Venetian $400. Villain 30ish Asian, no special reads so far. Hero 50ish WG, Probably viewed as a bit of a nit.

At 200-300, Villain opens UTG2 to 800, hero calls BB with AQss. Hero is effective stack with 18K.

Flop is AJT rainbow, one spade. Check, check. This is a strange check here for Villain, but whatever.

Turn is 7s, giving us Nut flush draw. What should our line be?

Are antes in play? Makes a huge diff for your defense and 3b ranges.

Yes, sorry I omitted that.

If you have "no special reads" on Villain, why do you find the turn check strange?

Can't imagine even a typical player checking a set or 2 pair twice here, or even AK.

I probably bet about 2/3 pot here. If called and the river doesn't bring a spade or a K, I'll check back if he checks.

The answer is:

In theory: literally always check again, his range is so far ahead of yours OTF it's actually kinda remarkable, good instincts on identifying this as a super unorthodox/suboptimal check.

But you always x turn again in theory because, since it makes such little sense for V to x any hand, it therefore makes as much sense (i.e. no sense) for him to show up w/ AA here as it does TT or 22 or whatever other hands might be in his opening range.

Therefore, on a dry turn card (7s only improves a handful of combos in your range that's probably over 800 combos wide) V will, in theory, still hold a massive range advantage OTT and therefore you cannot profitably bet air and therefore you cannot really bet anything.

In practice: Try to make a qualitative judgment about what he has (this step is obvious) and just go with it in terms of what you think the right exploit should be because theory aside, he is almost surely exploitable.

But in practice this is kinda hard to do esp against someone whom you're never played before so I think you should just x turn and see what happens

Not sure there are any EP opens that we are ahead of that will pay off two bets.

KK/QQ will call one bet for sure but not necessarily two.

I like checking turn because villain may bluff or may even think KK/QQ are ahead.

Ultimately I think we want to get to showdown cheaply, if possible, and we want to have a chance to draw cheaply to a BD flush draw.

Villain didn't check turn, he checked a flop that I would expect to be a bet close to all of the time.

I guess this is a routine check/call. That is what I did in game. Afterwards, I thought maybe I should check/raise or checks shove turn.

Nah just a pure x/c

If V is indeed arriving at turn, albeit suboptimally, then he just has too many strong hands (he's 100% uncapped actually) for us to raise as thin as AQs and in fact when we x/r he shouldn't really be continuing with worse aces (unless he has a FD too which, obv isn't relevant here)--really, think about how strong we rep (both in theory and just in practice) when we x/r turn.

So we're much better off x/r much more polarized (we have bwy, we have the other straight, we have 77, TT and possibly some JJ, we have 2pr, and we have hands like KsXs and QsXs ((the weakest ones--really the ones that are not double-gutted), 9sXs, and 8sXs that benefit more from being x/raise than AsQs does (because these combos get folds from better, AQ almost always merely folds out worse)

In reality his range is almost all pair plus draw or one pair no kicker, a few traps, a few underpairs, no air.

I probe twice chunky. Call a turn raise, fold to a river raise. I see no reason to allow him to continue pot-controlling and he's generally not going to be good enough to turn anything into a bluff.

What does probe twice chunky mean?

66%+ turn, river leads

Lead turn. If he pops, call and hope to hit king or spade.

I think you are betting for value.

For the results oriented among you, Villain had KQo..