Early on day 2. Main Villain is good young Aussie. No specific reads on him yet. I am a middle aged White guy who looks tight/nerdy. I have shown down one hand where I open raised 99 from UTG. Raised another hand, and lost without showdown.

Effective stack (me) is 105K. Main villain has 140K. Scotty Nguyen opens to 1800 UTG (600BB). He has been sizing a little bigger than the new style. I 3 bet AA to 5100. One fold to Aussie kid, who makes it 12100. Folds back to Scotty who annoyingly shows the rest of the table his 'big laydown', and the action is on me. Villain has to be super strong here, I doubt he has any cold 4 bet bluffs here. Should I 5 bet? If so what sizing?

How many 3bets/4bets have you made? Even if answer is none, I just go ahead and 5bet here out of position. You can leave yourself a lil over pot on the flop to comfortably shove.

Sound like you’d size it at about 35k?

Throw three orange chips out and then act surprised that that was a raise and that you were trying to call. ;-)

I would go 28.5k.

IMO any 5 bet here that isnt all in, with our image and with it being the ME will look so insanely strong that there is a real chance a good villain can talk himself into mucking KK.

I think you either rip it in or call and x/r any non A flop.

What hands other than AA would you rip 101k over 12k? I don't think that necessarily looks weaker. I would say 28 looks stronger than allin if we have, say, 65k, but not when we have 101k.

I think it lets villain convince himself we could do this with QQ+, AK. 5 betting to 25-30k commits 1/3 of our stack pre and never looks like anything other than AA.

I think if villain can convince himself that we would rip over 150 bigs with QQ or AK, he can convince himself that we would go 25-30k to either "see where we are" or "get a good flop".

I mean, there's no action we can take that doesn't look pretty damn strong.

I agree that when we're 5betting pre in the main we're talking about an insanely narrow range of holdings, especially given how we're likely perceived.

I think it really comes down to if we think villain can have bluffs here. If we think hes capable of having a 4b bluff range here then I think the most +EV line would be flatting the 4bet. But, given the action so far, and how we're likely perceived, I feel like villain is weighted super heavily towards value, which is likely QQ+, AK - and I think the best way to get the maximum from those hands is to simply 5bet jam.

5betting small really turns our hand into AA exactly and we let a hand like AK and KK off the hook here. Jamming looks weaker (probably gets ranged on the same QQ+, AK) and lets us get the max from hands I think V might hero fold to a small 5bet.

Options are All in or flat unless you have dynamic/history to 5b light here ... 5b with no hist/dynamic is super face up hand

20k

Thanks for the responses. In game, I assumed Villain had Kings, and might go with them. I didn't want to 3 bet too small, that gives him the right implied odds to hit a set, though I might be able to get away from that. Of course he could have queens....

5 bet jamming is a cool play, I didn't think of it, but I thought that would be pretty face up too. I guess this is just a tough spot to get value preflop, flatting and calling down looks better.

Pretty easy flat you don’t have a 5b range thay isn’t aa so don’t turn your hand face up
Peel and let him blast off there’s not really any flops your folding so yea

wd getting off that hand skunk

Maybe we should have a 5 bet bluff range. Of course this sort of situation with 3 super tight ranges just won't come up often enough. But we were 170BB deep.

Even flatting looks super strong.

Pretty sure throwing out 3 5k chips without saying anything would be interpreted as a call.

what are the positions?

Nope because two 5k is sufficient to call. The extra one is large enough to be a raise. Wasn't seriously suggesting it though.

I was UTG +1. Main Villain was +3

Wowza. Think about it this way - what hands are you using as a 3b bluff in UTG+1 against a UTG open?

A5s? Then turn one of those 4 into a bluff?

in spots where my raising range consists of the nuts only i probably stick to not having a raising range. or bluff more.

I think you should flat and try to win an extra 20-30k postflop and not go for the whole thing, most competent players just won't put in 150bb with less than AA after utg raise/utg+1 3bet in the wsop main event. Not sure what he does with JJ, QQ and AK (many people will flat), but TT and AQ probably fold immediately and JJ-QQ probably fold to the 5bet. With your 5bet being [AA, bluff] his AK is actually better than KK, but he might just fold everything except AA. Many people will even flat KK pre here and only 4bet AA in the first place.

I'd 3bet a lot bigger, your size is good for about 30k effective stacks. Somewhere between 6500-8500 seems good.

What did Scotty show as dead cards? Very relevant here imo. Does V think there are blockers to AA? Are there blockers to KK? Did he muck QQ which really turns this face up?

We could not see them. What would you think he had? Obviously something good.