1/3, Friday night, 9-handed.
Very loose-passive table overall, many would call this table a "gold mine".
Hero's image: card-dead, perceived as a nit, has played maybe 5% of hands in the last 5 hours. Made one value bet in all that time post-flop, but successfully bluffed a few times (yet to be caught bluffing). Getting frustrated.

3 generic fish (50/5) all with $200-$300 stacks limp in.
Villain A (20yo Asian male, $350, 20/15) limps on the button.
Villain B (25yo Asian male, $200, first orbit, no hands played so far) raises to $30 in the small blind.
One of the players who folded accidentally reveals one of his cards, the 10h.

Hero ($300) calls with AJhh in the BB, hoping to maybe see a flop in position with VillainB.

All the generic fish call.
Villain A and Villain B call.


Flop ($180): J54r

VillainB checks.
Hero bets $100, everyone folds up to VillainA, who shoves.

What do you do?

How could this have been handled better pre?

Fold pre.

As played, shrug call.

Let this go preflop. SB raising this huge size is highly likely to be a range of hands that dominates your AJ. SB will also hold few hands you dominate, as he would likely limp. You get a pretty ideal flop for your hand, but if SB bets/shoves you're probably performing pretty poorly.

Flop: I might go a tad smaller, say $70. Getting all in OTT will still be a pretty trivial bet if we get action, and it may get our opponent(s) to continue with a bit wider range.

After BTN shoves, I'm making the call. We're calling $170 into an effective pot of $550, getting over 3 to 1. He can have sets of 55/44, maybe 54s for 6-8 combinations of better hands. He only needs to be getting out of line with a worse Jx a minor % of the time for us to profit on a call.

There are definitely opponents you can find a bet/fold against in this spot though.

Fold pre, AP sigh call.

I fold preflop. Dude has put in a huge 15% of his stack from the blinds, so we're paying far too much with what is likely a fairly speculative hand against his range (one with poor IO when it outflops him and poor RIO when it doesn't). Yeah, it's possible everyone overcalls (albeit with their shortstacks), but then we're sandwiched between the raiser and everyone else (difficult to play postflop). If we were last to overcall closing the action on the Button then more of an argument for seeing a flop for this poor price.

I probably also bet this flop once the preflop raiser checks, but there is no reason to bet so much on this dry board. Heck, even $50, which is obviously lol in terms of percentage of pot, will still be considered a "big" bet and will get the job done.

I fold to the check/shove, as now it simply looks like dude had what he looked to have all along (a big pair).

ETA: Whoops, didn't realize it was someone else doing the shoving. Yeah, probably have to sigh call even though it's quite meh against typically fishy passive opponents (who simply shove sets here, cuz, sets are gud) and otherwise typically just flat TP (cuz passive).

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