villain 28/19 over 168 hands
cbet flop: 8/14



I was just wondering if this is a good hand to basically not fold the flop. I have a **** ton of backdoors, no SDvalue whatsoever and there aren't any natural draws I could make a move with. I'm only uncertain about how to play my range here. I think I should be the one with more 8x in my range so does it make sense to have 8x and hands like this in my x/r range or does that weaken my x/c range containing a bunch of overpairs and overcards with backdoors by too much?

Seems like a safe board for villain to bet so a good one for us to checkraise and I wouldn't worry about your second argument too much.

Despite what different lines on this board do for your overall range, this is a fine board to x/r bluff. A good player might not fold KK/ AA here but this play will work pretty often given all of his overcard hands (that have plenty of equity against us) have to fold and there's just not too many hands that can continue. Against nitty ABC players I'd expect to get plenty of folds here.

yuk i almost like a fold

Many regs will also check behind their overpair in this spot imo.

Think it's ok to bluffraise here as long as we keep a credible image.

good hand to choose to x/r bluff obviously, i do this some non-100% frequency with this hand to balance my 22xx, ak8x combos. Having this in your x/r range does not weaken your x/c range. Do you mean that having a value x/r range weakens your x/c range? not necessarily, it obviously narrows it, but we should have a x/r range on this board and it obv should have some value.

I think X/R should be in your range some portion of the time, i'm folding here a decent portion of the time as well.

Which 8x are you then roughly x/r for value with? Is it only the strongest ones like AK98 or also sth like A875, KQJ8?
And how do you track your frequencies here? Doing this x% of the time and that y% of the time seems really hard to not get our of line with. At least, which value:bluff ratio are you targeting with a flop x/r?

you can't have a x/r here if you want to x/c at all. we need to defend 68% of our range to prevent villain from profiting from a bet here with any 4, and we really struggle to get just to 60% even if we include hands like this.



so if we x/c this range, we'll have 25% of it being 8*** or better, and 35% being 99+ w/o trips, which gives us a pretty strong range that can withstand pressure moving forward on turns (and rivers).







you can add some bluff x/r's on the turn to increase the defending % even more obv, but we have strong x/c ranges on various turns now in the 57%-67% of our range, which is perfect.

but if we take our some of those hands on the flop, look at how this destroys our x/c range. let's assume we x/r Q8> and the type of hand we have in the hand in question: a backdoor wrap draw + bdfd



so we took out a lot of weird backdoor hands from our range as we looked at it in a x/c everything that we continue with scenario. our x/c range should be cool moving forward then yea?



on a non-flush non-str8 completing run out (which is often and which is good for us since we took most of our backdoor str8 draws out of our x/c range by x/ring them), we can now see how few trips hands we have in our x/c range on turns/rivers - just 14% of the range that continues each time. in order to prevent our opponent from barreling with w/e, we have to x/c with QQ on 3 streets, which seems like complete suicide because it probably is.



gave villain a 30% range even tho most ppl don't open that wide from MP but w/e. even with HUGE barreling frequencies for each street (78%, 65% and 67% by street), his river betting range includes trips or better 51% of the time, and the other half is AA and KK. i forgot to include bluffs for villain on river but his betting range is still super strong

so summary:
1. x/ring destroys our x/c range on future streets on this paired board texture, forcing us to call down with QQ vs. a range from villain that by the river includes 67% of hands that our better than ours before he even bets

2. our x/c range also is only comprised of 14% of trips> by the river if we have a x/r range on the flop

3. x/ring on the flop doesn't really cause villain any problems, as 42% of his flop betting range (which was 78% of his pre-flop range mind you) is 8>, AA, KK, + any other floats that he wants to put in there since our x/r range is pretty bluff heavy

4. x/cing everything that we're gonna continue with on the flop avoids all these problems and makes it simpler to understand how our range looks on turns/river so that we can make better x/r and x/c ranges from there on different turn cards


let me know if u see any mistakes and i can try to fix them

^You're completely right that it destroys our x/c range to x/r q8+, even if we balance with bluffs; but can't we have a very small flop x/r range constructed of a few combos of nutted hands and a few like this with back door equity and blockers to 6789 type value cbets?

narrowed the x/r range to just 22,82,A8 + a smaller backdoor (wrap + fd) range that has to have two cards of a T,9,or 7 in it which is now only 20% of pre-flop and not 30%





(took out TT from x/c range on turn this time since we prob don't need to call it to defend enough)

it helps but we're still in a range disadvantage on river on a board that we're supposed to hit harder. when x/ring doesn't really hurt villain that much (see above post) and it only allows us to have a set> 32% or so the time on a lot of blank river runouts, when villain has a set> 50% or so of the time he triple barrels. x/ring a smaller frequency on the flop helps but still doesn't make it better than x/cing 100% of our continuing range imo