Villian is pretty decent. Should i just give up after the flop? On the river he needed to be good 27% to call.
Please comment on flop+turn betsizing as well.

BTN/SB: $230.50
Hero (BB): $274.70

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BB with Q 4 Q 3
BTN/SB raises to $6, Hero raises to $18, BTN/SB calls $12

Flop: ($36.00) T J A (2 players)
Hero bets $26.00, BTN/SB calls $26

Turn: ($88.00) K (2 players)
Hero bets $60.00, BTN/SB calls $60

River: ($208.00) 9 (2 players)
Hero bets $166.00

wp whole hand, I would barrel whole hand since we can rep straight pretty hard + villain most likely has something like 2pair + fd ect. If he had straight ul

River I would bet less, 110-120 is enough. if there wasen't K I would bet same as you did.

But its hard to comment hu hands but generaly vs decent villain yeah..

Thanks.
Eff. stacks on the river were $126.50, thought betting less would look fishy there.

nh sir vwp i find that potting river works better when blocking than value bluffing

The good thing (for this discussion) is he didnt have the straight.
He had KTAT.
So maybe im wrong and he sucks. After the hand i thought he knew that his hand is face up, and probably knows i know it too, so he doesnt fold. Then again i can only have so few hands that arent a straight...

Yeah i suppose your range is real polarized but i play same way

wp mate, i would play it the same way but i also make this experience that a lot of villains on lower midstakes HU games make this kind of call! i like u play and i would just make a note and play him all nite long and stick his herocalls in his a** til the session is done and ive his money... don t get disappointed, u played it pretty well, after he just called the turn, i definitly go all in OTR if a blank hits...

Villain's call is probably a losing call if you are only bluffing blockers. It's very hard to have a Q without a straight on this board, so bluffing here and only QQxx no straight is a good balancer as you will much more often have a straight.

I don't think betting less is a good option either. Opponent has hands with marginal showdown value almost every time here, and I think a small bet is too easy to call.

Yeah, vs my range his call is awful. Question is, do i need balance? Its not like i did this before vs him.

edit: not sure, does your post mean you think the shove is -ev balance aside?

I was just saying that I disagreed with whoever said you should bet less. I prefer shoving to get the max out of your value hands.

I think you should always have some level of balance. We had no idea if he would necessarily call with a set before the shove, so before we can make any assumptions throwing the tiniest balance bluffs is +EV. I would also say that even though you lost the hand, it's good for metagame to show bluffs as people turn into stations whenever you show one big bluff and they end up auto-paying off.

river sizing sucks, you can bet like 70 on the river i think.

edit: just saw it was only 120 effective which is less bad but still too much imo.

Yeah you´re right. Ty all. Im convinced and now happy with the way i played it, giving up isnt fun anyways.

you realize the board is 4 to a straight and calling without a straight should be suicide for villain here even for smaller amounts?
only small amounts allow us to bluff here profitably as villain will have the straight a lot himself. that said a big value bet in case we have a straight doesnt make sense either as villain should only call with the same hand.

the point is at much smaller u bet as bigger odds u give him to call, as less he have to be right to make this call profitable...

donkeykong makes a good point about how our opponent can have the nuts a non-negligible amount of the time as well, though I'm not a PLO maths wizz so I wouldn't be able to tell you how often his turn range is composed of straights. This cuts into our bluff frequency quite hard because of the times we vbet the nuts and chop.

However, I don't think opponents fold sets or even AK that easily on the river, even if it is suicidal or incorrect to call. People turn into stations a lot in HU games, and even though a straight is obvious, they still might tell themselves "I have a set, call." At the same time they are still capable of folding it to a shove as well.

I think if our opponent has that many straights, then we probably shouldn't bluff at all, not even for small, it will be too easily bluff caught. If he doesn't have that many straights, we should shove, to maximise the chance of him folding non-nuts. That's where the blockers come in handy, and if the assumption that he's never paying off worse than a straight to a shove, this play must be profitable unless he still manages to have 60%+ straights.

here my few words in some more words

do you ever see yourself having complete air, like 8765ds and firing 3 barrels because villain almost never has a straight when he only calls flop and turn? or maybe Axxx with the nfd? (villain hat the ace this time, but just in general)

if thats the case villain is correct to call you down with bluff catchers with some frequency.

in his shoes i would fold the turn vs most villains. maybe he thought he could bluff you off the straight if the flush hit the river because he has the Ace.

What makes you think that he never has the Q once he calls turn? I think it would be fairly standard to flat Qx on the turn here for villain.

yeah, but we will have a bluff rarely on this board. it hits our reraising range very hard. i also dont see reasonable players calling big bets on this board without the straight on the river.

it is not correct to call with bluff catchers because we can have a bluff sometimes. if there are 10 straights for 2 bluffs we can have he has to muck every time if we bet bigger than one third of the pot.

We would always shove a straigh here, wouldn't we? I agree that we don't need to bet that big in general, but when we have 60% psb left, anything but shoving will look really weird and induce herocalls.

I think we should bet bigger on the turn, we are gonna get the stacks in anyway on blank rivers so we get more value when his draws miss (and possibly a few more turn folds). If we make it $10 more on the turn our line looks way more credible and we have better stacks left for river shove when we shove $116.50 to $228, which still is enough to make 90% regs fold a hand like two pair with missed fd.

i think always shoving a straight here and stating that lesser amounts would induce herocalls should give you something to think about. i still like the smaller bet both for value and as a bluff here.

Very interesting posts guys. Not sure if i like betting smaller. donkeykong´s reasons make sense, but im not sure people always think logically while playing poker. And it seems to me that on a "feel level", betting smaller could induce.

I agree with chinz that $70 on the turn would have been a lot better, thanks for pointing that out.

Styx: I´d give up turn with 4567, and c/f river with Ad4d56. There are really only a handful Q*** hands in my 3bet+3barrel range that dont have the straight here.

By betting bigger our ratio of bluffs can be increased, or he will make a bigger mistake by calling light.

The main complication in this situation though is his non-zero chance of having a straight. How often he has it really affects our river decision, i.e if he has a straight 99% of the time, then bluffing would be terrible at any bet amount for any frequency, and value betting any amount doesn't show any significant profit either. If he had it 1% of the time, then shoving becomes very good because he will be forced to call with a lot of non-straights, so more value for us. Of course, it's somewhere in between the two numbers and where it lands really defines how much we can bet.

Given that opponents are willing to call a set here though, despite it being most definitely a bad call, picking shoves as a bet size can't be all bad.