1/3, hero new to table, just bought in to cover table. Villain is a middle aged dealer in her 40s or early 50s. Hero's image is probably unknown to villain. Hero played once with dealer before. Her image is basically an okay rec. Mainly she bets her value hands aggressively, donks turns with flopped trips on wet board, makes reasonable flop calls vs cbets with second pairs, etc. Nothing too crazy.

Button straddle to $6. Folds to hero in HJ who bets $20 with 6h6s Villain in cutoff 3bets to $65. Button straddle folds, SB fish cold calls, hero calls.

Flop $204: Ac7h6d checks to V who bets $65. SB Folds, hero raises to $175. V calls

Turn $554: (Ac7h6d)Ks hero bets $400. Villain tank calls.

River $1,354: (Ac7h6dKs)4s. Villain has $1,560 behind.

Commentary: preflop is standard. Definitely looking to set mine at over 350 straddles deep.

Flop is pretty standard. Mainly repping sets here, possibly 76. I guess I could play AK this way too. 87s, T9s, 54s, 87s, 65s would all be reasonable bluff candidates.

Turn is a perfect card for my hand. Because now AK is emboldened to stack off. It's not great for my range, but with what I rep on the flop, it is not too bad unless I have 76. I could continue to bet a lot of my flop bluffs on the turn.

River is a blank as no reasonable holding improves, except villain could have A4s (she probably won't though). I think we should just go all in and hope villain had AK. Not sure what my bluffs would be here. Probably just not a good spot to bluff after villain called 2 streets. I think AK is mainly calling me. Not sure what we should assume villain would do with hands like AQ, AJ, ATs. And if she has AA or somehow luckboxed KK, I think she just gets all the money and that's that.

Pretty standard jam. Bluffs will be hands like 98s, 87s, 65s, 99, 88. Straight draws and straight blockers basically.

i think flop and turn could both be bigger tbh

A jam is in order. You will stack AK and get stacked by AA/KK regardless of the play. But you can't be sure that she will bet her strong Ax hands whereas she will most likely call them off quite a bit. If she is a "rec" then she's not going to have as much as you hope by way of bluffy hands.

Someone said go a bit bigger on flop and turn and I agree, certainly flop anyhow, makes the shove a bit more palatable

I know that “theory” says you aren’t supposed to do this, but I think you can size up slightly on flop and turn, with the goal of leaving less behind for the river.

Like if she’s calling 175 on flop, she’s probably also calling 195. More importantly, if you like that turn enough to think she’s calling 400, would she also call 445? Or even 475? If she hadn’t called your river jam this might have made a difference.

Otherwise, yeah, nice hand.

The problem with this is that we are always going to be continually changing our bet sizings and we need to be correct MUCH more than wrong.

The times that you are wrong, and you bet $475 and get a fold when $400 would have called are HUGE mistakes. If she calls the $195 but folds to $475 (but would have called $400), we just lost $380. In your scenario, if she calls $195 and $475, but folds to the shove, we only gained $95.


Which is why playing significantly exploitatively is such a gamble. $75 is 20% of $400.....thats literally a huge difference. The flop increase is about 11% which is obviously much smaller.

20% is not "slightly."



So, when you step that far out of bounds on the turn bet, a 20% deviation.....you better be right a ton of the time.

So, I think with an infinite amount of time to calculate the pot and villain's stack size, I would have sized up flop and turn a little bit. I try to be consistent with my sizings in general unless I have a specific exploit I think will work. I think I meant to go for a 50% pot raise on flop, but ended up under-shooting that quite a bit. Turn I felt like I could go 75% pot and jam river, not knowing what villain's exact stack was and trying not to tank too long to figure it out and calculate geometric sizing.

I do think there is some value in not going too big on flop and turn to represent too much strength. In a way, at these stakes vs this villain, I don't want her to realize that on the turn I am saying we are playing for stacks on the river. But I want to balance this with making the river jam more palatable. I think on river if villain is going to call a 75% pot bet, there is a good chance they call a pot sized bet, and there is a good chance they call a 115% pot jam, especially after deciding to call the turn.

On the turn, I think they might be more sensitive to the dollar value bet if they see a $500 bet as likely to be followed up by a jam on the river, meaning their call is almost a $2,000 stack decision. And to be fair, if I think I can get away with exploitative sizing, I want villain to be aware I mean to play for stacks on the turn if I have a bluff. I would probably make more of a point for her to see I was sizing up her stack and thinking about the bet size to get it all in by the river.

But at the end of the day, I don't know how much of a difference any of this makes. At the end of the day, I was targeting AK and my okay was 75% turn, jam river. I was trying to keep it simple with not too many sizings. Lastly, I wasn't really thinking AQ or worse was going to call, especially on river, but I have definitely learned never go 75% for value when you can go a little more than pot for value. You will get called more often than you think.

I mean, let’s also remember that in practice she is folding to $400 or $475 some percentage of the time, right?

So the EV difference is not the numbers you’re claiming.

She would have to call $400 significantly more often than $475 to make $400 better.

Let’s say she calls $400 100% of the time. She’d have to fold to the extra $75 more than 20% of the time (the exact number is 3/19) to make us want to bet $400 instead. Is that realistic? I don’t think so…

Just curious.. what hands you keep on bluffing turn and river with?

You don't need to have any bluffs here. This is lol live poker. Just blast every street and get all the money in with your value.

Honestly, I am probably going to be very unbalanced on the turn. But I could have a hand like 98s, 54s, T9s, 76s, 65s. After the way this hand I certainly would not try to bluff this villain here. I would probably be looking more to check call flop and hope turn checks, if I brick, fire river.

That's the funny part.. (no offense)
everybody out here talking about the bluffs they have and so forth but don't think it through..

I like that you just said as it is.

PS: I guess I'd just pick ONE and follow through to put pressure on high pairs on flop and AQ on river and thats about it

I mean if villain is never folding a hand like AQ I am just not going to bluff her with this line ever. That's exploitative play.