2 orbits in. Table seems like a mix of chasers and decent players. The main villains haven't gone past turn as far as I remember. I've seen no hands of theirs. Smallest of final villains stacks is $200 ("original bettor"). I have $300 and everyone else covers me.
On the button

QcTd

3 calls, hero calls, blinds completed 6 to flop

Flop ($18)

T83 rainbow

Check, Check, Bet 6. Call, hero raises to 25, SB calls, fold, fold, original bettor calls, call.

Turn($118)

2c

Check, check, Hero???

I am making the transition to no limit from limit. I raised to basically "see a free card"...... do I want it?

Comments on all streets appreciated

S3G

Raising to see a free card works better if you have a draw. It's a good play since you get better hands to fold, and allows you to check the turn to see a free river.

Raising with Top pair, decent kicker in a 6way pot is amost over-repping your hand and essentially turning it into a bluff, but I like it since there is now $30 in the pot, and $6 is such a small bet to call that we need to charge draws and random junk from drawing out on what is often the best hand. Your raise-sizing doesn't help narrow ranges, so I would have made it $35-$40 at least. Getting it heads up with the bettor that made it $6 is a much better result, and we can get better reads on our opponents hand strength by seeing how they react to our bet size.

Once we are 4 way on the turn, our hand is not strong enough to get stacks in so I'm looking to get to a cheap showdown. This pot is extremely bloated given the relative strength of our hand.

On the surface, it appears like we are ahead, since you would think opponents would raise all of their sets on the flop, but it's not a lock. Same with two-pair. Low stakes opponents play bad/passive preflop and postflop, which makes their ranges all over the place. For example, one of your opponents can easily have AT here that would be willing to call huge bets with a vulnerable 1-pair hand, yet only be willing to limp in for $3 and only willing to make a tepid $6 probing bet with the exact same hand. Bet small when they are ahead, and call huge when their crushed. The perfect recipe for losing at NL.

Also, it's likely that someone is slowplaying, so I'm not going to get stacked making a pot-commiting bet on the turn, even though it appears like we are ahead.

On the river, I'm probably folding to a bet since almost every card will be bad for our hand, and there's a chance we were behind the entire way.

This may seem nitty, but over-playing top pair in limped pots is a massive leak at the low stakes. We should only be looking to shovel money in when we are the guy with the nuts and the other fish can't fold his top pair. Not the other way around.

I put my opponents on draws and make it $60 - $75. Even with a middling hand like TP Q kicker, in this spot. That's a good (high) price to charge for people to draw against you, and it sounds like they may be willing to pay it.

You didn't raise to get a free card, you raised because you thought you had the best hand, and to take control of the hand. The $6 screams draw or a weaker 10 to me. If I'm called I def check every river.

Fold pre. Raising QTs

This. Prob raising QJo unless table is limping AQo/KJo

Over limping QTo on the BTN is fine if you think you have a skill edge. Without better reads on the table the flop raise becomes an overplay and you need to immediately slow down. Check back the turn and generally fold to a sizable river bet, especially if it comes from the SB.

Edit: 100 BB's effective is the minimum I would consider over limping this hand btw and may be a tad too small. I advocated a limp because I'm generally always >150 BB's effective.

I'd go 20-30 pre, I'm looking for smallest number that is still likely to take it down.

AP, flop is ok,could call,could raise more.

Ap,turn, I'd usually b/f 1/2 to 3/4 pot. Decent chance we're ahead here.

Given small betsize on the flop a raise isn't totally out of order, but turn is a clear check imo. If your opponent had bet bigger OTF, it quickly becomes a call imo.

Thanks for the input. Seems like a lot of conflicting ideas. fold preflop, call preflop. Bet flop / check flop. Bet Turn / check turn. What I get from this is that it is not an easy decision either way.

I'll stop overthinking it. The toughest info to hear is folding preflop for $3. That, I wasn't expecting.

3GS

Welcome to 2+2, where every $3 is ripe for ideological battle.

This is advice you will hear frequently. It is very often correct. After a lot of experience you can play around with this hand, but when starting out, best to keep it simple. Though if you're not inclined to play micro stakes online, you will have to learn hard lessons at some point, and limping for $3 in position is a cheaper lesson (usually) than lots of other beginners' mistakes. GL

Folding pre seems completely indefensible to me. You have position on everyone. Are their hands, on average, likely to be better or worse than QT? Seems like an obvious "worse", right? So we're folding why? I play all sorts of speculative junk for a multiway limp OTB and think it's a huge leak not doing it. QT is not even close for me, I will play any suited queen in this spot and unsuited one-gappers down to like 97o.

OTF, I don't really like raising. It's not a particularly drawish board and our Q is a blocker to draw outs. Raising is turning our hand into a bluff and we're going to be in no man's land on subsequent streets. Let's say we do raise and only the bettor calls. Turn is a blank and he checks. Betting? How about on the river? Raising and then continuing to bet is going to be way overplaying our hand, while raising the flop with a value hand and then wanting to check later streets is a pretty good sign that we didn't actually have a value raise.

Raising would be better from OOP, where charging people for their hands is important and taking the pot down is a good result. In position I'm happy to just let the hand play out, I think there will be opportunities to bet later in the hand that have a much better value expectation than raising the flop.

I will say that the small bet size argues for raising and it is somewhat close. I would raise KT because then I get action from QT and beat it instead of raising QT, getting action from KT and losing. AT is a clear raise for value.

With a more normal bet size from the opponent I wouldn't raise either KT or AT.

While there is not a 1:1 correlation between # of posts and skill level, Chris you have 32K posts. OP has as of this moment, two. (He haz pair.) Newbies aren't really asking what you would do, they're asking what they should have done. Completely different ball game.

OP has TPMK in a MW pot that is becoming a bit more bloated than he hoped for, and he doesn't have a plan. In a way, there's nothing wrong with that! It's a spot we all have been in hundreds of times, some of us keep getting in them as a matter of fact, but telling OP to fold pre and avoid them until he has more experience is entirely defensible. If he's not worried about the money and as long as he wants to learn, he can also feel free to get in there and get dirty, but that tends to be expensive.

If that's the rationale then people should post it explicitly, like "if you're not very experienced you might want to avoid these sort of spots by folding pre". But not just "fold pre" like that's good general advice. OP probably wants advice tailored to OP, but he's not the only one reading threads and trying to improve.

I also disagree that limping OTB here is something particularly liable to get a noob into trouble, it's an unraised pot with Hero in position and the hand plays straightforwardly in most spots. Stuff like raising AQ out of the blinds leads to far more difficult to play postflop spots, but people advocate it anyway because it's good poker.

You have to be pretty terrible at poker to be playing QTo with a -EV multiway from the BTN.

Yet it's T832 rainbow and OP doesn't know what to do.

I think this hand is pretty good evidence of the joys of being in position and how difficult it is to **** this up. I prefer calling the flop, but raise is reasonable too. Either bet or check on the turn would be fine. Unless he starts calling when they checkraise or donk the river things can't get too out of control.

I should say though OP, "raising to get a free card" is not a thing in NL, because betting doesn't double on the turn. Almost always when we bet or raise it's with the idea either of getting better hands to fold or worse hands to call. Sometimes we might check behind the turn if they call a flop raise, but that's a plan B when they don't fold. Raising early in the hand tends to make the pot larger, and the saying in NL is "big pots for big hands". So (oversimplifying a bit here) a flop raise should generally be either a big value hand that we want to play a big pot with, or a big draw where we don't mind if a lot of money goes in right now, or a one-shot bluff where we're done with the hand if called.

This hand would be a very easy call if the bettor had bet a normal amount, like $12. The only reason raise is reasonable is that the smaller bets are, the more they should be treated like a check. I would treat a bet of $3 exactly like a check here. $6 is in a bit of an in between twilight zone. As a result I'm flatting QT (which I would raise vs a check or $3 bet) and raising KT (which I would flat to a normal size bet).

I'm cool with seeing a cheap flop in the best position preflop.

I would never raise the flop here. More often than not, my initial instinct is to actually fold here, but we're getting an awesome price so I might lean towards calling and using our position to evaluate turn card/action. Mostly it's dependent on opponents (the nittier the donker or caller are, the more I'm folding even for this good price). Raising just starts building way too big a pot with our very mediocre hand (we didn't play this preflop to hit TP3K). Also note how a Q might be the worst turn card (completing the OESD of J9).

Transitioning from Limit to NL is a tough one. A few key concepts to keep in mind is "small hand, small pot; big hand, big pot", and we have a very small hand here. Also, "don't go broke in a limped pot". Raising for a "free card" (um, that free card actually cost us $19, which would be a fairly awesome hourly winrate at this game, so not exactly free) is typically not a good play unless we have a really nice drawing hand (which we don't here). Overall, I toned down my aggression like 10x moving from Limit to NL.

I'd check the turn after this action and try to get to a cheap showdown at this point.

ETA: Preflop boils down to how good you are at NL postflop. Most winning players could probably make QTo profitable overlimping it in LP. For losing players, it's highly unlikely they'd play it profitably, so they'd be better off folding it preflop.

GcluelessNLnoobG