^^^^

Why cant Villain have a T or 9? is it basically off his line only? I only ask cause if I had T or 9 depending on Villain aggression level I can see us taking a check back line on turn.

Which ones and why? I don't really have a lot of natural bluffs other than my straight draws.

Villain can have Tx or 9x, but a lot of those hands make better calls pre than 3-bets. Also, I'm not sure if he is tricky enough to check them to me on the turn.

Aggressive players will not check the turn after taking a 3bet and cbet flop with paired board, if he has trips or better. So, 10 and 9 should not be in his range. But sometimes ppl do play crazy. You can't predict craziness, you can just construct a standard range. Standard we have way more 9 and 10s then the V.

You keep saying this but you haven't explained why. There is a lot of missing info that is relevant to your decision making like ...

1. How many times has villain 3! this session?

2. How many times has villain 3! you this session?

3. Was villain 3!ing IP or OOP?

4. Was villain 3!ing a linear or polar range?

5. Was villain squeezing one or more callers or without dead money?

6. What cards did villain show down in these 3! pots?

7. What circumstances has villain 3! you in previous sessions and what were his cards?

There has been no discussion of range analysis and what you think villain's preflop 3! range is, his flop c-bet range, his turn x/c range etc.

There has been no discussion of what your flat vs. 4! range is, and how that range changes vs. a "positionally aware villain capable of 3!ing light" or whatever this thread is supposed to be about.

Feeling the need to defend hands like KTs and QTs here without the relevant info provided is more likely to be a leak than a profitable defend.

Ew gross. Pre and flop standard. Turn river is really weird. You have tons of countrrfeit pairs and straight draws with way less sdv than this you'd prefer to bluff with.

I am Hero.

no....I AM HERO

I can not answer all of those questions, except that this is villain's first 3-bet this session. It is less than an hour into the session, though, so that's not very relevant.

I don't know what his 3-bet range is. I don't remember all of the times I've been 3-bet by him in previous sessions, just one time I 4-bet him small and he snap folded. Besides, those spots wouldn't say much about this spot. BB vs. CO is much different than BU vs. UTG with callers in between, or whatever. CO/BU vs. blinds doesn't come up in live play much because play is so loose.

I do suspect that he is c-betting 100% of his range on the flop, because I have a lot more data on him as the pre-flop aggressor. He checks the flop almost never in HU pots as the PFR.

I disagree with you that it's a leak and that's fine, but it's probably also a leak to take those hands out of other people's ranges. I doubt villain has done so.

I am folding 66-22 pre, probably even 77 sometimes (I do not have my range down that specific in most spots). I do not like to defend small pairs. By the river all of these hands have pretty equal showdown value since I doubt he calls with less than A-high on the turn, so it should come down to blockers, which I haven't looked at in detail yet. On the turn I generally prefer bluffing with equity when I have enough hands in my range to do so. Should I just be checking these back IP? I haven't really looked closely at how many bluffs I need. If you prefer counterfeited pairs I think 77/88 is not enough bluffs for the turn. Maybe 77/88/87s is enough.

Why in the world are you folding small pairs to a 3bet but calling with KQ and apparently smaller suited connectors? Maybe that question is more important than anything you're asking about in this hand.

Why is the flop 100% standard when it seems like villain has a range that is ahead of our hand? With our blockers, JJ is a wider part of villains range too. Although a J is nice, have no gin card. Our chances of having / ending up with the best hand are slim. Also, this is a villain that we've been picking on, which he may or may not have picked up on. Our chances of winning this pot are dependent on him giving up (what if he barrels again with hands he beat?) and also on him folding to our bluff. T94 flop is a different story but as it is, think I might just fold flop.

Because small pairs play horribly in 3-bet pots. Suited connectors are much more flexible since they connect with many more flops and work themselves into continuing ranges much more easily. Suited connectors also do well at retaining equity against strong ranges.

The flop call is a float. I do not expect to have or improve to the best hand often enough to make a call profitable alone. There is a significant bluff component.

Villain should be checking most of his range to me on this flop when I have a range advantage due to having much more Tx, but he is recklessly betting. I am not getting out of line by floating him with a significant portion of my range, because I have many value hands which would call the flop to support this.

I prefer to defend my range on this flop by only calling, as villain's range has very little equity against my value hands, and stacks are not too deep that I have trouble getting them in by the river. Raising folds out a lot of hands with very little equity which may continue on future streets.

Made hands (PP's) don't need to connect with flops ... because they are already a made hand! But when they do (at a much greater frequency than SC's), they smash sets.

You are really not deep enough to be defending garbage like KTs, QTs, J9s and other ridiculous hands people were suggesting are standard defends. You are 180 BB's deep, the SPR will be ~6.4x in a 3! pot. You don't want to be defending hands that need to see turns and rivers to realize their equity because it's going to get very expensive very fast and your street by street calls will assuredly be -EV. Likewise, semi-bluffing into an uncapped 3! range is also spewy and -EV.

Thus my first reply was "you are repping a narrow range of JJ" because we shouldn't have much Tx here. If we are showing up with lots of Tx combos here we are leaking pretty badly.

LOL, go play online and fold to every 3 bet as the button with KTs, QTs, and J9s and see how long you last.

Honestly it's probably fine to defend the small pairs, I just personally do not like them. Maybe I should be calling those, too, but I am not calling 22 before QTs. They should be close to breakeven defends. When we do not flop a set and face a bet they will usually just have to be folded. The fact that it's a "made hand" doesn't matter much if we can't take them to showdown profitably. SCs make much better floats than PPs in general. When I say they connect with a lot of flops, I mean they can often be defended even when they only flop backdoors.

Just folding almost everything pre is fine vs. a nit, but it is not against a player who actually has some idea what he is doing and is fighting for pots. If you do not think the pre-flop calls and flop calls are standard, then I don't know what to say. If we do not defend those hands pre and this hand on the flop we are folding far too much of our range. If you don't think this matters then we obviously have much different approaches to handling other thinking players.

And I do not understand what you are talking about with regards to semi-bluffing. We are not allowed to bluff post-flop because our opponent 3-bet pre, even on boards which favor our range?

People are saying these are standard defends because they are. Two sources I have found in a brief search recommend defending these hands. (Applications of NLHE, Pokersnowie) You may claim that these are outdated or inaccurate or whatever, but I challenge you to find a source which recommends folding QTs to 3-bet CO vs. BB, without the stipulation that BB is very tight or passive.

Biggest question to ask is does villain x-call turn with a lot of Ax hands, what about OTF does he bet all the AJ, AQ, AK combos that should effect your decisions OTR, i think he can have a lot of suited Ax here tho.

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You've got a small value range OTR any Tx or 9x assuming your not 3! calling with unsuited combos and a lot of bluff combos?

Villain's range is JJ-AA and a lot of 9x here too, if you discount the Ax i don't see him folding 50%

Because online 6-max and live full ring are so comparable...

Well this is a pretty big stipulation. You haven't given me any reason to believe he is actually 3! wide from the BB here other than your hunch or belief that he is a thinking player. So until I have some HH evidence to the contrary I'll generally put most people into the population read bucket of not 3! wide, especially from OOP with no dead money. That is a more than fair assumption.

You also haven't discussed your 4! range here which should likely include some of these hands you want to defend with as well as the ones you want to fold (the small PP's).

You are only getting my word for it, because I am terrible at remembering HHs from past sessions. What I know about him is that he is young, plays all the time and is notably aggressive.

I am not very experienced with or knowledgeable about 4-betting ranges, so this may be a crappy strategy (probably oversimplistic at best), but I am 4-betting {QQ+, AK} for value, possibly mixing in some flats with QQ/AK. I use the suited wheel aces as 4-bet bluffs. I am aware I probably need more bluffs than just the suited wheel aces, but in practice I know my 4-bets tend to be value heavy because I am a wuss.

Browni, I think you don't need to defend your defending range pre. All good and aggressive player should agree that your defend is pretty standard. Johnny is just a nitty player, and leave it like that. The whole pt. of this hand is whose range is stronger at the river. I feel it's you, thus, this bluff should be profitable if you are balanced. But if you're too bluffy in this spot then its not.

It's hard to float rockets.

I think this line is fine, as long as you're doing stuff like this less than once every N hours of play (hero-dependent N). Just saying you can't do this every time and expect to win. But if you're super tight and never even stab at a flop without at least top pair, you'll probably get away with this every time - as long as you've been at table long enough for villains to take notice of your tightness. Also, you should have recently showed down some monsters and have a "winning image"... It really really depends on your image and perceived range.

to me it's spewage, i'd slow down on the paired boards myself

This was important enough to quote for it's own response. I'm not sure if you have read Applications of NLHE or not, but the book is designed for GTO play vs. "perfect" opponents in 6-max style games.

His section on defending against 3!'s (p.69) with hands like KTs, J9s etc has fairly strict assumptions:

1. You are opening a 40% range from the BTN in a 6-max game (not CO in a live full-ring game such as this hand)

2. You are opening for 2.5x BB

3. Villain is 3! to 9.5 BB's

4. Villain is defending wide enough that his worst hand is losing 5.5 BB's on average (good luck creating a proof of concept for this one)

5. You are playing with 100 BB stacks and are going to make super loose hero calls and super marginal near 0EV bluffs for your stack on the river.

I think it's important we don't miss the forest for the trees here. The game and theory Janda is describing is an apples-to-oranges comparison to a typical live 2/5 game. The overarching theme that gets repeated ad nauseam on this forum is "exploitable poker trumps balanced/optimal poker 99% of the time.

Is it more likely that this villain is some online 6-max wizard with perfectly balanced ranges and frequencies from every position, or rather he is just 3!ing a fairly linear range from OOP vs. your CO open (not the BTN which is another fairly significant flaw to overlook!).

I think it's a leak to defend light here at this stack depth/SPR vs. my range estimate for villain. You don't. Who knows who is correct. But what I feel pretty confident about is misinterpreting something you read in a book and not applying it correctly is likely massively -EV/leaky.

Not sure what he x/c on the turn without betting river. Would be a very sneaky check if he has a T or 9. Ax is my guess, doubt he can call river.

GTO perspective...

We know that V's range (mostly) only contains bluff catchers. And hero has a mix of bluffs and value hands. So the river is easy to solve theoretically (GTO wise).

If villain folds more than 50% of the time to a PSB, you win. So he should call about 50% of the time to make you indifferent to bluffing. He's getting two to one on his money, so you need to be bluffing at least 1 out of 3 times to make it profitable for him to call. So you should have a bluff 33% of the time when you shove to make him indifferent to calling.

Suggestion would be to try not to look at this and just say, "oh great spot to bluff." Think about how often you actually have it here and how often you're bluffing, and try to make sure you're doing this less than 1 time for every 2 times you have it. If you exceed that, you're definitely bluffing too much and bluffing too much is generally going to be a bigger leak at LLSNL than not bluffing enough.

For that reason, to make sure you're not bluffing too much, I'd maybe just opt to take your line with the very bottom of your range... JQs and 78s (if you flat pre), maybe KJs. Or maybe only counterfeited pairs if you think you call flop with those.