1/3 NLHE 7 handed.

V - Young thinking reg. Good player. Winning at these stakes, not sure about 2/5. He comes around now and then and plays a pretty straightforward game but we don't have a lot of hours together. I usually avoid getting mixed up with him. He seems a little off this session though, tired maybe. BB. 500$.

H - Early in H's session, has been playing well and is up a bit. Fun winning image. BTN. 750$.

Table is loose passives besides V who is the most competent player. Stacks are all 350-750.

---

UTG straddles 6, one limp in MP, H opens T 9 to 30, V flats, limper and UTG fold, HU IP.

Flop 65 - 8 6 3

V checks, H bets 20, V calls.

Turn 105 - 2

V checks, H checks back

River 105 - A

V checks, H bets 125?

size makes no sense when you x turn

AX trying to get max from underpair?

you cant overbet one pair for value here without making very large assumptions about oop (seems very unlikely good thinking reg fits this description). range as a whole wants to bet about 60% which makes sense when you cap yourself ott

What do you think of flop cbet?

flop sizing looks fine to me. frequency is kind of up in the air but its an alright combo to cbet some % of the time. closest comparison i can really come up with is like mp open vs sb call where mp is checking 55-60% of the time depending on stack depths when sb is leading 18. that goes up even more if sb is never leading (which basically the entire population of thinking players simplify to never doing). i do think straddle probably tight here pre if he's trying to win given the open is quite big and hes got two behind. this is relevant bc the tighter he is the less often we want to be cbetting as his range is stronger blah blah

There is a narrow portion of range that could do this for value. Some trapped flushes, 54, and some sets could still take this line for value. When villain check calls flop, checks turn, and checks river, he doesn't scream strength. I would expect flushes to either raise the flop or bet the river a lot. Even if he called flop with Ad, he can value bet river now. Although villain may be not going for thin enough value.

Ideally you want to have some diamond in your hand to make this play. Kd because is the natural choice since Ad is top pair now. And I think it is reasonable to have some bluffs in your range at a smaller size like 75% pot.

But the reality is that we could be totally out of line and be unbalanced with bluffs even with bad blockers and it is very unlikely for anyone in live poker to adjust accordingly. Villain will need to defend some with hands like 98s, 87s, T8s, K8s, 7d7x, 5d5x, 4d4x to avoid overfolding. He probably calls and A, but that's okay. Very likely this gets through enough to be profitable imo.

In theory we can't Cbet every flop with this hand, but sometimes it is good. We need some hands to bluff 4 flush runouts, and often busted straight draws work well.

How do we range him?

2p, sets, straights, flushes I think we hear from at some point, so his river check seems capped at 1p

I think AdKx probably 3 bets, so that leaves things like 8x and AdQx, perhaps AdJx (though a good player should fold this), and 99-JJ and perhaps even QQ.

I think we probably get enough folds to bluff river, but I'm going 80.

the issue is doing this too light incentivizes oop to x the river with all of his good hands and to xr signif more often. probably this gets through enough but so does 60%. i really cant find any permutation on gtow where its going to x turn to overbet basically any part of the range on this river. ive looked at 50 and 100 bb and vs both sb and bb flatting ranges and it doesn't do it. sure you can do random once off "explo" plays wherever you want but this doesn't make sense from a theoretical lens and is almost certainly unbalanced. does that matter? i have no idea but i think if someone is trying to improve they're better off trying to learn / play good poker

can see a tiny bit of overbetting i guess utg vs sb 100 bb deep.

Wouldn’t care about having a diamond since so many of BB’s XC-X-XFs are single diamond hands. If they bet flushes too often on the river then overbet is fine and you’d probably like bluffing no diamond.

I think it helps to know the theoretically correct sizing, but being imbalanced is almost always fine. Vs good regs there are spots where we need to be more balanced, but even vs them we want to exploit wherever possible.

I do think 125 generates a lot more folds than 60. For 60 villain is more likely to find a call with 8x, 99, TT. They are going to recognize that is hard for them to get to the river with an ace, and that represents a small portion of their total range.

60 is probably okay as it doesn't have to work a ton of the time to be profitable. I think you could argue for anywhere from 60-overbet here. A good exercise would be giving villain a probability weighted range of hands and guessing what he does vs each different bet size to work out the EV of bluffing at different sizes. This can be done through an Excel spreadsheet.

I am OK with it, but the over-bet looks bluffier to me than a value size. Plus, he's rarely folding anything that beats an A, so you can size down and get the same result either way -- and if you are wrong, it costs you less.

Result:

Interesting hand by the river.

I think river i would’ve went small like 50, in the grand scheme of things 0.5x-2x pot is relatively the same. At 0.5x your saying hey i have an ace and i want you to call, at 2x your saying hey im trying to rep the ace or higher so you have to bluffcatch.

I think if you wanna fold out 8x or better you’d have to go over 2x pot, i personally dont think its worth the risk.

Without any relevant blockers and bottom range, small bet is the way to go imo.

like this is what exploitation is. it doesn't always have to be he knows my range never has value hands or whatever, it can just be someone deciding "overbet looks bluffier" or "overbet makes no sense when you check the turn" and calling most / all of their bluff catchers that are "supposed" to fold vs this sized bet. JJ here is a pure fold vs the overbet sizing at equilibrium but if you dont know what your frequencies are / potentially dont have any valuebets here, its possible his call is absolutely printing vs you. is usually why we just want to try and play good default poker until proven otherwise so that whatever leaks our opponents have don't end up being +ev vs us.

Yeah, sizing represents flush, which it is unlikely you have. If you were going for value, you would bet the turn. An ace wouldn't overbet.

Man, its true, but people always tank against my overbets and fold.

I love overbet river bluffs, but I dont like this one and heres why: 1) A8 A6 A3 A2 are all very much in his range and will call. You want to overbet river as a bluff when youre basically 100% sure that they dont have a good enough hand to call. For example,i wouldve preferred it if the A hit the turn and the 2 came on the river. 2) I prefer to use the overbet bluff vs NON thinking players, and then use it for value agains thinking regs such as Submerible here would know i was full of **** aftee seeing me do these nonsense bluffs several times, and then they see the big bluff into them and they snap my value bet off with third pair.

They really do.

Villain calls faster with 3/4s pot bet. Perhaps, not the best call in theory, not sure, but I think pop tendency is to make these calls.

Regardless, this is a mandatory bluff on the river, since we want villain to fold broadways and smaller underpairs.

Not sure about the sizing, but would be more upset if I get called by something like 44 than JJ.

PRE - fine.

FLOP - monotone board, we can bet smaller than usual, though $20 into $65 seems fine enough, even if theory might say it should be smaller.

TURN - Dude, if you're going to bluff on a monotone flop, you have to barrel, or why bother?

Here's my reasoning - V flat called from the BB. He can have a really wide range of suited and un-suited hands, but he's not going to have very many big pairs or nut-flush combos that want to continue if you barrel the turn.

Yeah, he could have flopped it and he's trapping. We knew that on the flop. He knew that on the flop. We still bet the flop anyway, knowing that, and he called the flop, because he knew that.

He's basically daring us to bet the turn, whether we have it or not. And if we don't bet, he's either going to bluff us out of our shoes on the river, or call us down super-wide, because he knows we don't have it if we didn't barrel the turn.

RIVER - I mean...on paper, yeah, maybe the A is a good card to bluff to try to get his worse 1P hands to fold, but if we were trying to rep the flopped flush, the A is just a brick, unless we were bluffing with AX of some other suit or AdXx. But there again, AdXx would probably keep barreling the river, and AX of some other suit would probably just check back now that it picks up showdown value.

I don't know that the sizing matters as much here, after we check back turn. Your bet is barely an over-bet, and doesn't threaten to end his night early if he calls and gets the bad news. I'm not saying I'd have the balls to bet $200 or more here, but...it might get the job done, and you do have the stack depth.

Folding JJ would be really bad, because you are representing nothing.