Winning Poker Network (Yatahay) - 200/400 NL - Holdem - 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

Hero (UTG): 56.4 BB
UTG+1: 31.91 BB (VPIP: 20.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 5)
MP: 69.52 BB (VPIP: 23.53, PFR: 20.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 17)
MP+1: 4.8 BB (VPIP: 13.04, PFR: 4.65, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 46)
MP+2: 2.67 BB (VPIP: 33.33, PFR: 27.27, 3Bet Preflop: 10.00, Hands: 24)
CO: 26.91 BB (VPIP: 20.93, PFR: 11.63, 3Bet Preflop: 4.35, Hands: 43)
BTN: 59.31 BB (VPIP: 23.60, PFR: 13.21, 3Bet Preflop: 2.90, Hands: 162)
SB: 21.02 BB (VPIP: 25.93, PFR: 15.38, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 27)
BB: 14.17 BB (VPIP: 32.14, PFR: 16.67, 3Bet Preflop: 10.00, Hands: 28)

9 players post ante of 0.13 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.62 BB) Hero has Q Q

Hero raises to 2.25 BB, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, BTN calls 2.25 BB, fold, fold

Flop: (7.12 BB, 2 players) Q 5 K
Hero bets 3.56 BB, BTN calls 3.56 BB

Turn: (14.25 BB, 2 players) J
Hero bets 10 BB, BTN raises to 26.44 BB, Hero?

KJ and JJ...those are the hands you're hoping he has.

What he likely has? AT

What would I do? Pay the man his money, the whole stack on the turn.

There is absolutely no way I'm folding. He has a lot of hands that we beat in his range like KQ, KJ, QJ, straight draws, flush draws. JJ probably folds flop, he could also have 55. AT is possible, but he seems like pretty nitty so there's a decent chance he folds OTF unless it's AsTs. Anyway, there are way more hands that you beat than hands that have you beat so snap call.

Have to call this one like adrian said way to many hands that you can beat here versus the ones you don't A10 109 and KK is all that beats you and you still boat up against A10 109, if he had J5ss or KQcc he might do the same, if hehad you it's a nasty cooler and we've all been there trust me.

Let me use this post to fire a question that is scratching the back of my mind lately...

From a mathematical point of view, isn't that bet on the flop a bit too small, as betting just 1/2 of the pot will give flush draws the right pot odds to call?

This is something I am struggling with. On one hand, you wanna induce mistakes in the opponents by making them call bets that they will lose most of the time, but on the other hand you wanna keep the weaker hands playing so you can get more profit...

Been lately betting my hidden sets quite aggressively when wet flops and just get opponents to fold. My bet size when there is two cards for flush and I don't have the same suit is between 2/3 and 3/4 of the pot, as Dan Harrington recommends in his No-Limit tournament series. Is this a bit too conservative? Do you guys prefer a standard 1/2 pot sized bet as a standard, to disguise your hand and make it more difficult to play against? Why?

Thanks for the help guys, this is my first post and the forum looks really interesting.

In this spot , you have dominate a BTN range , just jam on it for value , as with his re-raise on trun he is represent AT wich will be diffucalt to find in BTN spot on way he played , but i still would go broke on it..

This is kind of wet board when we're talking about an UTG open and a BTN defend and we're still fairly deep (personally, I consider like 20bb or more in an MTT to be deep--in that respect, we're actually really deep in this hand). It's wet not just because of the FD+SD, but because of the presence of pairs and better in BTN range.

We can expect BTN to have at least {55, KQ, AT, AJ, AQ, occasionally AK (he's got a low 3bet %-age), JT, J9, T9--the list just goes on and on} and especially when you consider the the FD combos of those hands, his continuing range is pretty wide and pretty inelastic to sizing, in other words if he calls 1/2 pot he likely calls pot, and similarly, his folding range (hands like {22} and w/e) is pretty inelastic to sizing meaning he's folding to any bet regardless of sizing

In this situation, I definitely think going bigger is much better because we're kind of just running bad if we run into his folding range and when we run good enough to hit his continuing range we extract max value w/ a bigger bet, since that bigger bet doesn't change his continuing range much if at all compared to the smaller sizing.

Also, this hand is surprisingly vulnerable given the presence of monster draws and FDs and OESD, etc. So if his continuing range just happens to be more elastic than we think, then getting a draw to fold still isn't the worst thing in the world. Especially in a spot like this where we have a tough time folding even when draws do complete. Who likes folding sets?

Also, the times he has a made hand that doesn't have a redraw, we want to get max value from those hands now because those hands hate life when a spade or an ace rolls off--those are bigtime action killers for us in that case. Yet another reason to go bigger.

So, yes I think hero should go like pot and if he's worried about balance he should have enough {AsXs}, maybe {JsTs} too that he can add into his PSB cbet range to balance it out


As for this particular hand, I personally don't ever really fold sets unless it's a ridiculously bad board, which this one decidedly is NOT. It's just so damn hard to make a set, let alone better than a set, that if you're in the habit of folding sets in spots like this you're gonna be in a world of pain. EZ stack off IMO, just bink your boat and collect the chips.

This is one area where poker has gone through quite an evolution over the years. For a long time the standard bet sizing was typically 2/3 or 3/4 pot on the flop but in recent years that shifted towards 40-50% pot, and now many pros are even going as small as 25-33% on flop bets. From what I understand, the rationale for the smaller sizing is:

1) People generally don't respect flop bets like they used to, so calls are more frequent. If you expect your bet to get called, a smaller size allows you to get value while conserving chips.

2) Smaller flop bets helps you balance your whole range more efficiently. If you want to be able to bet draws or other bluffs in addition to your value hands, it becomes very expensive to do that if your bets are on the larger side. Or you risk giving away a betting tell by betting bigger for value but smaller on a bluff. Smaller bets are more difficult to interpret for this reason, while larger bets look like value protection bets.

What does standard mean in this context? Does it mean "When in doubt"? Does it mean "highest frequency"?

There are over 20k possible flops, surely we need to do better than just applying some blanket standard.

Standard in this context is the generally accepted approach. There are always outliers but it refers to what most players do.

Thank you so much for your answers guys, nice input.

I will try to get better in these situations and probably will fire more questions soon. Really like the forum, good stuff.

Gii ott.

+1 to bigger sizing otf. More accurately, I mean that I think we should be mixing w/ range but second set is high freq big bet on this board.

To add to the sizing discussion...

On this flop you block the Qs of course, but there are a lot of Ks on his preflop range and they're not folding. So you might as well extract max value. Plus you still get called by most draws. You don't need to be balanced, just bet big.

If you had KK it would be different, there you block his top pairs, so you're going to have to size smaller to widen his continuing range to 2nd pair+

Fwiw, while it’s true that I’d bet smaller with KK, it’s also a high freq check for me otf.

I think checking is pretty bad in this spot because we are leaving value on the table and this is a hand where I want to gii otr so building a pot is important.

This makes absolutely no sense. Where did that come from? Standard here is we wanna build pot and bet a board that hits our range.

This can easily be true. I haven’t ran any sims on this spot. However, we are allowed to bet more than the pot so gii otr is still possible.

How would you build your checking range otf? What hands would c/r on a blank turn, if any, after c/c otf? Do you have overbetting ranges anywhere on this board after checking oop as OR? I get that this is dynamic high equity board for heros range, so we should be betting a lot, but how often, idk, Lol.

Sorry if there is too many questions but I’m trying to figure this poker thing out and it’s not always super easy 😊

Also what hands will gii otr ui but won’t double barrell when checked to? KJs? Slowplayed AK? These might be enough to make it bad but we block them heavily. Are you thinking of missed value against passively played draws?

Blah, I gotta work more on my game. I should know how to play KK here, lol.

Feel like {KK} should be even more eager to play this particular flop fast and hard bc now villain has a set of queens in his range.

I think if we have top set then on a board like [Q33] on [K33] it's really bad to cbet, but on this particular board I think it's really bad not to cbet. I think not cbetting in this hand would be some really egregious FPS.

Let's put it this way:

We bet he either:

folds his air (a netural outcome bc he's prob not putting money in the pot w/ an airball bluff anyway, also what air can improve to the point of EVER wanting to put money into this pot?)
calls or raises his SDV (awesome)
calls/raises/folds his draws (anywhere from a neutral to good to awesome outcome)

We check, he either:
x's or bets his air (awesome when he bets but highly unlikely),
x's or bets his SDV (outcome is anywhere from terrible to awesome)
x's or bets his draws (outcome is anywhere from terrible to awesome)

Checking opens us up to all kinds of terrible outcomes. Why would we ever do that? The only reason I can see would be if we think it makes it easier to get stacks in at some point. But I think it's trivial to see that in this particular spot, it's actually the inverse that's true--checking flop would make it harder, not easier to get stacks in, at least when we have the best hand.

I would be checking this flop w/ underpairs and air because it's also a pretty good board for the IP flatter and I have all sorts of better thands to continue to the turn w/. Also checking a few draws that benefit from getting a free card and can call a flop bet--I don't see my checking range continuing for more than 1 street unimproved and I'm pretty sure that's fine bc villain would need to really be capable of putting us to the test and firing multiple barrels w/ a big chunk of his range to make us pay for taking that strategy

I'd definitely have an overbetting range on this flop, but only if stacks were much shorter such that I can JAM (never overbetting for less than a jam) and not have it be just a totally ridiculous sizing with respect to the pot. I'd be overbet jamming my whole fat value range in that case as well as NFDs and straight flush combo draws, deciding what to do w/ the rest like {KJ-KT, Qx}. I think my threshold for taking that line would be <=20bb (I don't think a 3x overbet jam is that crazy if you're gunning to maximize FE w/ a hand that had a ton of hot/cold equity like a NFD, which you wouldn't fold to an all-in from villain anyway)

Bigger sizing could be theoretically good, the problem is most players cheat. They bet their big hands 3/4th on two-tone boards and bet their draws or weaker hands 2/5th then wonder why opponents folds. Then they kid themselves and say they only exploit like that vs fish.

I think players should come to terms with the fact that big draws will often have profitable calls in position, the cost of a wildly unbalanced flop strategy is too great.

Consider where the money comes from in poker. It's not from racing vs big draws and holding. The money comes from getting pitiful hands to put money in, low equity hands, this money is all coming back to you. AA vs KK on 922. AK vs AQ on Axx. QQ vs AK on KQx. This is were you get paid, not by bombing away vs some 45% equity combo draw that is never folding and letting top pair get away.

Hello and thank you for your long post. I would like to start with saying that I by no means am sure about checking here w/ KK but I’d like to make a few comments.


Firstly and unimportantly we don’t really care that much about QQ in our strat; the money is going in set over set often anyway wether we bet or not.

Secondly, I still bet KK otf sometimes but I was under the impression that it would be >50% check. I know what the favorable outcomes are as far how he reacts to our bet/check decision. Like you say, how villain plays his air isn’t really that important to the discussion. Although what little ev it contributes, goes towards him betting 0 equity napkins when checked to. Now I don’t know the ev difference between these 2 lines (bet or check) but I’ll run this when I have the opportunity to do so. Again, you might be right about the higher ev play. Need to know for sure though.

Thirdly, having only giveups and weak sdv in checking range opens us up to way more bad spots than checking KK. We don’t need to check KK in order to not get exploited but if we just bet all our high equity hands otf, villain can bet whole range twice and print when we check.
Furthermore, I think not having a c/r range as pfr is less than optimal here. I might be dead wrong on this one too but I cannot wait to find out wether that is the case. 😊 Many good things to study here.

Lastly, my overbet comment was more geared towards turn and riverplay after flop going c/c but thanks for your thoughts on overbetting otf as pfr anyway.

All excellent points.

You're probably right about our checking strategy. I hope I'm wrong, that means I'm improving my game. Intuitively I'd guess {AA} are a good flop check--especially w/ the ace of spades--ditto for {AK}, and {KK} may very well be a high freq check OTF

I'm running in PIO, let's see what the solver says. Stay tuned.

The strategy I gave is definitely exploitable, but that's because it's an exploitative strategy.

Thank you for running this spot for us. I’m on a vacation so can’t do so myself atm.
I absolutely will stay tuned for this. I was thinking about this spot alot last night at the expence of my sleep, so facts are more than welcome, lol.

Did you have time to pio this already?