Had a hand last session i butchered a bit and was lost on all streets (w/o preflop). Game was somewhere in an European Casino. It was 10 handed and a mixured of Regs, Reg-Fish and Fish at the table. The game started calm but developed over the time due to some tilting fish / Regs. Average stack ~1500.

Hero (~1100): Recreational Player, known by half of the table as tight aggressive. Plenty of history with lots of villain. At the moment perceived as tight. Have not shown down any special hands. Took a lot of pots down w/o showdown or had to fold to action.

Villain 1 (~600): Standard Reg-Fish.

Villain 2 (~3000): Fish I have plenty of history with. He is chasing/targeting me and I won plenty of money of him. Without tilt he is more loose passive but can develop in a total spew monkey in tilt mode (Blind raises of 100bb etc.).

Villain 3 (~2000): Regular in the room with plenty of leaks. His main leak is, that he is way too loose often in worse position and therefore has a high bluff frequency. But I don't like him to my left due to his aggressiveness. He is also a bit targeting Hero cause of some history.

Villain 4 ((~800): Best Player at the table. TAG


Up to the Hand. Standard raises vary between 25 - 50 at the moment.

Hero get dealt QQ

Preflop: V1 (UTG1) limps 5, V2 (UTG2) calls, Hero (MP) raise to 50, V3 (CO) calls, V4 (BTN) calls, V1 calls, V2 calls

Flop (260): 910J

V1 Checks, V2 Checks, Hero ?

I will come up with later streets after a while

I think you have to bet here. I'd bet 150. Any 7, 9, T, J, Q, A can kill your hand which is 19 cards.

Raise pre is great if people are that loose. You have blockers to KQ and Q8 and lots of equity against Sets and two pairs

Bet about $150.

Bet 150ish (1/2 PSB) as previously mentioned.

Check behind is ok depending on what you range Vs on, but not optimal as we are definitely ahead of everyone.

Are you bet/folding or Bet/Calling?

Had a hand last session i butchered a bit and was lost on all streets (w/o preflop). Game was somewhere in an European Casino. It was 10 handed and a mixured of Regs, Reg-Fish and Fish at the table. The game started calm but developed over the time due to some tilting fish / Regs. Average stack ~1500.

Hero (~1100): Recreational Player, known by half of the table as tight aggressive. Plenty of history with lots of villain. At the moment perceived as tight. Have not shown down any special hands. Took a lot of pots down w/o showdown or had to fold to action.

Villain 1 (~600): Standard Reg-Fish.

Villain 2 (~3000): Fish I have plenty of history with. He is chasing/targeting me and I won plenty of money of him. Without tilt he is more loose passive but can develop in a total spew monkey in tilt mode (Blind raises of 100bb etc.).

Villain 3 (~2000): Regular in the room with plenty of leaks. His main leak is, that he is way too loose often in worse position and therefore has a high bluff frequency. But I don't like him to my left due to his aggressiveness. He is also a bit targeting Hero cause of some history.

Villain 4 ((~800): Best Player at the table. TAG


Up to the Hand. Standard raises vary between 25 - 50 at the moment.

Hero get dealt QQ

Preflop: V1 (UTG1) limps 5, V2 (UTG2) calls, Hero (MP) raise to 50, V3 (CO) calls, V4 (BTN) calls, V1 calls, V2 calls

Flop (260): 910J

V1 Checks, V2 Checks, Hero bets 130, V3 tanks for a while and calls, V4 folds, V1 folds, V2 calls

I bet here and depending on the player who would raising me, I would have bet/folded or bet/called.

Turn (650): 8

V2 Checks, Hero?

I would probably just check this flop 5 ways and bet blank turn cards. Getting raised here would suck since you can't really fold but your hand isn't much stronger than JQo on this board.

I prefer to ch call this flop unless everybody/most is so short I can bet/call comfortably

Are you check/folding or check/calling facing a huge bet?

Depends which player makes the bet and how large it is...

Since you are among regs how often would this Flop get checked through .. ie, what is your c-bet frequency? This may not matter with this board, but I do like V3 & V4 to my left in this hand since you 'technically' could get pushed off this hand by V2 if one of them bets and gets a couple of callers and then a raise from V2 with nothing more invested here .. unless you are ready to play for your stack here.

I think I would bet a bit more here than $130 but I like your reasoning to risk less if you would be folding to more than one of the V if they raise and you do have 2 cards on the high end of this preventing 8x/AK from drawing. This size bet will price them in even though they have less outs than they want to have available to them.

You have a 5 card hand now (middle straight) but could still be in some trouble and could have a backdoor flush in there too. I dont think you are ready to put in your stack here yet either so a bet of less than $300 will probably do the trick. I am still a bit wary of V2 check-calling if he comes along again but I dont think you can let this go by without a bet in a cash game. V2 can c/r your Turn or River bets but I think he would probably c/c with the nuts here on the Turn which will allow you to c/c on River. I would probably check this in a tournament for pot control depending on what stage we were in at the time.

This is a bit image dependent also, but in a loose game like this you really want to make all parties pay for any draws they are on ... $285 seems good. GL

Now the whole hand to comment

Had a hand last session i butchered a bit and was lost on all streets (w/o preflop). Game was somewhere in an European Casino. It was 10 handed and a mixured of Regs, Reg-Fish and Fish at the table. The game started calm but developed over the time due to some tilting fish / Regs. Average stack ~1500.

Hero (~1100): Recreational Player, known by half of the table as tight aggressive. Plenty of history with lots of villain. At the moment perceived as tight. Have not shown down any special hands. Took a lot of pots down w/o showdown or had to fold to action.

Villain 1 (~600): Standard Reg-Fish.

Villain 2 (~3000): Fish I have plenty of history with. He is chasing/targeting me and I won plenty of money of him. Without tilt he is more loose passive but can develop in a total spew monkey in tilt mode (Blind raises of 100bb etc.).

Villain 3 (~2000): Regular in the room with plenty of leaks. His main leak is, that he is way too loose often in worse position and therefore has a high bluff frequency. But I don't like him to my left due to his aggressiveness. He is also a bit targeting Hero cause of some history.

Villain 4 ((~800): Best Player at the table. TAG


Up to the Hand. Standard raises vary between 25 - 50 at the moment.

Hero get dealt QQ

Preflop: V1 (UTG1) limps 5, V2 (UTG2) calls, Hero (MP) raise to 50, V3 (CO) calls, V4 (BTN) calls, V1 calls, V2 calls

Flop (260): 910J

V1 Checks, V2 Checks, Hero bets 130, V3 tanks for a while and calls, V4 folds, V1 folds, V2 calls

I bet here and depending on the player who would raising me, I would have bet/folded or bet/called.

Turn (650): 8

V2 Checks, Hero Checks, V3 tanks again and checks

I think the check isn't good but I could not see what a bet accomplished. Thus I could get some bluffs from both villain in.

River (650): 7

V2 Checks, Hero bets 250, V3 tanks again and raises to 700, V2 folds, Hero calls

Please feel free to comment all streets and the different options we have

Check turn is bad imo. You've got blockers against KQ, essentially the nuts here. Bet enough to get V3 off of his two pair/flush draw hand and just take it down and wait for better spots to gii.

Call on the river is ok given history with V3, sounds like he turns over two pair/top pair that he floated to bluff river more often than a flush here. However, checking the turn 3 way after the hpsb on the flop gives great odds to flush draws here, so I think we might be beat.

On the flop, I would have bet $150 (as I stated) and called a raise from anyone. I would never have checked this turn. If I had checked this turn, I would have checked river.

As played, I call, too, against this villain.

Bet turn, fold river

Checking the Turn would mean I probably c/c the River here. This 'tanking' was done with what? And he still bets into the backdoor flush! I doubt he is putting you on a flush since you probably wouldve continued to bet the Turn if you had just c-bet Flop and actually picked up something on the Turn. So where does that put him?

Why the tanking on the Flop? Unless he just had a killer combo-draw he really has no reason to tank both the Flop and Turn unless he already had a made hand and was contemplating a raise. At this point I think the act was KQ but I still find myself calling a decent amount of time here .. but against a decent reg, with history and who is 'after' me I dont really think I am good here very often.

As most will be here .. why bet this River if you didn't bet the Turn and your hand didn't improve AND the board got worse. I am not even sure if calling to chop is +EV here. GL

The first sentence I quoted is evidence of a weird kind of fancy-play-syndrome that I myself deal with sometimes. We're playing deep-stacked poker, in a multi-way pot, with significant action preflop and flop. By the turn, the pot is quite large, and now we should really prioritize NOT MAKING A SIGNIFICANT POSTFLOP MISTAKE with our strong/nearly-nutted hand; pots this large are statistically quite rare, and so any mistakes we make are amplified because we probably won't get a chance to correct it later.

Imagine the turn checks through (as it is quite likely to, a lot of the time), and on either this river or a river that pairs the board, either Villain makes a significant bet or raise. At that point, we are fully in "up the creek without a paddle"-mode. This is basically exactly what happened.

The second sentence is extremely wishful thinking. It's simply a fact that even the craziest/most maniacal of Villains will tend to play far more face-up when the pot becomes this big AND it's multiway. The fact that someone is willing to bet/raise 100bb blind preflop has surprisingly little bearing on how likely they are to put in a large turn/river bluff in a huge 3-way pot with significant postflop action. Maaaayyyybbbbeeee he'd do it against you specifically heads-up, or mayyyybbbbbeeee if the pot was smaller or his stack was shallower and he could make a cheap-ish $500 all-in bet over a $100-$200 bet from you. But the way the situation has played out, it is EXTREMELY ambitious (to be somewhat charitable) to assume that anyone will take a made hand and turn it into a bluff here, or that someone is bluffing with a total airball.

And you cannot overlook the fact that literally 20+ river cards can put you into a spot where even if your optimistic assumption of inducing a bet/raise happens, you'd still be at a significant risk of making a mistake on the river when you find out that they're not bluffing nearly as often as you think.

Just bet the turn. It's ok to take down the pot; to think that checking the turn means that someone will call you on the river with 99/JT/whatever is once again, quite... optimistic. Sometimes the board will just run out in such a way that you have a strong hand, and no one will have a strong enough hand to continue with; in such a scenario, when they can't call a bet but can still draw out on you very easily, it's a mistake to not bet, and an even bigger mistake when the pot is this huge.

In other words, betting might not do anything all that positive for us (it's like a EV-neutral play), but NOT betting can easily be a very negative EV play.

Thanks for your responses so far. I agree that not betting turn is a huge mistake. Dumblock explained it very good.

But i don't agree that we should check this river card. After v2 checked we should have the best hand here because v3 would have bet his nut hands on the turn and would bet a huge part of his flush draws as well (which he rarely picks up).

The reraise makes therefore no sense and i think he won't give me a huge hand as well after my turn check. Thus he is trying to bluff me of the obvious chop often enough to justify the call.

I will post the results this evening.

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Betting is prolly optimal but not fun

Do we induce more bluffs by betting or by checking the River? Do we see more (and larger than OP's) bets for value if we check River? I think we only bet this River is we intend on calling all raises ... unless 3-bet, then we just got outplayed by someone!! GL

You are right we don't increase bluffs by betting. I think we strongly decrease bluffs. But i'm betting here for value and hope one of them will call for the chop.
As played there was only one player left who might bluff and the chance that one of them will call me is higher than v3 bluffs (although he has a high bluff frequency here)

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Now the whole hand with results

Had a hand last session i butchered a bit and was lost on all streets (w/o preflop). Game was somewhere in an European Casino. It was 10 handed and a mixured of Regs, Reg-Fish and Fish at the table. The game started calm but developed over the time due to some tilting fish / Regs. Average stack ~1500.

Hero (~1100): Recreational Player, known by half of the table as tight aggressive. Plenty of history with lots of villain. At the moment perceived as tight. Have not shown down any special hands. Took a lot of pots down w/o showdown or had to fold to action.

Villain 1 (~600): Standard Reg-Fish.

Villain 2 (~3000): Fish I have plenty of history with. He is chasing/targeting me and I won plenty of money of him. Without tilt he is more loose passive but can develop in a total spew monkey in tilt mode (Blind raises of 100bb etc.).

Villain 3 (~2000): Regular in the room with plenty of leaks. His main leak is, that he is way too loose often in worse position and therefore has a high bluff frequency. But I don't like him to my left due to his aggressiveness. He is also a bit targeting Hero cause of some history.

Villain 4 ((~800): Best Player at the table. TAG


Up to the Hand. Standard raises vary between 25 - 50 at the moment.

Hero get dealt QQ

Preflop: V1 (UTG1) limps 5, V2 (UTG2) calls, Hero (MP) raise to 50, V3 (CO) calls, V4 (BTN) calls, V1 calls, V2 calls

Flop (260): 910J

V1 Checks, V2 Checks, Hero bets 130, V3 tanks for a while and calls, V4 folds, V1 folds, V2 calls

I bet here and depending on the player who would raising me, I would have bet/folded or bet/called.

Turn (650): 8

V2 Checks, Hero Checks, V3 tanks again and checks

I think the check isn't good but I could not see what a bet accomplished. Thus I could get some bluffs from both villain in.

River (650): 7

V2 Checks, Hero bets 250, V3 tanks again and raises to 700, V2 folds, Hero calls

V3 shows AJo and Hero scooped the pot. V2 later told me he had a set of 9s. Overall I think the turn check was a mistake. I'm not sure whether I should bet that flop or check.

Your check there is really bad because there are many cards that would be bad given the action and big pot. If it's small pot you can do pot Control and trap v2 a little. I will just bet half-2/3 pot ott and check call the river.

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I think bet-calling the river is fine, esp. for this sizing. There's probably like 3-4 combos of realistic flushes that V3 could have (stuff like QTss/QJss/ATss/KTss), and it really helps us a lot that the turn and river were the 8s and 7s (i.e. that he couldn't have had T8ss or 87ss or w/e). When he doesn't jam on the river, I really suspect that he doesn't actually have the flush... I mean, we only have about 900 total left by the river, and he makes it 700? Smells very very fishy to me.

I think you could argue for checking back the turn vs very good villains or very bad ones. But against the middle of the pack/average ones, just bet and keep it simple.

Overall, I think you made a mistake on the turn, but arguably saved yourself on the river with a bet-sizing that seemed highly likely to induce a raise from a guy who you're reading as trying to "get" you. So assuming your reads were accurate in the moment, then wp on the river.