V1: sitting to my right. Competent player, not scared money, plays tight. I would mark him as a winning player for sure. 30s and overweight, chats it up at the table and keeps it light and keeps the fishies feeling good about their losses. Very aware player, purposely tried to trap with kings in a prior hand since he noticed hero raising and 3 betting light. $600

V2: 30s, white cut, has been there since 2:30am… it’s now 2:30pm. Tired and made a hero call a few orbits prior with AKs against a maniac. Turns out the maniac was bluffing with the best hand and he lost a huge pot with the right read but wrong hand. $100

Hero: seems as very blurry and nobody believes my raises pre. Got caught with my hand in the cookie jar 3 betting light twice. $800.

1/3 Straddle is on for $6 in this hand. OMC in LJ raises to $15. HJ calls. V2 calls in cutoff. V1 calls from SB. Hero looks down at 73 suited in the BB and calls. Straddle calls.

Flop ($100)
3c 4h 7d

Nice. V1 donks for $50. I’m weirded out because I’ve only seen him lead with value in the past, so could be 7x, set of 4s, 56, or maybe something like 45?

Hero calls. V2 says time for me to go home and jams. Everyone else folds. V1 calls. I call.

Turn ($370)
Js

V1 checks. Hero?

Real time I bet $100. I couldn’t figure out what worse hands would call other than 7x. V1 calls.

River ($570)
Jc

Bleh… I hate this card. Now I’m losing to 7x. I’m not sure what to do here. Villian checks to me. I can’t figure out if I need to bluff out a slightly better 7 or not. Hero?

Preflop fold but I expect you knew that was coming.
Flop is fine. Your right it's a weird situation because it's unlikely V1 is donking a 7X into that crowd and there are no good draws he could have. This feels like an over pair in the 88-TT range.
Turn bet is OK. It's a dry side pot, what worse hands are going to stick around? A small bet just folds out the hands you beat and weak draws. At the same time your hand is sort of fragile and there is no reason to let the weak draws stick around.
On the river I think you need to check because of your turn bet. Villain probably has the best hand and knows it's probably the best hand. Your going to have to make a big bluff. Add in the risk that you can only win the side pot and it's hard for it to be profitable.

Question on that, why fold pre? I know the guy to my left isn’t squeezing unless he has QQ+. It’s $12 to win ~$100. Bad flops I can fold, good ones like this one I can hit weird unexpected hands and since my image is bluff heavy likely get paid. That’s my thought process at least but curious to hear yours!

Its a very repetitive thing I see on these boards. H calls with stupid hand and hits the miracle flop and is now worried he is beat based off of zero reasons. Fold pre + get more money in there when you flop a monster and stop being worried about running into the nuts when you hit a huge hand.

I get it. You're have 8:1 odds on your money. The questions for you are, what are the odds of flopping two pair or better? How much betting are you going to be with a pair of 7s. Once you have those answers, you'll know why you should have folded pf.

Your getting good odds and if the straddle is passive can call with any plausible hand. 73s isn't a plausible hand. You need to catch two pair+ to have a good hand. That won't happen often enough. When you do make a good hand it isn't a particularly good good hand, putting hero in awkward spots like this. Being way OOP will make it harder to make money when you do have the best hand.

Fold preflop. If you were going heads up vs a whale I get it. Vs multiple players either 3B or fold preflop.

Flop, the guy has all the 56. All the 44. You are in a terrible high variance spot multi-way because you chose to play trash OOP multiway passively. $50 call seems like a further donation but what else can you do?

Now on the river you want to blow someone off A7. For probably half the pot at best while value owning yourself a ton. But. You block everything but 44 and a jam likely gets you the side pot. I hate the hand overall, but you are here might as well blast off with all those blockers and hope he doesn't make a 56 call off. I just cant see V1 checking turn and river very often with 44.

Look at the spot you ended up in. You are getting good odds to call but hands like this are very difficult to play post flop. You likely are going to make mistakes and get into tough situations OOP against multiple opponents.

Yea makes sense why this hand is Garbo to play lol. There was a super splashy As played I bet $200 and he folded. I have no clue what he had as he didn’t show and I absolutely hate this sizing upon reflection. I think $350 would have been better. Other guy flipped over AQo so he was just gambling

Sure, the pot gets bigger as more opponents enter it, but that also means you have more opponents to beat in order to win the pot. The reason it's a trivial fold is because you have disadvantages in hand strength, position, and potentially skill.

On the river there's only $200 in the side pot, so you should be pretty confident the all-in player has air (or have strong reads) in order to want to bluff this river. In general, it seems that you probably need to work on your patience.

Already been said but this is a trivial fold pre. OOP with a dogcrap hand = no bueno. Either you bleed chips given you're going to fold often, or when you do hit big, you can easily get "coolered" because your 2 pair+ hands are almost never the nuts. I'd say the majority of the times I stack someone it's because they made a basic error somewhere, usually not it's not folding preflop or OTF or both.

This problem is compounded with deep stacks (though with the straddle on that doesn't apply here) because position and nut potential matter more when 200bb+ are in play. I'm making this point because people like to use "implied odds" as an excuse to play a hand but implied odds don't go to infinity.

Easy preflop fold for me. Yeah, we're getting an ok immediate price and almost closing the action. But we'll be OOP with a high RIO hand (basically every "good" hand we make will be in second place if anyone else decides to pour in money with us postflop).

I'd be extremely worried about the competent player donking into the world. I mean, we're basically only ahead of a handful of smallish overpairs which decided to not 3bet an OMC open (with decent dead money in the pot to boot). For this price I guess we can't fold yet but we should be treading extremely carefully.

Does V2's jam re-open the betting? Or can V1 only call? I think I'm fine with just calling again and seeing what happens. If V1 continues to voluntarily put money into a protected pot, I could see making a nitty exit on the turn.

When V1 checks the turn, I feel a lot better about my hand. But I also don't see how we possibly get him to pay off with worse (unless he has an extremely nitty QQ preflop?), as betting into a completely protected pot is so strong. There are no draws to protect against (other than some counterfeiting ones). I don't have a problem with a small equity protection bet in a large pot, but if I really wanted to eke out some more value from V1 I might consider checking this back.

I think I just give up on the river, although I guess an argument can be made to bluff him off the side pot. A bet here looks insanely strong and should get TT-88 to fold (although I'm surprised they didn't fold the turn). Heck, QQ might even make a very nitty fold as we shouldn't really have any counterfeited 2 pears.

GcluelessNLnoobG

Crappy hands under-realize their equity OOP. There will be a lot of times you flop equity and check fold or put in money drawing to a second best hand.

In 4+ way pots the best hand wins a huge percentage of the time because it’s hard to bluff 3+ players. 73s doesn’t make the best hand often.

When you do make the best hand it’s hard to create the pot size you want OOP.