Historically, I've been a Limit player (online back in the day and off and on live since then), but my casino's limit game is unbeatable (rake/promo) so I've been dipping my toe into NL the last few weeks...

1/3 game in Midwest Casino

Hero has QQ in the SB with approximately $550. Fishy bad guy limps UTG with ~$200. Good LAG overlimps OTB (he has me covered). Folds to me and I make it $17 in the SB. New shortstacker guy (BI for $100) calls in BB. Limpers both call.

Flop is 7 7 4 Pot is $63 after rake.

Hero bets $55. BB folds, UTG folds. Good LAG OTB calls.

Good LAG is someone I've noticed since he sat down at the table approximately 1.5 hours before this hand. He can 3-bet OTB without a premium hand, will open with a wide-range in position vs. limpers or in short-handed pots, and is willing to make moves post-flop (though he'll have some equity/outs when he does so). Notable hand I saw him play: UTG+1 limps, LAG raises in CO to $15. Flop QT6 rainbow. UTG+1 donks $25, LAG raises to $60. UTG+1 ships for ~$175 more. LAG calls with J9o and spikes a river 8 (vs. UTG+1 over-played KQo).

Notable hand he's seen me play: I raise a MP limper to $12 in LP and get 3-bet by BB to $40. I call, flop is T63 rainbow. BB bets $45, I call. Turn pairs the 6. It goes c/c. River is a blank and I check behind again and win. Otherwise, my table image is standard TAG that doesn't get too out of line, but can generally board read, makes okay decisions, but maybe tends to bet more conservatively (i.e. smaller) than is maybe warranted (that whole limit background/discomfort with NL thing).

Turn is J. Pot is $173.

Hero bets $125. Good LAG shoves. Hero?

bigger pre.

flop bet is too big and will only get called by better. id probably just check this flop OOP vs. 3 players and see what happens. also by betting big you are setting yourself up for an awkward turn/river situation because the pot is becoming too big for your hand.

id check the turn, probably folding to a big bet and calling a medium sized bet.

as played i guess fold, even if he "makes moves" i dont see how you can just put him on a random flop float here with no evidence he's capable of floating with air.

More pre, less flop, check turn if he truly is a lag

25 pre

then 1/2 pot flop

let lag take the lead after that

Welcome to the dark side! I played many hours of 2/4 Limit - 4/8 Limit (where, yes, rake is crushing and pretty much unbeatable at the lowest steaks) before eventually moving to NL.

My preflop thoughts differ than most on this forum. I think it is absolutely key that you must avoid playing OOP to good players while giving them good IO with perhaps face-upish hands especially in multiway pots (which create small handcuffing SPRs). So preflop is actually a lot more difficult than you may realize (and absolutely does not boil down to "I haz QQ I raz". If we were only up against the loose $200 limping fish, then a preflop raise to $20 would setup a trivial stack off situation postflop with TP. But the overlimp by the good lag on the Button really throws a monkey wrench into things this deep. Unless we feel we can raise to an amount that will isolate the fish and yet fold the Button, raising becomes a lot more tricky. So I'd either attempt a raise that would accomplish that (say $40 if I feel the fish will go for that) or else I'd seriously consider just completing here. Absolutely no one here will agree with that. But you simply can't underestimate the hugenormous disadvantage you are at OOP to a much more skilled player this deep with a perhaps face-upish hand; underestimate it at your own peril. NL is often about avoiding incredibly big mistakes, and you are on your way to making the only mistake that will matter in this whole session (rendering every other decision you make in this session irrelevant).

Postflop we don't really care about the shortstacks. They paid a pretty handsome preflop price to see the flop and if they outflopped us well they're going to get our stack especially since the SPR is so small against them. A bigger raise would have made their mistake larger, but whatever.

So the real guy to concentrate on is the deeper stack where the SPR is 8.5. This means that stacks can go in with just 3 biggish (but still reasonable) bets. How often are we going to be ahead of a good player by raising preflop from the blinds and then betting 3 postflop bets for stacks with him calling down? If your answer is "about never", then you're correct. The less you turn your hand face up on the table at this point, the better you'll be. The board isn't very drawy. We certainly risk giving free cards to A/K but maybe someone else will bet. I'd mostly lean to a check here and see what happens. If the smaller stacks get involved, we'll have an easy decision of committing (in whichever manner we see fit). If the deeper stack gets involved, we'll have to proceed more cautiously.

Even if we were to bet (which ain't great) our flop sizing was atrocious. While we are committed against the shortstacks (where betting big would be fine) we are not committed against the deepstack, and he's the guy we should be worried about. Against him, we only want to bet very small (if betting at all). We should be hating life after the flop result, imo. He knows pretty much exactly what we have and yet we're flying blind and he knows it. He's simply going to own us on later streets (by either putting our stack in play with either bluffs or value bets) and leave us in a world of hurt OOP and guessing. You need to avoid these situations (especially as a noob) at all costs (which goes back to preflop as well as the flop bet and sizing).

And again the turn bet is setting up a hugenormous pot where we'll only have about 80% PSB left for the river and can be made to play for that trivially. Him flatting the turn or jamming the turn is just as scary. And we're doing all of this with a face-up hand (seriously, this guy knows pretty much exactly what we have) having gotten in just a lol 3% of our stack preflop as the fave.

The dark side is quite a learning curve when coming from the Limit side. The more you play, the more you'll realize the importance of position, the difficulty level of your opponent, stack sizes, playing a small pot with a small hand (one pear is about the smallest hand there is, why are we playing such a big pot with it?), not turning your hand face up when not committed, the value of hands converging preflop if big percentages of stacks don't go in, etc.

Ggoodluck!G

Flop bet is too big, and I might check vs. this lineup. Turn bet is also too big, and it should definitely be a check vs. a good LAG.

As played, go with your gut. From my computer, I fold, but he could have a hand like 5c6c -- besides a bluff, that's about all I can think of that we beat.

So what we have here is some highly contradictory play by villain. If he's willing to iso with J9o then he's not limping the BTN ever. The fact he did is just a display of chaotic playing more than balanced thinking imo. I.E. he's a random button masher, just doing whatever whenever.

OTTH


For starters raise it up a little more pre. I like a 5x+1 when OOP, so with 2 limpers this should be a 7x open for $21.

On the dry flop just bet half pot. We want to keep in his middling pairs and his weird ace high floats and what not.

With that turn I'm calling it off, he likes to jam draws and otherwise make moves, especially with outs as you described. Does he do this with a random 7? Honestly I doubt he does. Only thing is you are betting the flop and turn so much that you are kinda announcing your hand. I dont think he puts you on AK or something at this point trying to bluff you off, but then again it's live and players will go for the most absurd bluffs sometimes, especially if it's in a spot they would fold. I've been criticized plenty of times for shipping AA on the flop because "omg you just have 1 paaaaiiirr, how can you call that!"

I'd prefer 20 (or maybe more, like 25) pre. We're OOP and deep vs an aggressive opponent. If he wants to play, we need to make it expensive.

Flop size is...well, sorry. It's bad. What is this bet trying to accomplish; size up so large that only 7x and like 65 can continue? So that when we're faced with bluffcatch situations, the bet sizes we face are bigger?

AP trivial fold. We blew out weak portions of his range on the flop (so much so, that I don't even know if we should be value betting, my guess is no, we shouldn't) so his raise is just 7x/44 weighted hard.

The problem is that this deep we'll rarely be able to make it expensive enough for him. Even a "large" raise to $25 (where it's possible we may now start to be giving sizing tells regarding our hand?) still gives him fairly awesome 22:1 IO with him having position in a difficult to play HU ~10ish SPR pot.

Gpreflopisverydifficultandnotstraightforward,imoG

Well then the answer is make it bigger. We have QQ. He has between 16% and 32% equity against us. If he wants to call $30 to realize it, let’s let him

We’re in agreement that 17 isn’t correct because it doesn’t get enough value and gives him too good of a price to try and hit something with 87s or whatever.


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Even $30 (and I'll let OP decide whether that is really tabling his hand) gives him close to 20:1 IO (not horrific in position). This is why I would recommend either (a) a huge lol raise that hopefully just ends up isolating the fish versus (b) no raise at all (which doesn't turn our hand perhaps face up deep OOP to a difficult player where we then simply play some postflop poker). The latter option obviously ain't terrific (especially against the shorter fish), but we'll have position on the deep difficult guy 9 out of 10 hands; in the 1 out of 10 times we don't, we don't have to build a pot just cuz we haz big pear.

GimoG

Back to the problem of "there's actual value with your hand". Like if you make a raise and he calls, you're going to be winning money in the long run. QQ usually beats 87s. Our range might be more defined, but if we play good strategic poker postflop, it doesn't really matter: we have a huge range edge.

I guess it depends on what you believe, but I absolutely do not believe this at all. Deep / difficult / in position trumps our starting cards, and it's not particularly close especially when OP is noobish / perhaps face upish, imo.

ETA: My guess is there wouldn't be a good deepstack player on here that would figure this spot (in position deep against a non-expert) ain't profitable with quite a large range facing any "reasonable" raise.

ETA#2: And it doesn't matter that "QQ usually beats 87s". First, obviously that's fine if we got in hugely significant percentages of our stack preflop, but we can't do that. Second, all that matters is the amount of money won versus lost; QQ could still win way more pots than 87s but lose money overall.

Gimo,butyou'refreetodisagreeG

"... NL is often about avoiding incredibly big mistakes, and you are on your way to making the only mistake that will matter in this whole session (rendering every other decision you make in this session irrelevant)... "

IMO this is the most important point GG has ever made in this thread or any other.

Even if a Villain sucks out four times in a row, if he makes the fatal mistake and loses his stack the fifth time (hopefully to us) the first four times don't make any difference to him, but it does to us because we get his stack.

Large, medium or small, our stack is what we have to play with in any particular hand. Maximize the good decisions and minimize the bad decisions, that is all we can do.

OOP it's far easier to make a bad decision and not know it until it's too late.

In NLHE the only warning sign we get (usually) is a twig cracking half a mile away in the dark forest. (Not original, I read it somewhere long ago.) OOP we are wearing earmuffs and the sun is shining directly into our eyes (to continue a bad metaphor).

And this example shows why we can afford to widen our range in position when stacks are deep.

Regarding this idea of a preflop overbet, I always like to ask "if your opponent told you that there was only 1 bet he'd call and that was $3 and you believed him, what would you make it?" The correct answer is $3 despite the fact that your opponent would be correct to call you.

If we arent concerned about sizing tells and this game is nuts then sure fine, make it $50 pre and $200 on the flop and put the rest in on the turn. I honestly dont really think live players are this bad unless some guy is on monkey tilt and drunk as hell which does happen on occasion, but not this time.

Villain has position on us and has implied odds to call, thats great. We also can squeeze value out of him all along the way, so as long as we arent always getting felted with QQ in these spots it's ok to just play for some preflop and flop value.

I could def see villain having like 89dd or A5cc and using a little backdoor equity from the flop as an opportunity to rep trips on the turn. I just have to ask myself "if you had trips in position vs a guy betting heavily, do you really need to get the money in asap? At least give him a chance to bet the river"