AP, Call/Call

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At this point stacks are going in so you may as well shove now since neither one of you are folding. Fwiw you should've 3b flop.

Call the flop raise and shove over his turn lead on brick turn cards. If a diamond or J hits the turn and he leads I would go with live read/sizing to evaluate. Probably not folding if board runs out well enough.

depending on his perceived range i think there are definitely times where we would want to raise turn. like if we think AK and TT are almost certainly not in his limping range, and if we think he will continue to semi-bluff a lot of hands that are drawing live and value bet his worse kings, this turn is a must-raise.

for instance, take this scenario, where we eliminate AK and TT, and assume he continues pretty wide with his Kx, NFD and combo draws:

Board: Kd Td 7s Kh
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 68.357% 54.55% 13.81% 312 79.00 { KsQh }
Hand 1: 31.643% 17.83% 13.81% 102 79.00 { AdQd, AdJd, Ad9d, KTs+, QdJd, Qd9d, KJo+ }

he has a lot of hands that can call a value raise and also a lot of draws that we want to charge by the river. we are also ahead nearly always.

i think this range is probably a bit too optimistic for most villains, both in the sense that we've completely eliminated hands that have us beat, and we've assumed he will continue to semi-bluff a lot of hands that are drawing live.

now, if we give him a tighter limp-call range (eliminate KJo and KTo), add AKo and TT back in, and assume he only bets trips or a boat, a raise becomes suicidal and our equity drops to like 30%. a raise is also bad if he only continues on the turn with these strong value hands OR air, since he just folds his air.

so that's a long way of saying i think i agree with your recommendation, even though i can see a scenario where i wouldn't. a raise is only good on the turn if we think live draws are a significant part of his range, and if we think stone bluffs and Tx are unlikely. against an unknown UTG limp-caller who we suspect might be competent, i think that these conditions are rarely met and we should probably just call down.

in fact, i think we might even have to consider folding if a really bad river, like the Jd, were to fall and he leads into us again.

I hear what you're saying. I ranged villain similarly but justified 3-betting flop. I feel villains who semibluff raise don't wanna give up to a 3-bet. He may 4-bet shove when his equity is greatest with 2 cards to come but we are still significantly ahead. He may flat but at least we set his price. I do see merit to calling and piling it in on a blank turn when our equity advantage is much higher against these hands but the downside is that if a scare card hits it either - (1)binks him for free (2) kills our action against worse kings (3) allows him to potentially rep a made draw and bluff us off the best hand.

But we did NOT give a free turn. In fact, V did us a favor by cutting into his own implied odds (if he is drawing to a flush).

One of the reasons why we bet is to deny proper pot odds, well in this case, villain has already done it for us by betting too big (if he is drawing) so we don't have to be worried about giving free cards or pricing villain in.

So where does that leave us? Well, that leaves us with trying to extract max value from V. And the way we do that is to let him retain the initiative and continue to barrel off while we underrep our hand. At this point, V should think that Kx is the nuts and even be empowered enough to overplay Tx hands since our flatting removes Kx from our range (from villain's perspective).

So in spots like these, I'm perfectly fine keeping his range wide and letting him barrel off. This is the more optimal line simply because this extracts value from more of V's range.

He has the initiative and he is firing away big bets, why do we feel the need to raise him? Let him continue to dig his own grave.

Otherwise, if we raise him, we remove all the Tx hands and even overplayed underpairs and airballs from his range.

Based on action, I think it's less likely V has a diamond draw so a river diamond is not going to scare me.

I really like a passive line here and everything said above ^. I find we often tend to only analyze the nuttish hands villains would checkraise the flop with, and forget that people like to bluff in poker too (even if they have slight equity, like AJo/J9o/22-99/XXdd etc.). I think we should just call down.

I'm in the camp of playing this passively and keeping V's range wide, although I'm not very happy about it. Hopefully let him hang himself with some weird hand. I've seen V's surprise me enough at 1/3 and have bizarre hands they just decide to go spewtard with.

Call the re-raise on the flop. Check/Call on following streets, as long as they don't have ridiculous run outs.

Sorry I forgot to update this.

I did elect to just call. Something smelled fishy.

River 4

Villain checks. There's almost $400 in the pot. About $300 behind.

Are we turning our hand into a bluff here if we shove?

What was the turn card/action?

7

See post 23 for a short description of turn

Grunch:

IP I really like just calling. When the turn bricks it gives him a chance to make mistakes with his entire range and not just his Kx. A diamond draw will feel obligated to keep firing which is a pretty good situation for you. Bet turn if checked to. Probably raisin small bets and calling big ones.

Turn just calling for same reasons.

River: will he call a shove with a naked k not AK? Unknowns are tough for this reason. If he won't fold trips then just shove right? If you bet you're committing to calling a shove. I don't think the odds of him bluff spazzing over an inducing bet are better than him just calling with a worse hand so I would likely just bet hard. He's unknown. Could definitely be missing a lot of value if you don't stick it in there.

I gotta agree with Spike up there^. I think if we bet, we shove.

Are we turning our hand into a bluff? I dunno. I'm not sure we have enough read on this V to answer that question. I think an average V could lay down AK here, but not always. Similarly, I could see a call with KJ or even K9 (for some reason LLSNL Vs love to call a raise with K9....). Is his calling range wider than his folding range? Again, I dunno.

Given that our best bet here is a shove, I'm not sure it makes any practical difference whether we are bluffing or value betting. If we had room to b/f, then I think we better know if we are bluffing or not, since we don't, I wouldn't worry about it.

well his river check should take boats and nearly always flush (unless hes lolbad hit-check river type) out of the equation. river shove might fold out hands that would cry-call value bet here $150-180?

AK is definitely in this villains range, but I'm thinking the best line would be to call flop and get it in on any safe turn cards. All the options seem to suck because if you 3 bet the flop you fold out most of the hands you're beating and if he ships you can't fold, but I doubt you're ahead.

Some non-zero percentage of villains range included hands he will fold to a shove so this logic is flawed.

Call him down for the most part here. Possible he's spazzing with a ten in his hand?

Results:

I agree. You are KaaayyyyyRushing most of his range even the part that calls your ship.

I know I have joined the conversation late and i have seen the results. So this might be a professor hindsight moment. But an unknown player limped utg, now the question we have to ask is: how experienced is this player? Does he understand the Gap concept? The thing about unknowns is just that, we have no info and a huge portion of our profit comes from gathering info and exploiting that info. Now there is a method i use when playing against an unknown. My method is to let other players pay to get info for me. An example with this hand is that he limped utg and in most cases a competent player understands they need a great starting hand to consider playing utg unless its for deception purposes. But in most cases in my experience it is most likely a fair/strong holding. It may be to our benefit in these situations to wait in till we get more info on him by viewing the hands he plays with the other players. Also when players first sit down they are usually playing their A-game. Just how good is there A-game? We have no idea. Props for loosing the least amount possible given that flop. The reason this spot was so tough was the lack of info imo. The question we have to ask ourselves is do I want to pay for the info? or wait patently and get that info for cheap?