If I had a nickel for the number of times these hands put me in hard spots, I'd be richer than Doug Polk.

This hand just happened in actually a pretty high buy in tournament, but there were so many satellite entries that it was really more like a micro mtt. Limpers here have a lot of pocket pairs, a lot of marginal holdings, a lot of random suited air and Ax, and then just some total spew.

UTG+1 (60bb)
CO (60bb)
Hero BB (35bb QJ)

UTG+1 limps, CO limps behind, hero checks. I don't raise here because both opponents will most likely flat and I'll be bloating the pot out of position in a marginal spot. Unfortunately, this also has the added effect of capping my range, since I will be raising all my better hands.

Flop (4.4bb) Q65
UTG+1 bets 3bb, CO folds, hero calls.

Turn (10.4bb) 9
UTG+1 bets 6bb, hero calls

River (22.4bb) 8
UTG+1 bets 18bb, hero?


(Spoiler spoiler, the spoiler doesn't contain a hand, just some important info)

how do you know that both opponents will most likely flat

I usually punish limpers pre flop. But your reasoning pre flop is all good stuff.

It might be sexy to turn our hand into a bluff though by shoving if we think we can fold kings plus. That's more of a cash game play versusfish. In a tournament and As played probably folding river.

I'm assuming this is fullring table.

First of all, something is wrong with the hand. You are BB, you act first post-flop.

Did you check flop with toppair?

We don't have information on Villain besides that he limps UTG+1.

l don't feel very comfortable calling off more than half of my stack without any info on villains hand and with toppair/good kicker.

He could be limping with some low pocketpair and made a set, he could have a strong draw on the flop.
If we just call both flop and turn, we can't gather much info on his hand's strength.

That's why it's important to raise pre. If they are flatting light, let's punish it with a bigger raise.

AP, I would fold to river bet.

@ffsh just my thoughts based on player pool tendencies. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely some merit to having worse hands continue to the flop, but I'm actually often an equity dog, since they'll be peeling with Axs, Kxs, and pp at a high frequency.

@nonsimplesimon it's actually a major relief that you said that, because that's what I did and it turned out to be mostly spew... mainly because villain has no idea what I'm representing, and secondly because villain happened to have the stone nuts here (take a look at what that was). But now at least I know it wasn't totally idiotic, if not a symptom of fancy play syndrome. I don't mind folding river here theoretically, the problem is, if villain can have random air in their range, aren't they bluffing way too much?

@SetPT yes, sorry, I wrote the HH from memory by hand, so I was just trying to save some time. It was full ring, relatively early on and I checked in all of those spots. I had just lost a pretty big hand in a cooler situation, so that's why I was short. I think I had some notes on villain, but otherwise no stats, etc.--trackers aren't allowed on this site.

The problems I have with raising QJo here, and some other marginal holdings, are one, it caps our preflop checking range even more severely, two, it's going to be horrible to play OOP, and three, villain's limp/calling range has a good amount of hands that are ahead of us.

For whatever reason, a lot of the player pool has adopted the tendency of making huge bets in position whenever their opponent shows any sign of weakness (I guess they see our range as capped). A good percentage of players will limp any two cards and then bet the pot behind versus the blinds. It's pretty terrible play, but it puts a lot of pressure on marginal holdings. So, there's potentially a lot of value to be had from calling bluffs, but in these situations we're also short a lot of information. This also happens when we raise first in OOP and get flatted.