Hey all--hoping for advice/critique of a key hand in a small tournament just played.

Starting stacks: 6,000 chips, 20 minute levels

Blinds 100/300 with 300 big blind ante. My prehand stack appx 8k.

I found myself in cutoff with 55 and raised to 600 with two limpers before me. Blinds fold, limpers call. Pot 2500

Flop is J48
Limpers check. I bet 600 which I realize was an underbet, but the table was playing really tight. One limper calls, one folds. Pot 3700
Turn is 5
Check to me. I casually toss 1,000 chip, excited about my set.
Limper raises to 3k. I ask "catch a piece of that flush?" (oops) and then call. (MISTAKE?) Pot 9700
River is a blank.
Limper pushes all in for his last 4800, has me stacked. I tank, then fold.
He shows A but hides the other card.

Limper started hand with about 9k, so had me covered. He had been playing tight-aggressive. Any showdowns revealed his hands to be reasonably strong.

In my tanking, I concluded he had the goods so I figured surviving was better than drawing dead.

Then, lying in bed reviewing the hand, I can't get over his river bet size. If he had the nut flush, wouldn't he have bet something smaller he expected me to pay off?

Where I've landed on it is that he had AJnonclub for top pair top kicker and I made a faulty laydown. I probably should have shoved on the turn after his raise. I called his turn thinking if I was behind, I could still fill up if the board paired.

Any advice appreciated!

I think AcJx is more likely to check-raise the flop with TPTK and a backdoor nut flush draw, particularly with you showing such weakness in your betting both pre and postflop. I think your fold on the river is fine, actually. I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

I don't think the rest of your play is fine, though. One, you should probably just overlimp pre if you aren't going to make an appropriate raise size to just try to steal the dead money. You said the blinds are 100/300 and there were two limpers for 300 and then you raise to..... 600? You should be making it at least 1100-1200.

Once the flop lands, with the small stack sizes, if you're going to cbet I'd make it about 30-35% of pot. You went less than 25%. I'm not convinced a cbet here is optimal with this flop against their limp ranges, but I don't hate it.

So overall, I think you might want to re-work some of your fundamentals. It looks like you're new here though, so don't take that personally. Everyone here is trying to get better, regardless of what level they're currently at.

Appreciate the advice, and that all makes sense. I usually limp a low pocket pair in that situation, so I can see why the tiny raise was the worst of the options.

Assuming he didn't actually have the flush (not sure), I think I also opened myself up to that river shove with my table talk. I need to learn to shut up. :P All good lessons.

With such a low pocket pair and 2 limpers I agreed that you need to re raise to "1100-1200" pre-flop. Stop following the trend with all this min raise non-sense. Also the flop sizing is weird you're giving a lot of hands that hit this board a good price to continue, this sizing needs to be a tad bit bigger. With this being said maybe if you choose 800 and player behind calls you should be able to either fold turn if you don't improve or when you hit your set to jam the turn.

I really don't get pre-flop play...if you wanted limpers to fold, then you should have bet more than 2bb.
If you wanted to play post-flop to catch the set of 5s, why din't you just limp?

First of all. When you play small to medium pairs you try to see the flop cheaply. Your main goal is to catch a set. If not, the hand is over. Go on. Call is right. If you want to contol the pot, a raise 5x bb is right here. I prefer to call.

If all checks to you, you check. 5 comes on the turn, now your main goal is to get the money in. 3 clubs on board? Dont care. It is these situations that decides of you make it to the final table or get busted. You still got outs if v got flush.

Guess this was a bad answer to U now, but next time with a set. All-in.