I call pre too but lol at running the math. The equity difference is trivial. You either think your skill advantage is bigger than your positional disadvantage for those stack sizes or not. And if you make that decision your goal should not be to be perfectly balanced in all spots just for the sake of balance. If your read is that they're nitty you should expect to benefit mostly by being able to fold bluff catchers, getting too many free cards when you have a weak draw and getting them to fold when their range is transparently weak.

When a supposed nit donks into the preflop raiser for 2/3rds pot on an ace high board and the other nit calls his bet you can probably safely say that the bottom of their range is roughly Ax and possibly stronger. Some nits may only betting AT+ on the flop. And when you raise, they're likely folding the AJ/AT which is probably about 40% of their range implying that the flop raise might show a small profit, but then you're left going into the turn against a far tighter range that's primarily two pair+ making turn bet questionable. And if called you face the same dilemma on the river where the bottom of his range is likely to be aces up.

There's almost no way for all 3 streets to be good bluffs independently. Them folding 'too much' to 1 or 2 barrels implies that their range will be so much tighter on the following street that each subsequent barrel is significantly less likely to succeed.
Or the 1st/2nd barrels are ineffective on their own, and the success of it is hinged on the subsequent barrel.

Maybe taken on the whole it shows a modest chip gain again certain players but i think there're a lot of "nits" whose flop donk range is something like AT+ (who also 3bet AQ/AK pre) who're unlikely to fold the river with aces up.

Say what? Leading flop makes basically no sense here at all and his post flop line is much better than any line that involves leading flop as sb

^ reading comprehension fail

IF hero wants to run a wacky alt line with the intention of seeing multiple streets at a price hero nominates to realise draw equity and have fold equity against two V's with high pairs and paint in their ranges...

THEN i'd prefer to donk flop into two Vs rather than c/r flop bomb turn and hope upon hope everyone thought i had a set

and very occasionally against particular V's I like to run wacky alt lines too, so i'm not going to hate, but i'm likely to c/c flop and c/f turn unimproved like the rest of you folks because i can think of much much better spots to get wacky

Yup

Elephants can’t play poker

We don't need to have a balanced c/r range on flop if we think villains have exploitable tendencies. In a live tournament like this, I think most older players call down too light in these spots, so I don't think we need to mix in more bluffs.

This is spot on. Villain's likely have clearly exploitable tendencies which make bluffing in this spot bad.

Only quibble is it's not just that we think our skill advantage > positional disadvantage. It's also that 45s is a hand that plays particularly well at these stack sizes against players who have tight preflop ranges and overvalue TPTK-type hands.

We also make the nuts with a wheel when they hit their Ace. This can't be said for hands like 87s. I am not sure the negatives of the smaller connector outweigh this factor, but it is something to think about.

Dude stop x/r >>>>>>> lead it’s not rly close

strongly disagree and would never c/r bomb a weak semi-bluff into two omcs it's lighting $ on fire and the worst of all options here

It’s actually not obvious which is better (or less bad) though.

The likely response to a flop lead is you get all non paired hands to fold out their equity, all aces call at least one bet and under pairs sometimes call sometimes fold. You can simulate that against their ranges and against tight passive players it’ll be close to neutral ev vs checking even if you check/fold unimproved on future streets (the benefit of their passivity will often be getting a free card on the turn and not being raised on the flop) allowing you to realize what is probably in the area of 30% equity against their flop calls.

It’s definitely not “not even close” and I don’t think anyone has run the sims to have any clue what the value of the lines would be against an optimal response much less a player with undefined tendencies.

I’ve done a good amount of work off the tables and I’m quite sure that leading sb in this spot isn’t a thing
It would be a pretty easy pio spot to run my guess based on the somewhat limited work I’ve done in sb spots like this is that mixing Xc and xr is going to be the most common response here and I’d guess you have a 0% leading frequency on ax boards after flatting min raise as sb vs btn open

I think its a fold pre, but its a liveament, which are fkn boring, so yeah, def calling.

I don't really prefer xr over xc otf on this action...you are pretty likely gonna have to go all the way (at least one player is gonna call to to the river), and your reads are kinda unspecific.

The value of a decision obviously isn't entirely determined based on whether it fits into a hypothetically optimal range. The reads are that they're old and nitty which likely means they're not betting the flop light.

If you're c/r/bomb/bombing against a guy who bets half as often as you'd expect, your optimal line is going to blow up in your face all else equal. The value of that line (with or without the turn/river bombs) is highly sensitive to changes in reads, and you have information on the two players that has to be given some weight.

Alternatively donking the flop is not optimal and on average slightly worse than checking but never significantly so, especially aganist nitty players who it probably performs best against (and worst against players who float wide and play back at you frequently).


If it's 'not really close' it's because c/r/bomb/bomb (especially after getting called in two places) is significantly worse.

Short answer is that pre this mostly should be a 3-bet/fold spot with 54, probably folding pre vs. demonstrably tighter players unless player is type that doesn't defend button raises well. I think we have better flatting hands in our range if we want a multi-tiered strategy where we 3-bet some, flat some and fold some.

As played on flop I can see both c/r and c/c having merit, would probably lean c/c vs. description of players.

I'm pretty confident that we can flat profitably here even if BTN's range was as tight as KK+

We'd need to have 25% equity pre in a 3-way pot and we're probably about 26-27% vs. most reasonable ranges in a 3-way pot with 54s (and most of our hands TBH) playing out of position. You could argue that there is some chance the BB folds which may make it slightly better.

If I'm going to have a flatting range here I'd rather have hands that play better in the most likely 3-way pot scenarios. If there were antes we could absolutely flat more of our range because the price we'd be getting would be better.

This is just the wrong way of thinking about hands when we're 100+ BBs deep. The implied odds matter way more than our direct odds. If villain has a tight range, we're even more likely to get paid when we make our big hands.

If villain has an overpair and we make 2 pair +, how many streets of value do you think we'll get? Most nitty players get married to their hand and are more than willing to stack off in those situations. At the very least, we should be able to get a big chunk of their stack.

Well, 54s will flop 2pair+ 5.5% of the time. If we can extract 30 BBs of value from villain ever time we flop 2 pair +, that gets us to breakeven right there. If we also factor in times we can profitably play a draw, we're doing even better.

Who said you have to x/r and automatically bet turn and river (I didn’t)

Also I said c/c is higher frequency than c/r tho I’d cr a little more often w bd fd and continue to bet on good turns
I said x/r is waaay better than donking here which would be silly

If donking is only slightly worse than check/calling (it is) and check/calling is usually preferable to check/raising, it seems like a bit of a stretch to say that check/raising is waaaaay better than donking.

And i think the flop raise likely gets folds infrequently enough that it's worse than both. Let's try and find agreement on the basics though - if raising it in some fractional proportion is optimal, it means it's pretty close to being break even vs alternatives. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be fractional - you'd do it every time you had 54s with a bd draw. That begs the question - do you think that doing this against an old nitty player is better or worse than against an optimal player?

I am confused by your analysis but only because I don’t truly understand what exploitable means.

Their exploitable tendencies are that they are playing too tight and would fold hands that are not close to the nuts, right ? So wouldn’t bluffing be exploitative ?

Dude what are you talking about. What are you supposed to have when you lead here. You don’t lead as the sb when you have a massive range disadvantage

+1 for not leading the flop. I don’t have leading range here either. It might not be significantly worse than calling/checkraising but it still is the worst option imo.

we're not talking about leading being optimal in this spot. it isn't.

we're talking about whether leading is bad enough to be worse than c/r - and i respectfully suggest that pouring beer on your head, standing on the table, dropping pants to ankles, and singing the macarena would be slightly +EV compared to c/r into two sticky OMCs after BB has led back into the raiser and raiser has called.

c/r is so bad it's even worse than leading, which i could at least justify at a particular sizing against two known fit/fold players who will fold out any equity less than Ax (although a check-through-flop-brick-turn would establish this more cheaply).

have a c/r frequency against a BB-check BTN-bet sequence by all means, but abort it as soon as you see both opponents with strong ranges.