1/2 game, loose passive lineup, tons of preflop limping even with top tier hands, partly due to high-hand bonus fixation.
Player in HJ is limping nearly every hand (sometimes raising to $7) and is probably the most active postflop. BTN also likes raising to $7. Other players are straightforward L/p.
Stacks are $150-200ish.

EP, HJ, CO, BTN limp, Hero completes Q8 in SB, BB checks.

Flop ($11, 6): A T 7
Hero checks, checked around

Turn J
Checked to HJ bets $6, CO raises to $15, BTN calls, Hero ?

I hate limped pots. CO probably has KThh exactly. Most rivers are bricks..

You flopped 2nd nut FD and a couple of ways to a BDSD in a 6 limper hand.

Why did you check? Why not lead out for a pot sized bet like you are defending your mediocre A? It's a small bet that you can get away from if raised and stacks don't justify a call.

On the turn with 2nd nut FD and a double gutter SD and you're still checking? what are you waiting for?

AP, I'm torn between calling and raising big. Maybe the HJ has a made str8 and was trying to induce a raise or maybe he was just fishing for info or got tired of playing checkers. The other two certainly don't have made str8s or they would protect from the FD or higher SD unless you think they are complete nits who have to wait till they have river nuts to get brave.

I call. 6 handed and a free ticket to the turn, the odds of one of them underrepping a 9 is too great. But it's worth $15 to maybe get the flush or K.

Checks on flop and turn are good OOP on wet board where you shouldn't have a good ace. They probably hit it hard on the turn on that high board. I would cold call the turn raise. 3-betting the turn would be really bad.

I think this is a raise or fold spot. I don’t like calling because with this many people in the pot, not only can someone have one or both of our draws nutted, but if we call we are also subject to getting 3bet by the original bettor.

I probably lead flop or turn, by the way.

Not loving this spot, but I think we can profitably call. Even though a $6 bet into $11 multiway should be fairly strong, for that dollar amount, it's not going to be super strong. If he had 2pair, a straight, etc, I expect he likely goes $10+. So I doubt if we call we will get 3bet very often.

Also, if the CO had 2 pair or a straight on the river, even if the flush completes, I think players will still bet fairly often. They tend to assume flushes will lead the river, which also may get them to call your raise as well. Or you could lead a flush completing river. Either way you have close to the correct pot odds and enough implied odds for a profitable call.

Not as clear what to do if you hit a straight on the river though. If you hit the 4 liner it is just hard to get paid, but if you hit the Q high you only have the second nuts. Either way, it gives you some added equity, which helps.

I don't think it's a super profitable call though. You are just going to lose most of the time. But if you get paid off a little when you do hit then you are probably seeing on average more than $15 return to you when you stick in $15 here. Even with the reverse implied odds of being against the king high flush draw, although that is a concern.

I don't love the idea of raising. I don't know that CO will have many folds if we raise here. And if he jams, it is really bad. Our equity and implied odds helps though.

I guess I would call in this dumb game, but I'm assuming the straight outs are chops.

A 9 will not be a chop very often, as we’ll beat a one-card straight (or worse hand) but lose if the nut straight is out there.

Hmmmm... interesting hand, MOM (yeah, I just abbreviated your name to MOM).

PRE - I'm usually playing my entire range as raise or fold in the SB. I think I can sort of get behind an over-limp here, with Q8s, simply because it doesn't seem like our opponents are good enough to understand how collapsed our range becomes.

Otherwise, I wouldn't like having an over-limp range heavily weighted towards mediocre Broadway-middling gappers like J7s/Q8s/K9s. It's hard to balance, unless we're also flatting some hands like AJ/AQ and 99-TT.

FLOP - can't really ask for a much better flop for our hand, in a limped pot. Unlikely anyone is going to have smashed this in a big enough way to want to pile it in, so I think I'd just lead out for like 1 or 2bb.

Full disclosure, I've experimented with leading stupid-small on multi-way flops, and then absolutely bombing the turn when no one raises my stupid small flop bet. I'm still surprised how often opponents will turbo fold to my turn bets.

TURN - so....yeah, I'd have led out on the flop, and bombed this turn card. But as played, I think our best option is to just check-call, and play some pot control.

HJ can really only 3B with KQ. If he 3B's and CO calls or jams, it's an easy fold for us. But otherwise, I think our hand has too much going for it to let it go just yet.

I don't like raising, because low stakes players will NEVER believe you checked twice with a monster, with a FDFD out there. You'd only be repping precisely KhQh. If either opponent has the Kh, the jig is up.

Raising here generates next to no fold equity, unless you go stupid huge, which is taking a big chance that neither opponent calls with KQ or 98, or 2P, or a better draw, or just decides to get sticky with A9 or something equally stupid.

Just call. See what happens. Next time, lead flop small and bomb river. Thank me later.

Sorry, I meant bomb turn above, not bomb river.

We should definitely have overlimps in the SB where it is only 0.5 bb to complete. Maybe not if it is an egregious flat drop structure, but it looks like a standard 10% rake based on pot size. Hero is calling $1 to see an $11 flop.

"It's hard to balance," balance is a GTO concept. We are playing exploitative poker. It is okay to be imbalanced. We are generally going to up against a bunch of super capped ranges with bad recs that can make huge mistakes postflop. We don't really need to worry about being balanced or protecting our overlimp range.

Playing raise or fold from the SB is more a response to higher rake structures and bigger open sizes where it is harder to play cold calls from the SB profitably. So cold calling 4x with 10% rake in live poker is rarely going be profitable, with som rare exceptipns, like preflop raiser and BB are both weak players we are deep with. But against minraises, even with rake the SB can have some profitable cold calls. Compare that to facing a limp where we only have to call 0.5BB and face super capped ranges and weak recs, calls from SB definitely become profitable.

This will contribute nothing to the discussion, but I fold spots like this preflop. If you know what you're doing then completing is theoretically +EV. I don't - and I suspect that I am capable of making a lot of blunders postflop that lead to a lot of volatility at best and probably losing a lot of money at worst - so most of the time despite incredible odds I quietly fold and move on. At least, in my head.

If I did end up here, I'd probably check the flop as Ax will be represented a lot and unlikely to fold. We got a fantastic result (free turn card and additional equity) but with straights and better flush draws out there I'd now fold turn.

Good stuff, man. Thank you for that. I may need to re-think some of my baseline pre-flop strat.

Thanks all for responses and food for thought.

Preflop I did not consider doing anything other than calling. The table is loose and passive and some may be limping with a big pair, trying to hit a high hand. (We had a thread on this recently) . Also they play cautiously with stuff like AQ, AJ, TT etc.
Players in these games are alert to flushes and flush draws but not so much for straights. Not sure why, could be that they do a lot of flush fishing themselves, or it's just easier to see

As it played out, I folded, figuring CO for one of the straights and expecting BTN to have a flush draw, which takes some of my outs and could have me dominated. HJ ($6 bet) folded too, so the pot was $42 going to the river.

River was 4 and it went check check. CO had KQo no heart and asked BTN if he had the flush. He did not.

Calling turn seemed neutral - I don't know if I get paid much on the river - but I probably should not have feared a higher FD bc I think the more aggressive HJ or BTN would have bet the flop with KXhh.

Decently solid hand to complete with from sb.

This is a pretty rough spot. Theres conflicting arguments for folding, raising, and calling.

First lets look at a call. If someone has QJ then your straight draw is worthless, and if someone has NFD then your flush draw is worthless, and Vs can have both, which makes calling seem like a move that could end quite poorly, since basically nothing but Kh youre especially ecstatic to get stacks in.

Ok well lets look at a raise, a big 3 bet could make sense because you can rep some very strong hands, and fold out some pretty strong made hands The issue is that with how tight people raise at these stakes, theres a good chance youre facing A7+, and with how loose they call, they probably wont fold it to a 3 bet, and also someone might just yolo snap off even a jam with the king flush draw.

Folding a hand that seems like a 15 outer including 4 outs to the nuts seems not awesome, but im basically between fold and call here. Id probably call turn and go the passive route and check call if i hit otr, because people tend to overplay when they hit something like a low fd so id expect btn to bet 54hh if he hits or whatever. BF works too though.

Grunch: easy call for $15