Prior hand:
I flopped the nuts with 76 on a 589 board with two clubs in a raised flop with Villain1 (old TAG) and Villain2 (very good, aggressive young LAG). Villain1 was the preflop raiser, and he bets $45. Villain2 calls. I make it $145 to go. Villain1 folds. Villain2 announces "all in" with $650 behind. I call and double up.

What this and subsequent play showed me was:
Villain2 will continuation bet, but can be bet off a hand.
Villain1 is very willing to stick it in if he senses you are making a move and/or he can take you off your hand. He also plays a lot of hands and outplays people after the flop. I think his image of me is as a good player who is willing to make moves; he definitely thought I was stealing when I reraised the flop. . . he was expecting me to fold.

9 handed Live 2/5 full ring:
Villain1 ($600) limps from MP
Villain2 ($350) makes it $25 on the button
Hero ($1350) calls with J10 in BB

Flop ($77):
793
Hero checks, Villain1 checks, Villain2 bets $30. Hero calls, Villain1 calls.

My thinking here is that Villain2 has a hand like 2 high cards, and that I can try to take the hand away or win it outright on a lot of turns with my overcards and gutshot. I don't like Villain2's flat call however.

Turn ($167):
793J

I check, Villain1 checks, Villain2 checks.

My thinking here was to check raise either player, but it got checked around. My usual line is to lead out here, but the presence of the aggressive player after me changed my line a bit.

River ($167)
793J8
Hero bets $75. Villain bets announces "all in", which makes it $470 more to call.

I have the second nuts here. . . I take a couple minutes, and apologize to the table. I tell him, "you have QT, and I know this, but I think I still have to call you." My thinking is that QT just didn't fit his line. . . he overcalled on the flop with basically nothing, and checked when he turned an open ended straight draw. I call, and . . .

Obviously, he has QT, or I probably wouldn't be posting. At the time, I wrote it off as a cold deck. After a while tho, I'm questioning myself.

My thinking:
1) He's an excellent player (maybe the best player at the table.) At second level thinking, I'm 90% sure he knows my river bet means that I have a 10. With that knowledge, I'm calling to chop or lose.
2) Calling hoping to chop is -EV, but the pot is laying me a $317 overlay.
3) If I fold this hand, and I'm wrong, I may be losing value against an aggressive opponent.
4) If I fold this hand, and I'm right, he's going to be convinced I have X-Ray vision and avoid me (he's seen me call down light as well.)
5) This is live play; huge bets on the river are very rarely bluffs. However, this guy plays more like an online 6max player.
6) QT just doesn't make sense. How does he overcall the flop? My only guess is that he was thinking the same thing I was. . .

Does anybody find a fold here?

I prefer leading flop or check raising flop better than this FPS OOP check-call to take it away on the turn. You have to remember that this is a 3-way hand, and you can't be trying to float OOP with your hand if you have no clue what the 3rd player will do (Floating OOP is very hard in a headsup situation, much less a 3-way situation). The flop bet is so small that Villain1 might be tempted to check-call with a marginal holding because he senses weakness from the PF raiser's weak bet and your weak check-call and because of the tempting pot odds.

Leading flop or check raising flop would give you a much better chance of taking the pot away from the PF raiser if you really did feel that he was weak here. If you really did believe that PF raiser had only high cards here, then he will almost always fold on the flop to a donkbet lead or a checkraise, so why bother giving him a chance to hit his overcards on the turn when you can easily take the pot from him on the flop now?

The other benefit of leading flop or check raising the flop is that you isolate the PF raiser and clean up your outs (overs + gutshot + backdoor flush draw).

Otherwise, you might as well check-fold here instead of putting yourself in a marginal situation.

On the turn, I would definitely lead the turn because you likely have the best hand, and there are many river cards which might allow someone to outdraw you. This is the best time to charge either/or/both Villains for their straight draws, and it is a significant mistake to allow this turn to check through -- especially since your hand has reverse implied odds.

On the river, you have completely lost control of the hand and have no idea of what any of your opponents have. Not only that, your river bet has turned your hand faceup as well (you have a T on a 4-card straight board).

I would much prefer a smaller river bet here (maybe $30-$35) to induce a river bluff-raise from a busted hand than trying to fire a standard river bet here that will almost never be called by worse. Otherwise, you should go for a river check-call to induce a bluff from a busted hand. Your hand has very little value here at extracting value from a second-best hand (very unlikely that anyone has a set here because of how weakly everyone played this hand), and your hand has huge reverse implied odds as second nuts to QT. Given that your value-betting your hand has little value and that you are very vulnerable against the nut straight, you need to bet much smaller on the river to induce bluffs/pot control or NOT BET AT ALL (check-call for inducing bluffs/pot control).

As played on the river, your opponent's hand range is so heavily polarized between a stiff T and QT that I would consider a fold here based off pot odds. You are only getting 1.66:1 pot odds on the call here -- meaning that you need 37.6% equity to call here. That means you need this to be a chop pot with another stiff T over 75.2% of the time for your call to be +EV.

In any case, I would say that you butchered this hand by playing too passively on flop and turn with too much Fancy Play Syndrome Floating OOP in 3-way pot BS and letting the turn check through (giving away free cards) when you very likely have a vulnerable best hand.

In the future, you should re-evaluate your FPS and remove moves like floating OOP in 3-way pots out of your reportoire. If you had simply played this hand more aggressively in a straightforward way, then you could have eliminated this horrible river decision.

Pretty much my thinking exactly. It does me good to hear it from other people.
By the way, my normal line is much more straightforward. I'm generally going to either lead or check raise the flop, lead turn, and shove river.
After the hand, I kicked my own ass for awhile, but somehow managed to avoid tilt and won some of it back a little later. . . .

might fold preflop cus of his stack size... eh maybe not

nice post dchan81

dchan + 1...like, seriously. nice post.

sorry to nit it up, but OP...when you described V1 and 2, you mixed up the numbers. it's easy to figure out, but it was contradictory to the action you described.
also, you said you can bet out V2...why didn't you in this case?

dchan you've been giving some good advice lately... which is hard to come by for live hands in this forum, what stakes do you play, where do you play, i dunno any other personal info of yourself would interest me... man that sounds weird

Corrected it because I can't type and got Villain1 and Villain2 constantly mixed up. For the record, Villain1 was a very good LAG. Villain2 was a mediocre-TAG.

My thinking on the turn was exactly this:
Villain1 was extremely aggressive, and I had the thought that he was floating along with me and his plan was to bet big on the turn. Turns out, I was right. However, the turn gave him an open ended straight draw, so he adjusted his plan to try to get a free card.

He could be reasonably certain that the Jack either:
1) missed Villain2 entirely at which point he wouldn't bet.
2) hit Villain2, at which point the original float bet on the turn wouldn't work anyhow.

Furthermore, two of his cards (8 or K) had the potential to make good second-best hands for the two of us (Hero and Villain2), so he had great reasons to check it through and try to score big. Like I mentioned earlier, he's an excellent LAG player, which means he knows the exact times when not to be aggressive.

If he didn't have the exact hand that he did, I believe he would've bluffed with air or value bet with any pair less than a Jack, folding out Villain2 (unless he was holding a better Jack than me) and giving me a chance to check-raise him out of the pot with my Jack.

Furthermore, because of his aggression and position, this player is capable of coming over the top of my early position turn bet and driving me out of the pot with my hand that has suddenly developed showdown value. Regardless of this, I'm usually firing at the turn against most opponents, and might occasionally shove light against this particular player if I feel he's getting out of line.

Like I said earlier, I'm not in love with the way I played the hand. My usual line is much more straight forward. However, the presence of an extremely aggressive player to my left convinced me to mix up my line on this one occasion. Sure, QT is part of a very wide float range for Villain1, but it really is the one, single hand he could have, combined with an improbable 4 outer on the river, where I get stacked. There had to be a certain number of stars aligning for him to double through me, and they did.

And no, I don't normally suffer from FPS. In fact, there was a post from a couple weeks ago where I chided dchan for FPS. Guess this is payback.

Jesus @ this thread.

Alright, in the "history" hand, you never tell us what Villain had. This is obviously relevant.

In the hand in question, preflop is probably a fold. Calling off 7% of your effective stack with JT suited OOP is probably spew, but

Flop is standard. Turn, kind of an awkward spot but probably fine.

River is ROFL for tanking. That's a slowroll in my book. Its impossible for him to have QT and its a fluke super cooler that he does. I can't believe how hard you're fellating this guy who's obviously ass at poker. He limp/calls QT OOP against a short stack. He overcalls 10% of effective stack on the flop with the worst relative position holding no pair no draw.

I bet the 75% number is almost exactly the odds of this exact player turning over a chop hand vs. QT, especially if he thinks he has any fold equity at all against another stiff T. Given the board and the action, T9, T7, JT, etc. show up here a ton, and villain is going to push all of them a high % of the time.

Of course, this is assuming that I'm 100% correct that his read of me is accurate. If he thinks I can value bet $75 on the river with two pair or set, for example, then at least some of the time his range includes a bluff representing the T, and I scoop a huge pot.

Thanks for the dissenting opinion.

These are the exact thoughts that went through my head at the table as I called. It's only afterward that I started wondering if there was a way -- ignoring how I got to the river -- to find a fold and save a buy-in.

I think most any close 100BB decision merits some attention away from the table.

Haven't read through thread yet...

In this scenario though, the original raiser was caught in the middle after you pop it on the flop. So I am not sure you can make the assumption that he can be bet off his lead always.

As for the second guy, does he really think that raising it $100 after a bet and call is a move? To me it just screams valuetown. So I would categorize him as quite spewy and/or bad judgment.

As for the hand, I am ok with the flop peel I think as long as your ambition to 'take the pot away' is somewhat subdued. I think there is plenty of value in your hand to justify calling with in hopes of hitting rather then looking to bluff at the pot later. The reason I say this is, is because if a card bigger then a 9 hits it is far scarier to you, the OOP caller, then it is for the leader and a card smaller than 9 would most likely only hit you if you trip up and thats just a small range. So I know this is nit picking but I just thought I would point out what my motives would be...

On the turn, I would much rather bet out than c/r though I do understand the need to have both plays working. It's just that you took a chance by peeling lightly on the flop to hit your card so I would capitalize on the situation and try to get immediate value. With the flop being bet so lightly 2 things occur. 1)It is harder for either player to make a move at the pot because it will look more suspicious and they will tend to get looked up lighter then they desire, and 2)the pot is small because of the flop being bet so lightly (less than 1/2 pot) allows you to make a cheaper then normal VB and not worry about getting pushed off a hand in a huge pot or feeling at all committed. It also will allow for you to get paid lighter then normal because of the bet size he/they will face.

If the turn had been the 8 I would be much more inclined to c/r (though I would still lead a decent amount of the time) since I now have a lock hand and the 8 looks less conspicuous. Now a hand like AK and such may bet when checked to for pure value. When you peel the flop lightly as you did it is slightly FPS. That is fine. But then when you check the turn looking to c/r you are FPS'ng again. 2 FPS plays in one hand = serious FPS....thus my inclination to bet out here. If the flop wasn't so thin or if it was checked through then I could understand the c/r more on the turn (since it wil be your only FPS play if that makes sense).

1)You bet 1/2 pot on the river (actually slightly less). This does not always have to be a T from you. It shouldn't atleast. You could have 2 pair that missed your c/r (ehem), a bluff since there is a 4 card straight knowing that they couldn't call without the T, or even a rivered set of 8s.

2)Calling to chop may be -EV if you are so sure his raising range is polarized to nuts/T. But given my response to #1 this shouldn't be the case. He should have chop/air way more often then nuts/chop.

3)Exactly. Folding the winner is wy more -EV then calling for the chop most of the time, losing to the nuts some of the time, and winning vs a move some of the time (imo).

4)If you fold this hand, he will never know you have the T (unless you tell him, which you shouldn't). As said you could and should be betting this river with much more then just the T only. Telling him what you had will only entice him to make plays on you, put you in tough spots, and try to run you over. No need to advertise 'big laydowns' ever. As for him avoiding you, that is good.

5)Exactly. You cannot group this player in a big stereotype of big bet on the river=nutz, if your read is accurate. He is a thinking player and has mutual respect for you (atleast I think you mentioned that) and thus the cat n mouse game that occurs on the river is not always what it seems. The fact that you could bet the river lightly allows for him to make a play where you question his raise for more then T/nutz.

6)His overcall with QT is definitely on the spewy side. No if ands or buts about it. Because of this he gets paid off to the max. So his implied odds if he luckboxes into this hand is huge but overall he will be losing money unless he has similar aspirations as you do about looking to hit his overcards and/or take the pot away on the turn. The fact that he didn't bet the turn tells me either a)you overrate his skills, b)he thought the same thing as you about the BTN double barreling, or c)he just temporarily misjudged the situation and lost hi brain for a moment.

I just don't know why either of you would think that the BTN would be double barreling here so often into 2 others who have shown eagerness to play (calling preflop and flop bets) when the board misses most of an openers range (big cards). When he bets less than 1/2 pot on the flop you can be sure he doesn't have a big pair or he would protect it so the board is basically scarier to him than it is to you, thus a more then often check.

As for finding a fold....never. He is not deep enough at all. Bottom line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYVcaQ1Bzu8

my advice is similar to this jam