Hello again.
In my poker infancy, I used to have a terrible habit of automatically c-bet/giving up a ton when I raised preflop. To counter this, a lot of the thinking players started floating my preflop raises and c-bets, knowing they could play any two cards in their range profitably if I checked the turn. I learned to adjust to this by learning how to pick spots to double barrel, and started balancing my check-back range on the turn with medium strength made hands vs. floaters who would reliably fire at perceived weakness on the river with air.
Now, some of the better thinking players have started taking a different line against me, and I can't figure out how to interpret it. Here's an example hand:
Villain: Blue-collar white guy in his 50s. Loose-aggressive regular who's a pretty big long-term winner in the game. His hand selection and postflop tendencies borderline on spewy, but he picks his spots well enough to consistently churn out profits. He views me as a decent tight winning player, but knows that I'm probably one of the more bluffable people in the player pool. I just table changed about 10 minutes before this hand, so I don't have any in-session history for today, but he seems to be in top form today, sitting on a 500bb stack.
Effective stacks are $525
PREFLOP Hero is CO with K
J
Villain open limps in MP, Hero raises to 20, blinds fold, Villain calls
He has a ridiculously wide preflop range here: A9-A2. K9s-K2s, QTs-Q2s, 43s+, 64s+, 74s+, 65o+, 55-22. I gotta be missing some parts of it here but you should get the point. Discounting a lot of pairs and broadways because of the limp/call.
FLOP (40): K
6
5
- Villain checks, Hero bets 30, Villain calls
TURN (100): 2
- Villain bets 55
, Hero calls
RIVER (210): T
- Villain bets 200
, Hero ???
Very confusing spot, not thrilled about the river card. He could have 55, 22, 65, K6, K5, K2, 6dXd, 5dXd here. But he could ALSO do this with a bunch of hands like 44, 33, 75o, 98s, etc, knowing that it's really hard for me to have a hand that could call a pot sized bet here.
This line is terrifying me right now, because I don't have an answer to it. Lets say I don't flop top pair. Let's say I have AT, or 77, or QJ, and this hand plays out the exact same way to Villain's turn lead. My preflop raising range is relatively snug, but so much of it misses this flop regardless that Villain could take this same line with his entire range and show an immediate profit! I've been playing in the same place for a couple years, and I think people have figured my game out well enough that I'm going to deal with this a lot more in the future, and my only shot of winning against them is to flop the nuts every time, which is rather unreasonable.
What's the correct adjustment here?