Hero (not me): Former accomplished tournament pro before COVID who has been crushing the 5/5/10 capped and bounty NLHE games post-COVID. One of the biggest winners in the player pool. Perceived to be Semi-LAG and sticky versus aggros.

Villain: Serious rec small winner at 5/5 NLHE pre-COVID. Has become one of the biggest winning regs in the 5/5/10 capped and bounty NLHE games post-COVID. Very capable of unloading the clip on big bluffs.

Blinds 5/10/20 with bounty (whoever wins 2+ hands in a row receives $25 from each other player at table). Bounty player (guy who won the previous hand) folds. Folded to Villain who open-raises $105 from CO. Hero flat-calls red 75 offsuit in the 5 blind. Other blinds fold out.

Heads-up Flop: K55r. Hero checks. Villain cbets $75. Hero CR to $225. Call.

Turn: badugi 3 completed rainbow. Hero bets $400. Villain calls.

River: Kx. Hero checks. Villain thinks for 5 seconds and overbet shoves $1.8k.

Hero?

If hero is the biggest winner in the pool I'd love to get in this game.

Pre seems just so bad. Flop too. As played I don't see how it's a call.

Hero isn't the biggest. But he is one of the biggest winners. Agreed that the preflop call is pretty bad.

Why do you think that the flop play is so bad?

You can’t raise K55r cause you never have a 5 or AK and are at a severe range and nut disadvantage. Not sure why we called pre

You have to play defensively on this board. You don't have that many 5x to begin w/ and once you start piling those into the raising line your check call line is F'd.

Yeah I agree that I would play defensively on this flop if I were the Hero. I guess that the Hero in this hand is OK deviating pretty far from GTO, but he is lying to himself about the negative implications for his check-call line when he is check raising trips occasionally?/sometimes?/often? here.

If you ever come to Southern California, I highly recommend that you try out the Gardens casino. The bounty game is the nuts in several different ways.

First, the structure is amazing for action. Second, the vibe is so fun and social because people like to joke around and cheer each other on in the middle of the hand. Third, you would definitely do very well in the games. Fourth, I have never seen people tilt harder in any other game structure than they tilt their brains out in the Gardens bounty game.

This game sounds like a lot of fun.

First, as others said, i dont know how this guy is a huge winner calling 5x out of the small blind w 75 offsuit, except that he is currently sun running.

Are you villain in this hand OP? I dont see how hero can possibly call river. What else does villain have other than a K?

He somehow has to both call flop XR, and turn bet, and then somehow decide to turn it into a bluff on the river w some pocket pair. Very unlikely. But I guess thats what happened since youve posted it.

I am not the Villain in this hand

Cool thanks yeah that does sound like fun!

Do you think that we should have some nonzero river calls here?

My gut instinct is that we are mostly toast here. But do we need to think about MDF? If we are thinking in terms of minimum defense frequency, should we just do a RNG to call some % of the time?

Pre flop is way too loose.

Flop x/r is debatable, I suppose. We're basically playing our hand face up, repping 5x exactly. I'd think it would be better to flat call the flop and look to x/r some turns that might give our range some additional equity.

As played, turn should be an over-bet. Once we x/r flop and V calls, we really want to apply max pressure to all his KX combos. In theory, I suppose we could have some decent strength KX combos here, that slow-played pre, but we're still mostly repping 5x exactly.

River is just a check-insta-fold.

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Results: Hero tanked 3 minutes and called. Villain turned over A4ss for a bluff (got stubborn floating flop CR with BDFD and BDSD, continued with a turn gutter, and pulled the trigger on an ambitious river overbet bluff that got heroed

Since when do pros call with 75o oop? Don’t the mods want the OP to always be the hero?

i mean flop can definitely be a raise. pre is obviously torch but seems like you're posting here to get people to say he's bad, i think turn id just pot as i doubt co going to be very elastic once the bet gets large, river meh. can see an argument to check or block range and call accordingly, we're supposed to have some amount of like KQ type hands here although i question if that actually happens. in practice with this line i think its reasonably difficult to expect anyone let alone random rec to b/c the flop and turn with anything with sdv to decide on the river to fold out almost all of oop's range

having seen results, r u co?

Are you never folding a 5 here?

My initial feeling was we should fold pretty often but theory wise obv have to defend some percentage.

i think its very difficult to call the river and win in most plausible scenarios (co has sdv always so he has to decide to not take that showdown value vs giveups and decide he's going to try to fold sb off of 5x nearly always). i think you should overfold here vs the (large) majority of any population except for maybe strong regs / play masters, sorry if that wasnt clear from my post

tbh i think co played his hand well and sb is whale (but i still feel like a large reason this hand got posted is to get people to call sb bad)

would also like to point out its unlikely u r going to make someone who plays like this pre to fold good hands post with any kind of frequency either bc they have no idea what they're doing or just massive amounts of ego

Hero in this hand is not a whale. I definitely think that he will occasionally make a silly overly loose preflop decision as he did here...mostly when he is tilted.

Bounty structure is more forgiving to loose play.

If I saw people doing this kind of preflop stuff occasionally in a regular NLHE game, yeah it would be fair to toss around the word whale.

dunno people can be good at "poker" and be bad in variants / spots they haven't put work into. its your game so if you say hes one of the bigger winners i have to accept that

a reasonable q is what do you think winning this hand is worth in terms of ev re the structure. is interesting game variant and im maybe not accounting enough for it.

Not sure what the point this hand is. What are we to learn?

Pre is obviously bad. All agreed.

Flop x/r seems debatable. My main concern with it is that it makes hero's hand pretty face up. Hard to balance, unless we have a lot of KQ in our pre flop flatting range. Even if we did, hard to see how that's not a hand we'd just check-call.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that once we tip our hand strength on the flop, we should be piling the money in on the brick turn.

The river is just the worst card imaginable.
I would think V should usually be checking back everything that isn't top boat here. Are we supposed to consider V's jam a good bluff or 75 a good check-call?

Alternatively, would it have been bad for hero to just check-call the whole way, to disguise his hand strength, play some pot control, and keep V's range as wide as possible?

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I was just interested in MDF minimum defense frequency.

I personally think that we have to call river with 5x at a small frequency. Probably using a RNG of some sort, so we don't allow our human biases to impact the true frequency of what we actually do.

The value of winning the current pot because of future implications of winning bounty next hand is very important to preflop strategy in this variant.

Unfortunately, I can't give up that info because that is such highly prized info in my player pool. I know that the top winners in my player pool understand it, but the vast majority of the player pool has a poor/zero understanding.

I would agree, if hero didn't check-raise the flop, making his hand face-up. Had he check-called flop and turn, he could bet the river for value, or check-call, or even occasionally check-raise.

As played, I'd rather block-bet the river to rep a K, or even K5 exactly, and fold to a raise, than check-call, which puts hero in the position of either folding everything that isn't a boat, or calling, because we think V will always bluff when we check here. Block-betting puts V in a tough spot, trying to figure out if hero will fold 5X or if hero has K5, which is entirely credible.

I'm honestly not sure how applicable MDF is here, the way this was played. Other than K5 exactly, our flop x/r is repping 5X or an extremely over-played KX for value. I have no idea what our bluffs would be, or if we would have anything other than K5, 5X or KX that would constitute a "value" hand, inasmuch as I can't see playing any PP's this way from the SB.

To be fair to hero, I suppose it could be argued that he checked the river with the intention of calling, expecting V to bluff at a high frequency, and perhaps believing that V would take a different line if he actually had KX. I could understand if he reasoned V would bet smaller with KX, to get value from 5X, so a jam is more likely to be a bluff.

Not sure I would agree with it, since I think I'd likely jam KX in V's spot, but I understand it. My reasoning would be exactly the opposite - a small bet looks exactly like KX, whereas a big bet might look bluffy. I doubt I'd be tempted to jam as a bluff, with that line of thinking.

and you think that the part of the population that hasn't done any work / thought on their own is scrolling random threads here (probably <40 active members and maybe 10 that play above 1/2 in any market before we even examine winrate / effort) are capable of and are going to adjust their game in a meaningful way based off a once off post by an anon? lol.