Quote:
Originally Posted by sixsevenoff
Is there a better way to navigate this spot?
1/2, 9 handed, three hours into session.
Villain appears to be playing pretty TAG, and seems OK, but has spent about an hour of the session away from the table. He hasn't been raising super frequently, but definitely a few times an hour. Villain got 3 bet once about 20 minutes in when he opened $11 UTG and HJ 3 bet him to $35, and he folded. Hero has a pretty aggressive image, probably moreso TAG.
OTTH
Two loose passives limp to villain in LJ who opens $16 and it's folded to hero OTB who 3 bets to $50 with AQs, and it's folded to villain who shoves for a total of $146, which hero called.
In hindsight, calling here comes out break even if his range is JJ+, AK; it's a small losing play if his range is QQ+, AK. Either way, we are in a pretty marginal spot getting 4 bet jammed on. Is there anything we should be doing differently?
Sklansky said it pretty well in NLHTAP: "don't raise an amount that will leave you unsure how to respond to a reraise."
[Re-]Raises to around 1/3 of the effective stacks fall into this bucket a lot at LLSNL, because a jam in response offers us ~2/1 odds vs. ranges where our equity is often ~33%. The simple answer is to shade the 3! up or down out of that dead zone if we can.
If your image is a little loose and prone to 3!ing, his shove range could well be a little wider than you listed, in which case a call would already be fairly +EV (although making it $55 or whatever might be better still).
If you think your image is more tight than LAG, maybe his jamming range is only QQ+/AK - in which case it makes more sense to shade down the reraise, maybe to $40-45, where you could more comfortably fold to a shove. (As a bonus, AQs is a great holding if it instead winds up 4 ways to the flop for $40, always a possibility at these stakes.)