.5x~). This hand, 500BB deep is simply a call imo due to the overflush value. A hand like 68s or KJo is better to 3-bet in this spot since we can snap fold vs a 4-bet, even super duper deep.

OP, would exploitatively minclick flop with my entire continuing range and then go from there. I’m ripping it if raised OTF.

Once the board pairs Probably b/f lead turn and river.

AP turn x seems fine

AP river b/c for 175 BB’s more is spew as you are aware and quite costly. That’s several sessions worth of profit right there

The snap turn check was a red flag to me.

A hand like KQ/smaller flushes are more likely to evaluate betting or checking, imho. Hero also blocks the NFD. That's the reason I B/F 1/2 pot on river.

Yeah, honestly it was to me as well. I just messed up and didn't follow my own plan

Absolutely. You live and learn I guess! I very rarely make calls like this one, don't really know what came over me.

Thanks to everyone who commented!

Surprised no one commented on speech before raising pre. In my experience a comment immediately before or during making a bet generally indicates strength.

True, but he was iso'ing a weak player so he may feel strong with 100% of his range lol.

The one other thing I'd like to bring up: I had talked about 3b preflop, but I actually don't think a fold is terrible either if we're up against a good player isolating a bad player for a 5bb raise.

One thing that this hand demonstrates is that without the preflop lead, you are going to encounter some flops in which actions goes check, donk bet, big raise, hero ? Another more common flop action is check, check, villain with preflop lead bets 2/3 pot, hero ? And when we have a capped range that doesn't hit strong hands/strong draws super often, we are going to have to either concede the pot to a worse hand or get ourselves into a bad spot against a better hand on later streets FAR more often than we'd like. We also have to think about the possibility of flopping a medium strength hand and then seeing action of check, check, bet, we call, then other villain check raises...even when it's a fairly easy decision to throw away it still isn't great to lose those 15bb in the hand.

We often times just won't have a lot of great answers to a skilled villain who knows how to use position with a preflop lead, and because of that I don't think we should be ashamed of folding to a 5bb raise (i.e. we should admit that calling 4bb to win the 11.5bb minus rake may not be worth it due to reverse implied odds postflop).

Don't believe me when I say our hand doesn't hit strong hands/strong draws super often? Well then let's fire up Flopzilla for a moment. 66.7% of the time, our hand results in ace high on the flop. 11.2% of the time we get middle pair or bottom pair. 17.4% of the time we have top pair (i.e. TPTK with A7 that will often have us wondering if we still have the best hand on paint runouts, or TPNK that will have us wondering if villain has us outkicked or multi-street bluffing when he decides to barrel turns). We flop two pair, three of a kind, or a flush 4.3% of the time, and even when that happens we can sometimes get coolered and lose our stack. 10.9% of the time we flop a FD and can feel good about x/r'ing to build a pot. 11.6% of the time we just have a gutter or 2 overs. 2.7% of the time we have a FD+ combo draw.

If we see a drooler raise to 5bb and we feel as though we have a good handle on postflop tendencies for that player, then of course that's a different story. But if we see a good player raise to 5bb, we need to ask ourselves if we really think we can play well enough with them postflop to make this profitable. We also have to take into consideration that their positional advantage means that when they hit big hand vs medium strength hand against us it's FAR easier for them to get a decent chunk of our stack than vice versa since a decent player will be far more likely than a drooler to check back when appropriate.

Axel, these are not arguments for folding preflop. Instead, they are arguments for the idea that if we do call preflop, we need to be ready to lead flops we want to continue on, a lot.

Leading the flop in scenarios like this puts the positional pressure on the fish and (at least partially) takes it away from us. When we check to the raiser, we are out of position, both absolute and relative. That's not good, and it hurts hands like ours. But when we simply take the lead and bet out on the flop, now it is the fish who has to act before the preflop raiser does, and most of the bad things you're saying can happen to us will now happen to him. Plus, we have the ability to pick up the pot without a fight, instead of the preflop raiser. And we are never in a position of checking and then cold 3betting, because we already bet.

Skipping the decision to check to the raiser on the flop is a big mistake, in my opinion--both in how the hand was played and how it was posted.