Saturday night at Excalibur. Table is seven handed. Action has been pretty good as four players have VPIPs above 45.

Villain 1 is a mid 40s caucasian male. His VPIP/PFR has been 45/2 over 50 hands. In the last few orbits I have observed him limp/call with QQ in early position twice. In one of those hands he flopped top set and took a line of check/call, check, bet 1/2 psb against the preflop raiser in the heads up pot. He starts the hand with roughly $400.

Villain 2 is a late 20s caucasian male. His VPIP/PFR has been 49/26 over 50 hands. He has tended to c-bet very often and generally play aggressive post flop. In one hand in which he was heads up for a dry sidepot he bet with ace high OTR to fold out chops and small pairs after his OOP opponent checked three times (neither hero nor V1 involved in this pot). He starts the hand with roughly $250.

Hero is a late twenties caucasian male. My VPIP/PFR has been 13/10 over 130 hands. I've played one hand against V1 about three orbits ago in which I raised to $12 pre UTG, V1 called OTB, flop came J 7 3 r, I c-bet $17, he raised to $40 and I folded. Against V2 I played a hand an orbit ago in which I raised to $12 over his limp, I c-bet $15 on a two tone flop and he called, I bet $35 on a blank turn and he folded. I start the hand with $330.

On to the hand: V1 limps in EP, folds to V2 who raises to $12. Folds to hero in CO who calls with 8 8. BTN folds, blinds fold and V1 calls. Flop comes A K 8. V1 checks, V2 bets $22, hero raises to $55, V1 raises to $110, V2 folds, hero ???

After seeing V1 open limp/call from EP with QQ, I can see him possibly taking this line with KK. I tend to discount AA since he had a chance to l/rr pre, but it's still possible. If I say he can do this 33% of the time with AA then I define his winning hands as 1 combo of AA, 3 combos of KK for 4 total combos. There are 9 combos of AK he may have as well as 3 combos of A8. Not sure if I can include K8 for this line; if I only include the suited combos then K8hh and K8dd can be thrown in as well. I don't know if this kind of villain ever does this with strong draws or combo draws, but if he can then I can include hands like Q J in his range as well as 8 7.

If he does have two pair, I feel concerned that he can see strong draws in my own range so that any club freezes action on future streets. If I were to flat his raise I would have $208 left. Does anyone like to flat here to prevent V1 from realizing the strength of our hand, or is it always better to 4bet to prevent scare cards from killing our action? If we do 4bet, is a shove preferable or do we like to raise some intermediate amount (again, to possibly string him along and not give away our hand strength)?

All in moment.

This is a fist-pump shove every day of the week. Feel free to moonwalk around the table as he calls you off with AK, A8 (lol), clubs, combo draws...The only holdings that beat you are AA and KK. If he's got one of those, its a cooler, the poker Gods are having a great laugh at you expense, there's nothing you can do about it. All other holdings you crush, and if he has a 2pr or combo draw hand and draws out on you, "Dat's pokah, Baby". Reach in your pocket and happily pull out another bullet.

By the way, I note your raise-sizing is a bit off, and I think I see why: When facing a bet and choosing to raise, you should factor in your call of the bet when deciding what to raise to. Ex: on this hand, the pots ~35$, V2 fires $22 in that he'll never see again, so it's on you, with ~$57 in the pot, facing a bet against two villains with show tunes going off in your head. Your call of the $22 puts the pot to $75-80, so a full pot-sized raise would be to $95-$100ish. Your raise to $55 doesn't get max value and doesn't charge the draws enough.

I think the range you assign V here is way too conservative (then again you did say you're a nit, lol, so I guess you're assuming the other guy is too). Throw in some big sooted aces and suited broadways and your equity shoots up:
Board: Ac Kc 8s
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 82.371% 82.37% 00.00% 41589 0.00 { 8d8h }
Hand 1: 17.629% 17.63% 00.00% 8901 0.00 { KK+, ATs+, ATo+ }

Yeah this is an obv fist pump gii spot. If he has AA/KK, he's terrible; walk it off, get back in there, and get your money back.

If you're going to guess precise numbers, at least choose ones that are mathematically possible

We have a Degree all in moment, as one of my favorite dealers says.

Yeah, I wanted to ask about this as well. I'm raising a smallish amount because I think it's more likely for V1 to have a draw then V2 since V2 is the PFR and V1 had initially checked; I'm basically hoping to isolate V2 and get him to continue with hands like AT/AJ/AQ since I don't think he can get away when I give him good odds to continue. From V1's perspective I'm charging him $55 to continue in a hand with $113 in the pot (including my $55 bet), so he's getting 2:1 to see the turn and knows he'll have to pay more to see the river.

Is this type of flop iso raise a good idea considering these circumstances? Would I have been better off going for 3.5 x the $22 initial bet even if I do want to isolate? I was really concerned about keeping V2 in the hand going to the turn, but obv I do have to be concerned about the wettish flop in a 3way pot.

Haha, good observation. Looking at my tracker I can now see that it's 49/26 over 53. I take notes on my phone while other players think I'm playing words with friends.

that seems like an awful lot of work.

Google Donktracker. At first it can be, but after a while it becomes second nature to tap a few buttons immediately after the preflop action.

I'll post results a bit later. They're fairly interesting, but not for the reason a few posts above seemed to infer.

Results:

I ask the dealer how much V2 has raised. I think for about 7 seconds and declare all in ($208 more). V2 snap folds.

After I rack up my chips a few orbits later, I ask V2 if he folded two pair or some kind of draw. He tells me he folded A8 (which by deduction has to be A8o).

Not a bad result for me by any means. V2 had 16% equity in this hand to hit an ace or runner runner kings, so getting him to forfeit that without seeing a turn is a positive. But it felt very weird to see a player bad enough to open limp/call QQ in EP seven handed, bad enough to limp/call A8o in EP eight handed, suddenly become capable enough to correctly lay down top and bottom pairs when getting 2.3 to 1. I hadn't been playing especially nitty in the last four orbits, and usually villains level themselves into thinking, "Well, he's a young guy who raises a lot. He could be doing this with J T." He made his 3bet rather quickly, so I tend to think he was looking purely at the strength of his own hand rather than thinking, "V1 has been playing LAGish. This initial raise could just be AQ/AJ/AT not respecting a c-bet. I'll raise for thin value and fold to a 4bet." I'm guessing I would have gotten called if villain had AK rather than A8; he was probably more fearful of AK being in my range than 88. He told me that he regretted his 3bet since he really wanted to see a turn and have a chance to draw out.

It did at least cause me to look at this situation a little differently, i.e. if I knew villain was capable of folding some of his two pair hands, would I gain anything by flatting his 3bet and planning to shove any non-ace turn? If I knew he could make that fold and effective stacks were very deep I might have to start looking at how much action I could gain by taking a line like that. On this board and with these stacks I still don't love that play since my call by itself will look very strong and action can get frozen by any club and to a lesser extent even by any Q/T/J.

Also, I realize that in this particular hand a larger initial raise by me would have caused V1 to either flat and feel committed OTT or make a larger 3bet so that he could not fold to a 4bet. I definitely wasn't thinking about this possibility when I made my initial raise (like I said, I was more trying to isolate the AQ/AJ type hands in V2's range and prevent V1 from drawing too easily), but I now see another bad thing that can happen when we make smallish raises with strong hands OTF.