Playing 2/5 on a very aggro table.

Button straddles $10

Asian female is UTG ($1000) and opens to $35. In the last few mins she has lost $1000 in 2 hands. One hand she 4 bet JTs UTG and shoved a monotone flop (not her suit). Another hand she 3 bet KQs and triple barrelled a FD and missed. The guy called her down with 77 on something like a A93J6 board. They are playing some real poker at this table. The guy who had 77 is the straddle.

UTG+1 ($2200) calls. He's a young back pack wearing pro looking guy who knows everyone in the room. I'm out of town and dont know anyone. I played with this guy for 30 mins earlier on a different table and I mentioned I lived in Ft Lauderdale and he said "Where do you play down there? The Isle?". So I assume he gets around and plays a lot. I havent seen him do anything crazy but he appears to be pretty good and capable of making moves.

Folds to Hero ($900) in MP with QdQh and he does what?

Your asian women seems very spazzy and is very likely on some sort of tilt from torching off 1 grand in the last couple of hands. She is obviously our main target here from the way i asess the situation.

I am looking to shovel some more money into this pot+ preparing to get into a possible 1800 stackoff pot with the asian lady in one way or another. If she is capable of 4 balling J10 suited preflop i am happy to felt with QQ for $900 preflop if she wants to do that, or if she calls our 3 bet we have a very manageable SPR with position and a premium hand that destroys here range against a very likely spazzy tilted villain.

And i am not too worried about backpack grinder either. He is very likely calling our asian lady with a very wide range playing deep and her displaying the tendencies youre describing. His range is decently wide and pretty capped here in my opinion.

Due to descriptions i am not going small regarding sizing here. Something around 150-160 seems appropriate.

$115.

If she is putting in a 4! with stuff like JTs, then let's give her the illusion that she can knock us off of our hand with a hefty 4!. I am fist pump GII pre, with QQ, against this tilt-o-maniac.

Obvious raise. Probably size it a bit bigger then normal because UTG will call too wide and UTG+1 will likely stick around wider then usual to target UTG.

I like $150 to unsure that UTG+1 can't get anything like credible odds.

3! to $135-$145.

If you were out of position against these two players or $1500 effective with the pro I would size up even bigger. Maybe $195-$205.

Do you remember the sizing that was used with the 3! and 4! when she 4! JTs? Does her open sizing give you any info?

Exactly, agree. Like- dream scenario here is to get this heads up against tilted asian, so she have the best chances of giving her money to hero and not somebody else.

Being deepstacked around 200 BB, we are not thrilled to risk going multiway at all with QQ.

+1

Not sure how $150 is a “big” 3bet here.

$10 straddle, $35 open and a call, our standard should be 3-4x the open + the call + straddle, so the 3b should be between $150-185 anyway.

There’s a straddle, we’re 90 BB deep.

No, we are not.

And i am not looking to go into another debate regarding straddles cutting our stack in half or not. I am tired of those kind of semantics being in focus of discussions, and been down that road countless times.

Cliffs is that i am simply not on board with the premise of straddles cutting our stack in half, because most of our opponents is not adjusting how they play, and they have mostly inelastic stackoffranges in relation to the money that we have in our stack-not influenced if the percieved amount of blinds is 90 or 180.They are thinking that hero have $900 stack, not that he techincally have 90 blinds due to the straddle. If hero really was sitting with 90 BB at a 2-5 game (450 stack), then our opponents play totally different against that compared to if we have 900 in front of us. Its the money amount that is meaningful to them, not the technical amount of blinds you think we have.

3! to $150.

I could not agree with this more. Our straddled 2/5 game present scenario is nothing close to the same thing as a 5/10 game with a standard $35 raise, a call and then a 3 bet. I dont care what the books tell you...its just not the same.

Would be useful to have some kind of read on how hero is viewed but generally:

3! to $125... $150+ seems a bit excessive unless we really think V is totally inelastic here

I havent been at the table very long and nobody knows me. I assume most of them think I'm some typical random donk tourist....other than UTG+1 who I had a 2 min conversation with earlier so he knows I play at least a fair amount.

$150 and be wary of a UTG+1 back raise.

$150 and if UTG 4bets she's prob light.

OK we all agree I need to 3 bet obviously. Maybe $150ish is better but I made it $110.

Both UTG and UTG+1 called.

Flop ($340) 7h6c5s. They both check to me....

Why am I already starting to get a very bad feeling about this hand...? 🤢🤮

I am with the crowd whom are attempting to isolate the UTG “T.asi.lty” (Tilty Asian) female. I 3bet to around $175 in this spot, looking to GII vs. one opponent by the turn on favorable runouts.

What happened next??? 🤔🤗🤔🤗

Anything less than $150 is criminal here. It's an aggro table where JTs was 4-bet, come on.

Blinds ($7) + Straddle ($10) + Bet ($35) + call ($35) = $87
I like doubling this amount if we are OOP ($174), but we are in decent position, so it doesn't have to be exactly doubled and we can go slightly less.

3! to $150-175

Im not arguing that bigger is better, but dont you think shes more likely to 4 bet lite when I go $110 than $150+?

bet 175 you can then jam 615 into 690+ on good turns

I am not so sure our main objective is to try and "induce" her to 4 bet us light. She may do that and she may not, it depends on her buttonclicking itching at the time+what type of hand she has. That is risky business to not go big enough when we have several deep stacks at the table, and we dont really want this to go multiway+ giving our opponents decent implied odds in a bloated 3 bet pot that may very well be a stackoff spot for us with an overpair.

If UTG+1 backpack pro is a good player, we dont really want him in the pot- and i see nothing wrong with sizing up our 3 bet here as a part of a strategy to give him less insentive to come along to the flop, and that way maximize our chances of playing heads up against our main target.

Good post by setintostraight by the way.

Definitely not a favorable flop! 🤮

This flop definitely favors our opponents ranges (especially UTG+1) more than ours. Since this table has been pretty aggressive, both of our opponents can conceivably have all two pairs, sets, and 98s for the nut straight. Our range is mostly capped at JJ+.

Luckily we have position, and I would check through on this flop to see what develops on the turn. Too much opportunity for our opponents to CR on this flop which puts us basically in a B/F situation resulting in us not realizing our equity. This is a disaster when our opponents CR us on a bluff or semi-bluff.

That seems pretty big to me. I normally don't go that big anyways and in this case running into effective stacks sizes would normally make me cut it down even further. Hero only has $900 so anything $100+ is pushing pot commitment. If I didn't expect UTG and UTG+1 to be excessively sticky here I would normally raise to $100-$125.

UTG probably isn't thinking about it, but UTG+1 certainly is.

I split the difference on this issue. How much it affects villain's range varies, some don't adjust at all, a few over adjust, most are in between. They are aware of the straddle but don't adjust enough, opening and playing too loose for the situation. It should make a big difference in hero's calling range because hero should be aware that there are a lot of hands hero can call with at 90BB that are folds at 45BB and the effect gets more pronounced the smaller stacks get, even if hero knows villains are not adjusting their opening ranges correctly. But you are correct that most villain's stacking off range is not adjusted correctly and hero has to adapt to that incorrect range.

Great flop to lose your stack but your also trivially committed because SPR is less then 3. Bet $200 for a good turn shove size. Sigh/call if there is one shove, sigh/fold if there are 2.

I check flop.

If we bet and get raised by V1 (and V2 folds) we probably need to play for stacks which, even though she seems erratic, doesn't make me feel great 200bbs deep with one pair.

If we bet and get raised by V2, I think we are probably folding, even though he probably has some semibluffs in his range.

At this point let's try to get to showdown.