Hi everyone,


First time posting in this forum and relatively new poker player, but love the game and would love to improve!

Posting a hand here that I played, wanting to get your thoughts.



1/2 game 9-handed. Effective stack is around 500 right now.

Hero in UTG +1 with AdKs

Hero open raises to 10, Button 3-bets to 30, hero calls, heads up into the flop. Pot is $63

Flop comes 428 w/ 2 spades

Hero checks, button bets $30, hero calls. Pot is now $123

Turn comes 3s

Hero checks again, Button now bets $90 which is 3/4 pot.

What should the hero do in this situation?

Call and see a river. I’d assume all your outs are clean as you block AA and KK. Villain should’ve bet that turn bigger.

What can you tell us about the villain? LAG, TAG, maniac, OMC, etc? How had he been playing? Most importantly, if you hit and donk the river, what will he call?

Assuming you're against JJ-QQ, you're a 2:1 dog to river the best hand, so with $213 in the pot and $90 to call, you do have immediate odds. However, that depends on a possibly faulty assumption. If you add AsJs+ to his range (a reasonable assumption), 7 outs become dirty and you could end up value owning yourself.

So, the decision becomes read dependent.

So the villain is someone that I played with for the first time, and I would say he was playing pretty solid, didn't seem like a total maniac, but also not a total nit either, so I would say relatively balanced, but did play hands aggressively. Skills-wise, he was probably one of the stronger players at the table.

So, what kind of range do you figure he had?

I was putting him on an over-pair like 99+ (minus AA, KK since I block those hands), and perhaps a set with 88. I thought it was also possible that he had AQs, AJs, maybe QJs in his range as well, so two over-cards with potential backdoor flush as well.

In which case, in the absence of a strong live read, I'm folding to the turn bet.

In the preflop play, would you prefer to call the 3bet OOP or 4bet since the 3bet is coming from the button? (assuming no live reads) Or a bit of a coin toss?

IME people drastically under 3bet so I flat to this read if this is his first 3bet, fold to a tighter read and 4bet if I think he is getting frisky with 3bets.

I'm not flatting pre OOP, 4bet/fold. If he 5bets, he's got it (not AK).

As played fold

This is a very hard lesson to learn and has issues of its own. In particular, if the villain flats the 4-bet, which a lot of people will do with 100% of their range. In essence, you're making a high variance play in a bloated pot OOP. It takes time for people to learn to deal with this successfully.

As it so happens, I agree with you most of the time, though not all the time. It's situational and judgment dependant that comes with experience. For me, the biggest situational factor is effective stack sizes. The deeper the stacks, the more likely I would 4-bet ... and yes $500 effective is deep enough. In the situation described and against this villain, I'm not really sure.

My point is that 4-betting AK OOP successfully requires some skills that the OP does not necessarily have and therefore flatting the 3-bet preflop, OOP is an acceptable play.

If he flats, we defined his range to be mostly med/big PP's or sometimes possibly AK/AQs (although rare), but the bulk of his range would be PP's. A lot of light 3bettors will fold to a 4bet, I don't players are calling a 4bet with their whole range unless he's a tight nit where there would be reasoning to fold pre, and there's nothing wrong with c/f'ing post flop if the flop comes J49 and he's firing away.