Paraphrasing but should be pretty close to the spot

$1/$3 Lumiere Place - Holdem - 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

Min buy-in: $100, Max buy-in: $300

BB: $150 - Passive Whale
UTG: $300
UTG+1: $300
UTG+2: $300
MP1: $1,600 - Solid TAG
MP2: $700 - Ultra Aggressive Whale, just joined table with $300 4 hands ago and already ran up to $700. In two of his 4 hands he's bluffed all-in without looking at his cards (and took the pot OTR), and bluffed and showed T4o in another all-in hand
CO: $900
BTN: $250 - Weak player
SB (Hero): $950

SB posts SB $1, BB posts BB $3

Pre Flop: (pot: $4) Hero has A A

fold, fold, fold, MP1 raises to $15, MP2 (post-flop aggro whale) calls $15, fold, BTN calls $15, Hero ???

So this is the spot. BB is a passive whale and 3bets here ~never, so we're basically closing the action. Calling is probably burning money in a likely 5-way pot, OOP. So the question is what do we 3bet to.

Pot is $49, but any normal 3bet to ~$60 will likely get calls by at least MP1 wanting to play against the ultra-whale, which will likely lead the other two to call. Normally this would be fine but we're 320 BB deep, and a $240 pot (80 BB, 4 SPR, playing from the small blind) would be a nightmare spot to be in unless we spike.

So we're 3betting pre, but the question in this spot (And why i posted it) is to establish what size we're 3betting to

probably just stick a stack of red out there
seems more like a dream spot than a nightmare spot

We can take a standard SPR line here, the lower the better, the more players ISO'd the better. We really want to be heads up with MP2, but we should size the bet as if our stack is effective in case MP1 comes along with KK. But if he's a solid tag, I expect him to fold out KK this deep anyway.

I'm with wiffle...neighborhood of $100 seems perfect. One caller gets us a $230/4.1 SPR pot, and the hand plays itself.

oh it definitely is, but it feels like too often i over-raise here and just take down what's currently on the table when we could take a great hand against an ultra-whale.

so you're saying ~$100 here?

I assume you have never played MP2 before and know nothing about each others play except what you have seen in the past 4 hands.

Given what you have seen of MP2's play you can probably never fold this hand post flop, so you want to kill his odds now. That being the case, at least $75 and more is better. $100-$125 would be my normal bet to insure that MP1 folds everything but this best hands. Occasionally go even bigger, something that looks bluffy, $250/$500 or just shove.

There's $48 dead in the pot right now....this is a dream spot to be in. You have to bet big enough to deny odds, otherwise you have to actually play deep vs. MP1 post flop.

Ok guess we're all in agreement, i actually went ~$100 in the hand and wanted to make sure.

Results for those curious:

3 bet to 100

I like the $100 bet.

- 300 BB is not super deep. it's just barely deep.

to adjust to the deeper stack size, instead of making it 60 pre, make 115.

if you have any callers, you are most likely going to go for just two streets of value.

if you don't make it 115+ and just decide to flat, be prepared to dump the hand on flops that look like they hit one of the other V's.

mp1 is handcuffed here with mp2 on his left. not really worried about him. and all of our decisions are easy against mp2

grunch: how is creating an SPR of 4 in a massive pot with AA a nightmare? That sounds like a wet dream. Size it bigger if the whale will call. Then just work on getting it all in somehow quickly.

Results: it happens sometimes.


I do hope you absolutely berated UTG+1 when the whale left. I mean embarrass him and make him feel like a complete idiot. That's one of the few reasons I can get behind showing someone up at the table for.

Yup, well played.

I make it $200 and see if MP2 feels like playing for the rest of it on the flop.

Beat here is you were free-rolling two outs to the bad beat jackpot.

I typically like to offer poor 8:1 implied odds when 3betting so that it makes setmining (and thus speculative hand mining) unprofitable. This is especially useful in most 3bet pots because the SPR will be so low that folding an overpair will be pretty much out of the question, so we better make sure we don't make setmining/etc. profitable.

So in this case, that would make it a 3bet to about $105 or so.

There's a decent chance this blows everyone out of the pot. But, whatever, we ship $45 uncontested and move on to the next hand, instead of putting 233bbs at risk OOP against a very tricky player. If the whale calls, we've set things up to stack off postflop (and against a bluffy player we'll have to decide the best line to do that).

GcluelessNLnoobG