Hey, guys! I'm grinding 180-mans with some success, but mostly by following my push/fold intuition (developed with DC videos and sngwiz) and less knowledge about exact ranges. Therefore, I decided to start posting hands (this is my first one) to hopefully improve. Thank you for any advice and please let me know if I'm doing something wrong in the post.


This is a funny hand, sorry if it is too basic for everyone else.


My thoughts: First hand of the tourney, so no previous reads. His preflop call seemed weak or maybe a small/medium pocket pair. The donk bet on flop made me think that he maybe hit a pair or a flush draw, so I tried to charge him, but not too much so he would fold. On the turn, i kinda spite-called, thinking that he may be doing this with something like AT and that if he really hit the Q, I still have some odds. I thought he would bet less with a really good hand (>2 pairs), but my thinking could be flawed (I stopped playing cash because I could never fold TPTK). Advice on any street is welcome.

raise more otf to about tree fiddy or even 450. now call? its close. i think theres enough AT, flush draw combos in his range to make this call +EV. plus u had outs.

You have to raise more on the flop!

You are beat way more often than this occasion that turned out to be a rare bluff. I'd fold to the shove barring any unusal soul reads. Sucks but definitely your best play long term.

I think calling is fine, I actually think its rare that he does have something, seems mainly like he just doesnt want to see a river, people here are c/r pretty much everything which beats you imo, the shove here to me seems weak, not strong... +the times when he does have Qx or 2p/set you have outs.

Edit: Just saw the flop.. you HAVE to be raising more here, raise to 450ish and then you are never folding the turn to his shove

Thank you for the replies. It seems that I got the idea about the re-raise sizing from some training video and started applying it in the wrong situations.

Could you further explain to me the idea behind a larger raise? Is it mainly to extract more value from his strong hands like TPTK and draws? Is it to give him worse odds to his drawing hands (to put it in another way, would you still raise this much if you had the absolute nuts)? It seems to me like a bigger raise will make the villain fold worse pairs (nines or worse pocket pairs) that he would call to a smaller raise. Does the value we get from his strong hands counter-balance this?

Again, sorry if these are basic/stupid questions.

The board has both a flush and straight draw which hits his range fairly well, and its a 2.50 so we want to be going for as much value as possible here, he really doesnt bother about whether its a raise to 300 or 450, its not really until he has 2/3 of his stack in before he even realises how big the bets are imo

By making it 450 on the flop you set it up nicely to just jam any turn and by raising more on the flop, you get more money in when you are 99% sure you have the best hand which is obv. what we're always looking for. (:

Raising to 260 puts you in an unneccessary awkard spot if he happens to randomly jam the turn. I still don't think a fold is the proper play to his turn donk shove though.

The bigger size is also because it's really important to size your raises postflop based on not just the bet size villain/s make but also the pot size. For example if he donked 100 into 150 your size would be more standard/fine but he donked 100 into 360 so your raise should be bigger. But yeah you will get more value from draws/pairs which will call/give you value, and it makes a nice stack size for the turn as someone mentioned and finally you also make it more likely he ships a draw which is good for you, instead of just calling which a 260 sized raise gives him a decent price to do.
as played i think it's close, he can have draws or weird dumb stuff sometimes but your price isn't that great (he bet a bit over pot for his shove). but you also have some equity when you are behind etc.