I got a PM asking me to come and comment on the QQ discussion, but I'm not sure what aspect of the discussion I should be commenting on.
I looked back at the OP regarding this hand and saw that the OP was asking for an appropriate 3 bet size, and at least one recommendation that we flat. I thought both of those issues warranted a comment, so I will start there.
3 bet size: Effective stacks are hero's $500. A 3 Bet to $50 yields us a nice round SPR of 5, and we can intend to put in stacks on a safe board. As a general rule, when we are OOP, our 3 bets should be a little bigger than when we are IP; this is simply to plus up our FE a little bit and subtract a bit from his RIO. Even with AA, we don't mind all that much winning the pot right there, as RIO hands especially suck to play OOP, and they especially especially suck to play OOP and deep. So $50 or $55 here makes him pay the highest price for feeling frisky with some trappy 97s speculative call he might make when we caught him at the bottom of his laggy iso range but he can't find the fold button because he is in position.
So if we 3 bet this guy, I like a slightly larger than normal 3 bet--$50 or $55.
But it is not clear to me that 3 betting this guy is the best play here. It might be; I am not saying it is or isn't. The OP doesn't provide enough information for me to decide.
Here are some questions I would need the answer to before deciding whether we should or should not 3 bet this guy:
1. What do we know about his 3 bet calling tendencies?
2. If we don't have sufficient info on his 3 bet calling tendencies, is he one of those cocky ass lags who will call with a stupidly wide range IP because they think they can outplay anybody?
3. Have we seen him overbet c-betting in 3 bet pots?
4. Is his bet sizing more conventional on the turn and river? Or dos he continue overbetting?
5. Is raising one limper to $15 standard for him, or is it an unusually big iso raise?
6. Have we seen him iso-ing a wide range that he'd have to fold to a 3 bet?
I guess you guys can see where I am going with this. As a lag, he presumably has a wide, weak range to be making this isolation raise. If he is sensible, he will be turbo-mucking most of it to a 3 bet. This is bad for us (but not all that bad). But if he plays penis waving poker and will call us with most of that wide range, then we definitely want to accept the opportunity to 3 bet him and get him to put in $40 more with a range that will mostly have between 19 and 33% equity against us.
So this is an easy 3 bet against a lag who calls a lot of 3 bets in position.
Against a sensible lag who doesn't feel like it is unmanly to fold to a 3 bet, our decision is quite a bit more difficult. I still lean toward 3 betting, but calling has merit against him. The main thing is we get to play against his entire isolation range, rather than just the top part of it he'd call a 3 bet with. This is GREAT, because a lot of his hands are hands that have only one overcard--AT, AJ, AT, A9, KJ, KTs, and a lot of the other hands are hands that have no overcards and have really terrible equity against us.
The downside, of course, to calling, is that we will have terrible relative and absolute position in a 4 way pot. This is a powerful argument for 3 betting in itself. But the hand can be played profitably in this spot, but mainly by semi-set-mining with it. But it's not a bad plan against a guy who we expect to fold to the vast majority of our 3 bets. Its merit lies in the fact that it keeps the SPR a little bigger (but his overbetting will still get us to the commitment threshold in this hand) and in the fact that we are playing against a weaker range with a decent amount of mostly dead money from the other two villains, and in the fact that one in 8.5 times we will bink a super well-disguised nut hand against a guy who is going to overbomb an already bloated pot--man, when i put it like that, it moves a little bit thinking about flatting here.
If we think he will fold to most of our 3 bets and decide we want to call to take advantage of the amount of dead money he will put in on an overbet c-bet, then my plan would be to surrender the pot to either an overcard or aggression from either of the two other players in the pot. Against the button lag on a safe flop, our hand becomes a bluff catcher, and we check/guess, check/guess, check/guess on most boards.
But if we think he'll call a lot of 3 bets, 3 bet away. My default play in the absence of information informing the decision would be to 3 bet.
Last edited by mpethybridge; 01-30-2012 at 03:44 AM.