felt really gross about this one. tanked river wanting to shove cuz his play looks so f'in weird but i was also a little wary of him trying to induce that. Regretted not 3b shoving the turn afterwards.

is it best to just check again and x/r shove over his bet ?

v is playing 32/17/5 in 135 hands

I think a lot of HU play is dependent on how your opponent is playing and what their tendencies are. Line looks pretty standard here unless villain is getting out of line often.

im not so sure we should be betting turn tbh. We have a hand that has a ton of equity vs his perceived range, which is weak pairs Kx and Ax. We also might be good. If we bet here, we need to go for it OTR too with no guarantee he folds. Also, we might get blown off of our equity which sucks. IDK

ez shove preflop

^ That deep?

Interesting. What kind of range would we do that with and what do we check behind with or raise smaller? It seems open to the risk of him trapping a lot but with the right ranges it could work.

I think hu hands are the hardest to review in isolation. having not shoved pre I think played fine.

Regarding shoving pre. I would consider it. If we have just got hu I probably wouldn't. I believe I usually have good edge heads up and there is so much equity at stake.

JQo also plays well hu. I would rather shove Ax even if it suffers greater domination by calling range as it is hard for him to have enough limp to induce hands especially when we block many. Shoving Ax and low -mid pairs here means I think we should check this pre readless.

What if we 3x it? We would do the same with a lot of premiums so we are quite well protected and take it down a lot now rather than playing OOP.

+1

Readess I don't like the 3X although I don't hate it. I would like it if we had slightly bigger effective stacks. It's a bit mad we are trying to give insight heads up readess. Yes this may be the 1st hu hand but surly we can make some conclusions from how villain is going to play from our 3 handed observations. 3xing and c bet folding means we are close to nashing it and let go of a lot of the edge we supposed we had.
Also the value of balancing our play with our premiums is negligible as this is heads up and we don't have premiums very often at all. Yes our hand strength is relative but the premium holdings part of our range will in most part play straight forward. Think A8 not Kk.

^ I agree it sucks when we c-bet a missed flop then fold, but that's only one possibility. A lot of the time buttons who do this just fold pre-flop.

3x > shove > x

u gotta take initative with this hand in HU this shallow.

also we need more info about V's limping range... was he limping before, is he limp/folding, did he ever limp shoved or smt...

if he's having any idea about how his limping range looks like than 3x is best option, as we'll dominate a LOT of hands that he'll limp call, and also our postflop initiative will be huge and cbet will have a lot bigger success than in case we checked

if HU just started and he's limping for the first time just shove ATC there (not value part of our range obv) as he'll NEVER have anything to call you with. He'll probably make adjustment next time he limps but if it's the first limp and u werent overaggressive before it than just shove it, it's a big +EV. I wanna forget about GTO in these spots bcs we loose so much value if we aint exploatative vs unknown guys in HUs etc... just go aggressive and until he gets that we're crazy mu****as he has 11bbs and we have 33.

^^ um, really? Let's rip 20bbs first hand of HU against a player with fishy stats because we don't know they might limp/call or limp/shove (but don't do it with the hands we might want to get called by...).

Maybe I'm missing something here?

ATC shove here have clearly bigger EV than checking and playing postflop also without any info. Or im missing something

I definitely prefer a shove to a check, but if we are right about him being capped then 3x achieves the same result as a shove against a lot of his range, the exceptions being some calls from hands we dominate a lot of. There is the bonus that if we are wrong and he's limp-shoving KK or AA we can still get away from it.

Some people approach HU differently than non-HU situations. Villain playing 32/17/5 (135 hands) there's clearly a big gap between their VP$IP and PFR, showing their tendencies to either limp pre, flat raises pre... or both. Also, with the PFR at 17%, we definitely can't rule out the fact that villain could be looking to limp/jam in this spot ~20bbs deep (or, indeed, limp/call shove at this depth).

We are going to realise a chunk of equity here by just checking preflop and playing deeper with a likely skill edge, albeit OOP, is where we're going to make our money vs this fishy looking player. If we are going to do anything, then raising to ~3x and folding to a shove is the other option. Would just hate r/f this hand pre though.

Regarding the ATC (but not top x%) shove > check here, I just can't find the numbers to back that up playing around with the ranges. We would have to be pretty bad postflop (not realising as much equity as we thought) or we'd have to be pretty confident that there's almost no limp/call in villain's range - something I don't think we can do on the basis of one hand HU with them.

Also, seems like a ton of risk and loads of variance, when we should be able to win vs this guy a big % of the time by making lots of good decisions and utilising our skill-edge postflop.

i see that biggest problem is that i said ''but not top of the range''... range here should be equally balanced obv. so 3x hands with no postflop equity that we will r/f and hands that we're going to r/c, shove those JTs QJo KTs Axs 22-77 type of hands. and x back suited connectors/gappers and maybe few Ax Kx with sd value...

i personally have QJo in my 20bb shove range (or limp shove) bvb vs regs, but i dont see many differences bcs guys on these levels NEVER have some balanced limp/call plan and usually they will fold 4/5 times when they limp in this situation. And QJo will probably play pretty good vs his limp/calling range as it tends to be pairs/Axs so just shoving is a huge +ev

this would be by far the worst decision possible. Both check and 2.5x raise are faaaaar better plays than opening shoving here.

If he calls the 3x the result is us playing a bigger pot OOP? Also, are we 3x calling? 3x folding is horrible, but 3x calling QJo here doesn't seem great either.

It's not an open shove, it's a shove over the limp. Also, shoving cannot be the worst decision...it's arguably the best decision.

No, we are 3x folding because I don't believe unknowns are going to bluff limp-jam at the start of hu.

The difference if he calls our 3x rather than if we check behind is we have the lead and an uncapped range and can take it down with a c-bet a lot of the time, so I don't mind the pot being bigger in this case.

so its arguable what is better a 3x or a shove but does it really matter? as don't we all think checking pre is better then either other play readless.

Why is 3x folding horrible, he never has a bluff there, he only shoves a really tight value range

Shove over the limp is definitely the worst decision, post this hand in the HUSNG chat and they'll tell you that it's very bad.

Checking pre is worse than raising because we aren't giving him a chance to flat with worse (which he will) and we don't have post flop initiative.

I think 3xing is better:

First of all he will fold 70-80% of the time and we will take an easy pot right there. Also we will establish the fact that limping rags will not be allowed at this HU(if he's actually doing so). Yes 3x folding isn't fun at all, but at least you don't loose your stack, plus you'll rarely get a shove from him.

Talking about shoving - that just looks bad to me. I mean you're shoving 20bb to take down 1bb with just a decent hand?? at what universe is that good? you're never gonna get a call from a weaker hand. At best you'd be flipping with 77-TT, but i doubt he would limp those hands pre.

Checking seems okay, but you go to the flop with no info about your OPP. Therefor I'm all for the 3x rise taking the hand pre.