Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 11,611
Oaks Card Club, Emeryville, California. $2 (on the button)-$3-$5 no-limit hold'em, $1000 buy-in cap.
Primary villain is a reg with whom I have years of history from playing 30-60 limit hold'em. He is aggressive and tricky, and he is not a fool. However, I do not yet have a handle on how good a no-limit player he is. (As a limit player he has been one of the better regs, top 20% of the player pool, but not in the top 5%.) Hero has the effective stack of $1K, villain covers by more than twice that much.
The lowjack is first into the pot with a limp, a young Asian guy who has not been running well that night. Hero is in the cutoff with QcJs. This seems like a good spot for an isolation raise, so hero makes it $25 to go. Action is folded to the villain in the big blind, who calls. Lowjack also calls. Three players see the flop, $74 in the pot after the rake.
Flop: Jc Tc 3h
Both players check to hero; hero bets $50, or 2/3 pot, with top pair good kicker on a wet board. Villain in BB raises to $150. Lowjack folds, hero calls. $374 in the pot.
Turn: JcTc3h 4c
The front-door club draw has come in. Hero has the queen of clubs.
Villain checks; hero checks behind. $374 in pot.
River: JcTc3h4c 8s
Q9 or 97 have gotten there for straight, to go with the club draw that came in on the turn.
Villain bets $320, 85% of the pot. Hero must decide whether to fold, call, or raise. Villain's bet is big enough to be polarizing. Hero needs to be good more than 31% of the time for calling to be profitable.
The Qc blocks some club flushes, especially given the Jc and Tc on the board. It is impossible for the villain to have flopped both top pair and a flush draw, although they could have had Ac3c or indeed other AcXc. The Q also blocks straights, leaving only three combos of Q9s and nine Q9o. With hero's top pair, there is only one combo of JJ, two of JTs, and six of JTo. So hero's hand blocks a fair number of the villain's nutted holdings. Villain, unlike many players in the pool, is capable of bluffing big on the river. What sorts of hands would the villain be bluffing with? Hands with a stiff ace of clubs, perhaps. But wouldn't villain bet the turn with those?
Alex Fitzgerald recommends asking the questions, when facing a bet like this, "What is the strongest hand that I beat? Would the villain play it this way?" That strongest hand is J9. Maybe they would have played it this way through the turn, but I would expect a smaller river bet size, more like 1/3 pot, for thin value.
In the end, I tanked for a long time, and I kept coming to how I blocked a lot of flushes and straights, and I knew this villain could bluff. I didn't actually count combos to see if I could find enough. Because I blocked at least somewhat a lot of the drawing combos that have gotten there, what else can the villain be bluffing with?
