V at ~$200. Played with him before. Young Asian guy. Thinking, but still improving. Overall, too loose pf. Nothing out of line post flop, but he does take weird lines. I think that he overthinks sometimes & levels himself/just plays weird. Relatively new to table, so I haven't seen any showdowns this session & it's been at least 2 months since I played with him.

Hero: Nitty image from being card-dead. Covers V.

Folds to H on BTN w. J8 opens $17. Standard for table, though in retrospect I could have gone lower. sb folds, V calls in BB.

Flop $30 after rake

984

check, hero bets $20, call

Turn $70 J

V donks $50, Hero wonders about QT & T7 and decides this V would fold a gutshot. Considers other Jx combos, maybe even a misplayed QQ+ that tried to trap and elects to call.

River $169: 2

V shoves remaining ~$115

Criticism on all streets welcome.

Too big of an open. What are you doing with that size?

It's not that could of gone lower, you should. $10-$12. You should be doing this with your entire range here, not pumping it up to big amounts when you have AA either. You need to get comfortable playing post-flop and not being exploitative pre-flop.

Flop c-bet is fine. Once he donks, the only play is to call.

It's a fine enough river, I call.


FWIW, if you want to convince me to find a fold, give some information, you clearly have/had it on your V.

"Nothing out of line post flop, but he does take weird lines."

"I think that he overthinks sometimes & levels himself/just plays weird"

If you don't remember them, then I guess this is just simply a guessing game.

It's hard to make 2p+ and Villains in the blinds, his range is pretty wide and we made a bigger pot by raising large pre-flop.


I'm not sure if he ever is trappy with overpairs or not, but if he is, it just makes it too easy of a call.

I expect 7 combos of sets, maybe a goofball AJ, and 9 combos of overpairs discoutning 1/2 of them for 3b pre-flop. 2 combos of 98s , 2 combos of J9s,

Do we give him 4 cobmos of QTs? any Qto? Do we ever give him a goofball bluff of TT? T7s? You opened rather large pre-flop, does he have this in his range?

Still calling on river.

J9 is top 2 not J8 but it doesn't make much difference here. Your not always winning but given your description of villain I can't see folding either. There are villains I could give this up to on turn or river but they are tighter and/or passive.

Bob Ciaffone has the best perspective on this. Aces, Kings and Queens are "our" range and Jacks, Tens and Nines are "their" range.

You played Jc8c on the BTN to steal the blinds and it didn't work. Now you are facing a range that V is likely to have.

Easy fold. There's another hand coming. Save your ammo for a better situation.

Since it's been folded to me on the Button, I open for much smaller so that my preflop steal / postflop cbet steal attempts have to work far less often to be profitable. I think we're risking too much with the big raise here relative to what is in the pot and it just forces us to successfully steal far too often to be profitable. Plus with these stack sizes a large raise can quickly get us in awkward commitment spots with weakish hands. If the blinds we're tightish, I'd open for no more than $10.

I'm cool with the flop bet.

When he donks the turn the pot is now $120 and he only has about that left. Our commitment point is now, and even though I'm not exactly loving it, I think there are enough worse hands (weird overpairs, JT, draws, spazz, etc.) that I feel committed. The board is far too drawy to allow another card, so I shove.

If we called the turn to trap Villain into spazzing on the river, our plan worked perfectly, so snap calling this blank.

At this level, I think we can have a super exploitative preflop method of raising big hands big and small hands small because I doubt too many of our opponents are capable of recognizing or exploiting this strategy. Admittedly, this method might not work as you begin playing with more aware players.

So for me, since the villains in the blinds are simply calling/folding based on their cards and not the raise size, I would simply raise to $20 here (10% of stacks) with TP type hands to setup easy commitment spots postflop, whereas I'd raise to no more than $10 with hands I'm simply looking to steal with. It is admittedly super exploitative to anyone who is managing to track the hands I show up with (based on no doubt a very small sample size as I'm guessing the majority of my hands in this spot don't go to showdown), but I ain't too worried about that at this level.

GimoG

Why so much pre? Make it ~$12. Steal the blinds or let them call with an inferior range oop.

Flop is fine. I shove the turn. Make all draws pay the price now before they hit/miss the river. Never folding the river for those odds and you're well past pot committed to fold (which is why you should shove the turn).

In general I agree with everything that you've said here.

But I think we should be taking it a bit father and paying attention to our villains who are on our direct left enough to know what they are doing.
They are the people that will be in position against us for most of the game, and can make our life the hardest / reduce our profitable late position steals the most.
So we should pay know if they are playing their own two cards for any amount, if they are dumping weaker holdings for larger bets etc.

Once we know that we can adjust our opening range and size accordingly.

I've been playing a lot of 2/3/5 lately (big boy job allowed for the move up bankroll) at a few different card rooms. I would say that even at the 2/5 level almost no one is astute. Even the competent players aren't paying enough attention to how you're adjusting your raise size based on players acted, players to act, position, your hand etc.

I'd say raising between 4 and 6 x is almost completely indiscernible to the vast majority of players playing up to 2/5.