1/2 It's hard to word posts like these without biasing responses but I'll try.

Hero: Young hoodie TAG winning image. Showndown winners where I have raised the river with the near nuts twice. (Covers)

V: Total fish with no real clue how to play the game. Took a bet bet bet line with K3 offsuit in middle position after he limped. K53 flop, 5 turn, 7 river. K was good, I was shocked. But he did something similar in the past on QJJ with Qx. I don't think he knew he got countefeited. ~$300

2 limp to hero in CO with ATo who raises to 14. Sb calls. BB (Villain) calls. Limper calls.

Flop T53.

Pot: $70. Checks to Hero. I decide to C-bet here mainly for protection. If I get c/r at this table it's an easy fold because these players would have a flush pretty much always, and I can get value from Tx, or single diamonds. I also think I can take it down here a lot. I bet $30, leaning towards the smaller side. V calls.

Pot: $130. Turn is T. V checks, and I bet $75, for same reason as flop except now it's for straightup value. Villain snap ships for about $175 more.

Yeah, snap it off. He has a lot of flopped flushes stupidly slow playing, but he also has a crap-ton of Tx, very little of which is T5 or T3. Prob no 33 or 55, given flop action.

You only need 28% equity to call, and you have 20% just against flushes with your boat outs. There really doesn't need to be much Tx in his range for this to be a call.

Why so small otf? Anyone with the J/Q/K of diamonds and a cracker can call profitably, and we can get more value; no droolers are folding Tx to a $50 bet here ever.

As played, what Garick said. We only need a few Tx combos in V's range for this to be a call, and this V likely thinks Tx is the nuts here.

You have some significant bet sizing leaks that you need to work on.

Raise more pre-flop. I would probably raise to $20 here. You have position, there is a fish you can extract value from, and your hand is somewhat light. Your goal should be to get heads-up with the fish.

I would bet more on this flop texture for value. Get out of the habit of betting for protection. Value or bluff. I would size it to around $50.

Your sizing on the turn seems okay.

As played, the question you need to ask yourself is how does this opponent play in-position vs how he plays out of position. I know you gave us some HHs, but you didn't state if villain was in or out of position.

If villain is only x/r the nuts, then you could fold here. If he is also donking all of his Tx hands on the flop and turn, you could also fold here.

With these stack sizes, it is a call. But these are the sort of things you will need to learn to think about when you start playing deeper.

First of all, if you are worried about biasing results, why did you title this "snap call, right?"

Second, I am not snap calling this. I think that we could use a lot more info on the villain, such as bet sizing tells (if any), times he has previously shoved (if any), and live reads as to his (self-perceived) strength. Is he playing every hand? Does he play every suited hand? (As far as you can tell, of course.)

I guess it is a call based on the math, as Garick showed, but remember that one hallmark fish trait is playing any two sooooted. On the continuum of snap call to crying call, this is not quite in the middle but is not at the snap end.

I responded in a bit of a hurry, but +1 to Tim Brice's bet-sizing comments. I'm OK with pre, though I'd go a touch bigger at an average table, but your c-bet is wayyyy to small. With TPTK on a monotone board, I'm going at least 2/3 pot for pure value against FD's, and depending on the Vs, prob more like 3/4 to full-pot.

Can't say I'm snapping.

The cbet would have been more useful if we bet bigger. Our small bet is never getting raised by or folding out better.

The turn c/r is also pretty suspect by V. I can't see V showing up here without a flush or flopped set turned boat.

Math says it's a call, but I'm neither happy nor snapping.

Personally I think this hand would have been improved if we delay our cbet until the turn. Flopped made hands are rarely betting, and in this case we want to rep a monster OTT.

$20 preflop is pretty much unheard of where I play over one limper at 1/2..?

The reason I bet on the smaller side with my c-bet was I made up my mind I was bet/folding, because I figured all flushes were c/r no matter my sizing. For this reason I tended to the smaller side. Wouldn't a $50 c-bet force my opponents to play correctly? I want to keep in hands like JT that are drawing nearly dead w/o the Jd. trucdouf just said "Our small bet is never getting raised by or folding out better."

I would be insane to try to fold out JJ+? I'm not bluffing. And why wouldn't better hands c/r? I feel like the only mistake I could possibly make in this hand would be folding to Ax, in which case it's not a huge mistake anyways.

But I do agree that I should bet more against Kx hands.

V had Q4dd. River brick.

Also my note about biasing responses was because obviously I lost this hand lol, and posts about coolers/bad beats aren't really educational.

You really should have known what you were going to do before you bet the turn. Plan your hand.

The OP said two limps to the CO, thus why I suggested raising to $20. Also, you shouldn't really think "it's unheard of to take this line in my room". Start taking the lines that are most exploitable, not what others do in your room.

Your small bet sizing on the flop will eventually make you super exploitable. I know, it is live poker. But I am assuming you want to get better at poker. Have a reason for betting and know what you are doing. The logic "I am just going to fold if someone raises so I will bet small" seems really bad to me.

Also, this hand is not really a cooler or bad beat IMO. If stacks were deeper this would be a relatively trivial fold on the turn.

Based on this, you should check the turn.

You are bet/folding the flop because you think you can't get raised by a hand that you beat. On the turn, the T changed nothing. Hopefully you see why the T changed nothing, right?

Anyway, the only good thing about the T showing up is that if you happen to be behind, you have a redraw now. So in fact, the presence of the redraw would weigh me to check back here because getting raised is now worse for me than it would have been on the flop.

So, flop is all one suit, and you've deduced that you are at a table full of players who are not tricky, and when they do a very strong looking move like a check/raise, they always have the goods. Then you get check/raised.

This really shouldn't be a surprise, now should it?

Check flop.

I prefer bet flop/check turn but this approach has merit too.

OP, The problem with exploitative bet sizing is that it is easily readable. If you bet closer to uniform sizes (like 2/3 pot), you will still get calls from weaker T's and idiots with flush draws.

Do you determine your bet size before the rake? Here, the pot was actually $54 on the flop, so ~$35 would be 2/3rd pot bet as opposed to H's $30.00.

If you decided a pot size bet was appropriate, would it be $60 or $54/$55?

I was trusting the OP that the pot was 70. Doing the math myself, it seems like it should be $58-rake. Not sure if it was a math fail, or if OP forgot to tell us about another caller.

In any case, when I figure percentages of pot, it is of actual pot, not of what it would be without rake. After all, that's what all the pot odds are based on.

Tim:

Don't you think a raise to $20 forces out most hands that we are beating? In the games that I play, there are very few hands even fish call with, when i put out a 10bb raise.

agreed with the rest.

Definitely don't check the flop that's ******ed. C-betting turn is good as well. V can have all sorts of single diamond hands.

It is probably heavily player pool dependent, but I think the answer to this yes. But I rarely play $1/3 these days, so it is possible that things have changed.

This villain called $14 with Q4s, I doubt he is folding for $20 regardless of how many opponents call the raise.

I'd suggest someone come up with a range of hands for the limpers where we're doing well on this flop.

A one pair hand on this flop isn't a value hand, it isn't even a bluff catcher.

Here's why: Against 4 Villains playing a wide range of hands, we're losing this pot over 71% of the time. We should be trying to find out if we're in the 29% or 71% without losing a huge portion of our stack.

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 28.344% 26.92% 01.42% 718623 37935.75 { AsTh }
Hand 1: 17.906% 17.29% 00.61% 461579 16393.87 { TT-44, AQs-A2s, K2s+, Q4s+, J7s+, T7s+, 97s+, 87s, AQo-A3o, K7o+, Q8o+, J8o+, T9o }
Hand 2: 17.893% 17.28% 00.61% 461235 16386.37 { TT-44, AQs-A2s, K2s+, Q4s+, J7s+, T7s+, 97s+, 87s, AQo-A3o, K7o+, Q8o+, J8o+, T9o }
Hand 3: 17.908% 17.30% 00.61% 461712 16327.07 { TT-44, AQs-A2s, K2s+, Q4s+, J7s+, T7s+, 97s+, 87s, AQo-A3o, K7o+, Q8o+, J8o+, T9o }
Hand 4: 17.950% 17.34% 00.61% 462858 16328.32 { TT-44, AQs-A2s, K2s+, Q4s+, J7s+, T7s+, 97s+, 87s, AQo-A3o, K7o+, Q8o+, J8o+, T9o }

If that is your argument, then we should check the flop for pot control.

Checking the flop is by far the best line. Not even close.

4 ways, with an extremely vulnerable TPTK, which is going to hate almost every single turn and river card. Literally, you only like the 2 remaining T and 2 of the 3 remaining A. That's 4 cards you want to see out of 47.

Its not about pot control, its about not getting 150bb in the pot when you most certainly do not have the best of it.

The problem with this reasoning is that our opponents aren't going to base their decisions on how much equity their hands have against AT. We can get plenty of value from Tx (which has very little equity against us), and get folds from hands like Kx8d (which have lots of equity against us). In 5-way pots, we're very rarely going to flop 50%+ equity against the field. If that's our requirement to value bet large on the flop, we're going to be leaving tons of money on the table in multiway pots against bad players.

If we bet something significant and get called, we should also be fine with any low non-diamonds. Sure, it's possible they're going to give an opponent a straight or two pair. But as someone put succinctly in a thread recently, our opponents do not have magic cards that transform to fit the runout. If they have 5 outs, they have 5 outs. If we bet $50 and get one caller, the 6 of clubs is very rarely going to improve their hand. Even non-diamond overcards still leave us in ok shape against a drooler's calling range.

Also, getting a bad runout doesn't obligate us to mindlessly pile in the rest of our chips

1) Against 4 Vs, those 5 outs are like 15-20 outs against us. And these are only the actual outs, not the 15-20 other cards that may not actually be outs for Vs but are scary to us.

2) We have no way of knowing which of those 15-20 outs are the ones that kill us, and therefore...

3) We are not going to be able to fold on later streets if any of the Vs bet. Realistically, b/f on this flop is bad simply because we could be getting bluffed by hands like AXnon-diamond.

4) Small mistake made OTF leads to 2x and 3x the price of the mistake OTT and OTR.

5) If we simply wait until the turn, our Vs lose 1/2 of their equity (if they miss). Its a good thing to let them give up their equity before putting more $$$ in the pot when H's hand is so vulnerable.

The flop is already a bad run out for our hand. Unless it goes runner-runner AT, 100% of run outs are bad.

People should be, and are, calling raises with suited hands and pairs.

5-ways the flop is the most obvious check-fold in the world. Rarely, probably never, is anyone betting a hand that we have good equity against.

It is just LOL bad that the responses above are focused on how likely the Villain has T5o rather than how horrible our equity is multi-way on this flop.

In every hand where the advice is play-like-a-fish, the advice is rationalized by the-Villains-are-fishes.

Raising and getting called by 4 people is bad news. Having one pair on a monotone flop is hugely bad news. There's absolutely no reason to build a big pot, with our weak hand. We've already had a bad run-out by the time the flop appears. We're very multi-way with a weak hand that has little chance to improve.

The Hero's obvious mistake in this hand is that he tried to protect a hand that was much too weak to protect.