Hi all,

just been losing so many hands and got tilted by this one as well and am wondering if this was overplay or just variance.

I am on the button with AdAh9d2s. CO opens, I repot it, blinds both fold, CO calls. At these stakes there is hardly ever a fold to a 4 bet.

Flop comes:
Ks9s2h

I bet third pot, he raises. As I have been tilted from losing so many hands due to different reasons, I just wanted to get back and reraised all in. I am holding the 9 and the 2, in case he doesn't have KK he could do this with a wrap, where I am slighly ahead or a FD and a pair where I am break even. If I weigh more set and wrap + FD, then I am losing.

He had K9, no FD and just backdoor SD and held.

As Aces are the most profitable hand, how to extract the most value while not losing the whole stack like this?

You can't always flop a set or the NFD or a small pair that doesn't fair to hit the opponent.

Thank you for the help

pure check back on the flop

thanks, is it because of the two spades and lack of spades in our hand?

Not pure check back at all. When I see pure check back I think you mean full range check back, and that is not true, although this hand does make a lot of sense to check back.

No. It concerns your absolute equity, lack of robustness, playability, side cards and blockers.

Let's say we play a B50/B100 strategy in this spot (which is what I play and I am not sure why you are betting B33). On this texture we should be betting about 50% of our range and primarily for half pot. With AA, that goes up slightly to about 60%. With two or more spades, that goes up to 98%, and the only checks we have is when we have K2, K9, 92 in our hand. With the naked As we bet about 70% of the time.

So, your hand is AA92 on a K92ss board; if you bet, what hands are you targeting to call? You unblock Kings, which is good, but you block 9 and 2, so that reduces the number of calling hands in your opponent's range and weights him more towards Spades (we are probably a flip) or KK. Additionally, his top pair hands will often have a flush draw, and these will often play aggressively against us here, which is bad.

We'd like to see a turn card with our hand, as we have moderate equity with poor playability. We are not excited about playing for stacks on this board yet, but if we bet, we basically have to.

This is horrible and you should quit playing if you feel like this.

Over pair / bottom 2 on the flop on a board with multiple draws, none of which you have.

If you cbet and get raised, you're in a situation that you are not happy about and are either folding or making a crying call. Bottom two doesn't do very well into check raises.

If you check you allow for a safe turn card to hit and can then evaluate your turn bet, call or check based on how your opponent reacts.

In this particular spot we can use our positional advantage to control pot size and see a free (hopefully safe) turn card.