This is not my hand. This is one of Andrew Neene's. I am very new to tournament poker but have been a cash game player for 2.5 years now. I saw this hand it made me really confused, because I would think this is a very clear fold on the turn, but Andrew acted as if it was standard.

OTTH

Effective stack is 65 BB. Hero has said nothing about opponent. We are 8 handed and there's a 1 BB ante by BB.

CO opens 2x and hero calls in BB with A 5

Flop (5.5 BB): T 6 3. X-x.

Turn (5.5 BB): 9. X-2.5 BB-c. Andrew said he called because he couldn't think of a lot of hands that have a 9 that x flop and now bet turn. He said maybe they have QJ and picked up equity or want to take it down with KQ high. To me this seems like a standard x-f.

River (10.5 BB): A. X-5 BB-c (standard.)

This was actually a $600 buy in event. Could a moderator please move this to "Mid-high stakes MTT"?

yup std fold on the turn, he could be betting pocket pairs for protection, even hands like QJ will most likely double barreling+have tons of eq so you are just burning chips with call neeme does mistakes too.

I can see where he's coming from because defending the BBvCO (I'm assuming ~35% opening range) off a minopen with antes in play means BB should be defending super wide. Like only folding bottom 15% or so of hands wide. Doubt we wanna be 3betting too wide either since the price to peel is so good. Most hands simply will be higher EV to peel than to 3bet for that reason.

CO's range while it does have air is much more concentrated, narrower, and therefore stronger than BB's. As such CO really should be pounding this flop with cbets. There's so much air in BB's range that's instafolding. Then the push-pull dymanic that sets an equilibrium is gonna say "hey, if we're cbetting all this air, why not work in our value as well? Not like BB can just fold 100% vs our cbets. So now he's gotta pay off our value lest he get run over by our air".

The balance is naturally being taken care of by virtue of what a BB defend range in this spot looks like and what a CO opening range in this spot looks like.

So we should actually expect CO to almost always be cbetting here. Don't get me wrong, CO does need to work some x's into his game here, but almost always we should be expecting a cbet.

So it's understandable to exploitatively put CO on a hand worse than A-high when he doesn't cbet. After all, isn't it reasonable (if not extremely naive) to think someone wants to check weak hands and bet strong ones?

That being said, we have a billion better hands (like made hands) to defend turn with and it's not like CO always has worse than A-high with a 5 kicker when he checks flop. In fact, AK should be one of the most heavily-represented hands in V's checking range (as should A9).

So it's a pretty poor call OTT by BB.