Quote:
Originally Posted by 7weeks2days
No one in this thread is getting to this spot/dynamic ap so people saying they would fold as either v or think you are going for some form of value does not really mean much.
Just because no 2+2er is going to play like either of these villains doesn't mean our reads of hero river bet are meaningless.
The fish in this hand are making some attempt to determine what hand hero has. It's difficult to tell with bad players what their thought process is like because there are so many various Illogical ways inexperienced players think about the game.
In my opinion two commonly held beliefs among inexperienced/uneducated players are very prevalent;
1) The absolute size of a bet is what matters because they haven't learned about pot odds, implied odds, must defend frequencies, ranges, balance, hand reading etc. All they know is the absolute strength of their hand and they proceed to put absolute monetary values on those hands.
2) They think poker is ALL about deception to the point of absurdity. So if THEY have a strong hand they want to hide that fact by trapping. If someone is betting very big early in the hand they'll wonder whether they are bluffing because if they themselves had a big hand they'd wait till the river before trying to get value in order to fool their opponents.
So although it's nice for hero to know that we'd frequently fold river if one of us were somehow hanging about in this MW pot with a small pair it is more critical what we think the fish will do. Personally I think they'll fold, a lot, as they did. Yes maybe AK is actually winning sometimes like ImAllinNow suggests - however in my experience this small same-bet each street betting pattern is very often a crap top pair or a pair below top pair.
The fish simply thinks "I value a pair of 8s at $20 per street and no more." When hero then bet 3 times that amount, even though it's a less than half PSB, fish just thinks "ah, this guy had a strong hand all along and he's tricked me just like I would do to him. I fold."
I think that against fish hero's line is a low-risk exploitative strategy to steal some of these weird small pots. I think it probably works better than bluff raising them earlier because I think fish get suspicious of early aggressive action and when you couple that with their insatiable desire to see every board card before they fold - you're going to get called in all sorts of stupid spots by lots of terrible hands.
Surely this is why we are mainly just raising and betting for value vs fish? Because they can't fold. But if they've got to the river, seen all the cards and still just have a "$20 hand" all we have to do is guess what value they put on their unimproved hand (easy because it's often whatever they bet on flop and turn) and bet an amount 3+ times that for them to fold.