Villain is a lawyer reg, not afraid of bluffing, seems not to go super thin for value. Known to bluff nut flush blocker and other blocker type hands, has a wide and light 3bet range that includes things like A5s. Makes big folds and tends to give hero a lot of credit for value, IE folding an ace face up on AKXX to second barrel in 3bet pot.

Game is 2/5 with 15/30 straddle on. $3,000 effective. Time rake. Hero opens $75 with 9h9d first to act after straddle, fold, villain in HJ (3rd to act) 3bets to $225, folds to hero. Hero calls.

Flop $502 9s7s4h, hero checks, villain bets $150, hero raises to $500, villain calls.

Turn $1,502 9s7s4h5s, hero checks, villain checks

River $1,502 9s7s4h5s8c, $2,425 behind. Hero?

Analysis:

I play enough vs villain that I want to randomize. Pure opening 99, but mix fold and call to 3bet, high roll with my randomization technique so I decide to call. Flop I pure check, randomized a high roll and decided to raise. I think I could have gone larger, but didn't want to think too long about the exact sizing.

Turn I would is normally a mix of check and bet, I like to bet this spot a lot in general, but I feel like villain will call flop with naked As, so my plan would be to call a turn bet and call river if a spade doesn't roll off, but villain checks behind, so no dice. Not sure if this was the best play.

River is a terrible card in that now this board is so bad for villain it is so hard for him to call anything. He can have small amounts of 6x in his range also. Not sure what size to bet here or if maybe I should check to induce.

i dont really think checking the river induces anything, if he has air that b/c the flop is he really going to check the turn to bet the river with it? probably not, id expect him to have sdv here and realize that this runout is poor for the 3bettor. id imagine turn is a small bet and having failed to do that id just block the river. if he floats the flop with As and you block the turn i think he is still going to be willing to put his stack in either via raising the turn or jamming over a river block / betting vs a river check (after we block the turn).

Probably c/c here, hopefully he doesn't over bet but I don't see too many 6's in his range, I don't think he raises that light in this spot pre.

Would he check back the turn if he has a flush? (spades are only a small part of his range pre anyway, this looks more like an OP in this dynamic).

Another option would be to block bet but if he's capable of bluffs to begin with, we don't wanna get pushed off like that either. His call of the raise otf is probably an over pair, so it would also suck to not get any more value otr so we're def stuck between a rock and a hard place for sure but we'd still be taking down a 1500 dollar pot in a 2/5 game with a set on that board.

Turn check is bad. Small bet river imo. DO NOT CHECK.

Maybe you have good reason to think otherwise. but if I was playing a rando in a casino, I would pretty much never expect them to bet the turn. The flop was CRed and the turn is pretty good for you. I guess he could value bet something like AA, in case you had a worse pair or a draw. But a lot of people are going to be afraid of getting jammed on and want to play that hand for 1 more bet. It's def. the easiest way to go to just check back here and play the river IP.

If he was floating, this doesn't seem like a good card to bluff at. So many FDs, pairs+ draws and sets have come in. What CR hands now fold? Maybe TT or something?

The river could be a good spot for a small bet. You could kind of force a call from 1p hands and once in a while get a call from A high or induce a wild bluff.

If you check, you probably get only a few value bets from worse and bluffs. Maybe the best overpairs value bet and then something that has virtually no chance to win like JTsutied bluffs.

Overall, I'd say it's a 3 bet, check raised pot with a board that favors you, so I'd expect him to be playing it safe.

Probably c/c. B/F would be a disaster and b/c seems like an overplay on a flush and straight board, even with both unlikely.

I like turn 1/3.

As played river block bet will often get crying call from his over pairs I think.

I think hero should raise higher on the flop.

Villian over pairs and flush draws want to proceed on this flop. If V has a fd, he is getting correct odds to call otf.

A correct c-raise to 650 and a call brings the turn pot to 1800. With a stack to pot ration of 1.x hero can shove on lots of turn cards. Villains will call here at a high frequency when holding over pairs and the turn is perceived as a brick.

As played I think hero makes a big mistake on the turn by not betting.




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1. Seems optimistic to assume that villain will have a lot of bare NFDs on turn.

2. Why check and hope he bets those hands? Won’t he call (or raise) if we bet anyway?

3. Villain has a ton of overpairs with a spade that will check back turn and realize their (not insignificant) equity but will call a reasonable bet.

I like a smaller river bet. Maybe 25% pot? People hate putting in money against one liners

man 2 things here.
1) if he has the NFB and you block the turn i dont understand why he wouldn't still bet his stack if you block.
2) the other thing is if you look at the turn x node he's supposed to be mixing with overpairs vs a x and i dont think people do that (which should substantially lower ev of x vs bet). like yeah river isn't always going to be a 4 straight but if he doesn't put in money with overpairs on the turn vs a x the ev of your line has to drop substantially compared to just betting. it feels like you're over emphasizing one part of the ev of the line (how he will react with like AsQx vs a turn x) and ignoring all of the other components of it. What's the plan here if turn goes x/x and the river is a brick? jam? even if we always stack those overpairs on a brick, theres still going to be 9? non board pairing spades we cant put the money in on, 3 6s / 3 8s / to a lesser extent 3 3s we need to size down on, and maybe 3 K / 3 A we need to be worried about overplaying our hand by jamming, so thats like half the deck. granted u lose on some of those cards anyways and river oop is still gonna suck on spades but i think checking the turn is actually giving up a good amount of ev in practice compared to solver

not stacking KsKx is a disaster as that's supposed to be one of his most frequent turn stabs from overpair region and really never fold regardless of what we do

have not read the results yet… think it’s a mandatory river bet, villain should have basically no 6x in his 3bet range and very few flushes given the line. You lose occasionally to a JTs type hand but that’s just a couple combos. Stack sizes are a bit awkward but I could see a small bet or overbet jam both being reasonable…I really think his range is essentially capped and it’s just an exploitative decision of which bet size this guy is more likely to overfold against.

the other thing i thought about re this too is there's what 6 combos of AsQx and AsKx and maybe 1.5 of AsJx compared to 30 combos of overpairs and another handful of 9x

Yeah, but on the turn, he can probably start folding overpairs without a spade anyways, and outside of AA and KK with a spade it is starting to get dicey anyways.

This villain will probably have AsKx, AsQx, maybe even some AxKs, and will also have AsTs+, KsTs+, As5s, maybe As4s, and some other flushes sometimes as well.

I play enough vs this villain that I don't think it is as simple as I should always bet the turn. I need boats and flushes across rivers in both bet and check lines on turn.

I will get stacked often when he has a flush and I check call, but the only way I stack him when he has a bluff is if I sometimes check call.

One thing I have noticed about villain is he tends to overcall flops, but overfold turns and rivers. One thing I can do to capitalize on this is find other bluffs in this line. Low frequency T9s, maybe low frequency A4s, some AsKx and AxKs I can check turn at some frequency.

When I play with V multiple times every week, I think it is important to have value and bluffs in these types of spots.

I am still mulling over whether we can just pure bet the turn as an exploit. But I definitely don't think it's a blunder to mix check.

If villain calls flop too wide but folds turn too much, it seems like we’d want to adjust by betting turn more, rather than checking value hands and letting him realize his equity.

Well, the caveat is that I expect he would bluff the dry As on turn and river, perhaps 100%. Maybe sometimes with a dry Ks. I wonder if he might even make a merged bet with AsAx on turn and/or turn his hand into a bluff on the river.

Like, sometimes he just cannot help himself, even though he will end up in spots where he has way too many bluffs. Like, he will 4bet AKo and AQo and have more combos of nutflush blockers than actual bluffs and will tripple barrel bluff in an $8k pot.

He isn't your everyday villain.

Can’t we just bet on our own and get value from those hands? Or you think he’s folding NFD to turn bet?

probably my last post here.

my thoughts with adjusting your strategy around him (hopefully) having the dry As are basically this:
1) you need him to cbet AsKx AsQx potentially AsJx (these aren't full frequency cbets or 3b in AJ case but sure)
2) you need him to decide to b/c a xr hoping you give up later (this isnt remotely a full frequency play in equilibrium and i think the most likely place for him to just fold)
3) this is still a very small part of his range on the turn over all (even if u assume he pure cbets / continues AsQx and AsKx and pure continues with them vs xr its still somewhere around 10-15% of his range on the turn)
4) checking the turn with 99 is for sure an exploitative play. thinking u need flushes and full houses in both lines because you play rec every day is whatever but pretty much any rake structure / reasonable stacksize sim u look at (it may change as u get mega deep) has 99 being bet ott 80+% of the time.
5) it also becomes a disaster if he's not putting in bets with these overpairs, especially with a spade. i think solver outputs are fine to learn from but look at where this guy is deviating. in the actual hand he's supposed to b/c off his hand a good amount of the time and never fold his hand even on this river vs any size bet. the fact that he checks the turn and folds the river to 2/3 means the ev of checking your hand vs his overpair region is neutered significantly compared to equilbrium. i understand we cant know hes going to do that before the fact but you're getting direct evidence here your line is poor vs this villain. the issue here is compounded with point 3, it can make sense to play vs different parts of his range, but youre prioritizing an extremely small part of his range that you are still going to get ev from via betting (theres absolutely 0 chance he folds the turn with AsX vs a block) while giving up what ended up being a huge amount of ev vs a sizeable part of his range (overpairs in general are >50% of his range ott, and even if u think he pure folds AA!s to a block which i think is ridiculous, he's still going to have 15 combos of OP:s compared to at best 6 combos of the bare As)
6) its a very different situation if he 4bs pre and barrels off with the nfb compared to b/c the flop hoping to float and bluff later imo. the first is much easier to do as he faces no resistance, is bluffing into a "capped" range with blockers. the second one is significantly more sophisticated imo and as a result happens less often

anyways, i kind of think u get annoyed when i respond to your posts so i dont want to keep going in circles beating a dead horse but these are my thoughts. xoxo