Global Poker, PLO $0.10-$0.20, 6-player max

Effective stacks: 110 bb

Hero is HJ with K K J 5

Preflop: (1.5 bb, 5 players)
Hero raise to 3.5x bb,fold, fold, SB calls, fold

Flop: (8 bb, 2 players) 3 Q 9

SB checks, Hero bets 4 bb, SB...



My thought process:

Pre-flop > Seems standard.

Flop > I think this flop hits my range more than the villain's range. Plus I have club blocker and J and KK blockers, making flush and straight draws less likely.

A few questions:
1. Would a bigger bet be better?
2. How important are my blockers? If I have AAxx with no clubs and no J, do I check this?
3. Assuming betting is correct, is it correct because I likely have the best hand and want to charge any draws (the draws likely to be a pair and or non-nut straight and flush draws)?

Not sure what solvers prefer here, but in practice would mix a lot. Vs stronger opponents I think check at higher frequency, and size up a little more when we do bet are good.

Sizing is probably fine.

My intuition (and this is something I'm studying more in real time these days, so grain of salt) is that this is a board we don't want to do a lot of bet/calling on and it's a board we cbet less than average.

I think that this can work as a bet/fold given our blockers and how little equity we're likely to forfeit versus a check-raise. Given that lack of equity, it's an unattractive bet/3bet.

So whether we prefer bet/folding to checking back is the question.

I don't think that we benefit enough from simply realizing our equity to check it back. I think that being able to bluff a flushing turn against a weaker range ends up being a (potentially explo) benefit, but it's not like we're especially optimistic about future streets with this combo.

Denying equity seems like our overwhelming incentive here, and we can't do that by checking.

Thanks for the compliment, I hope I'm not posting too many hands. And I really appreciate all the feedback, it's a great resource.

I played a lot of online poker pre-Black Friday and realize I played mostly by feel, I didn't really understand the underlying logic of why a decision was correct or not. I was a winning player, but you didn't have to be terribly good back then to win. If I'm gonna spend time on poker again I figure I should actually improve my knowledge. I don't know if I'm gonna try to make serious money playing, but it would be nice to have the skills to do so if I wanted to go down that path.

I think this is a great hand to bet/fold. I agree that we don't actually bet a ton here, especially vs SB. The way I understand is vs a tight sb range we should check almost range vs most players. That said most people play way too loose in sb so it'd be a bit closer to bb where this board makes a medium frequency cbet and our hand goes into it.

So in short I think cbetting or not depends on how tight you think they are with sb flats. Also most people don't donk or donk enough so their range for checking would be even stronger.

Combo wise our hand makes a perfectly fine cbet. KK9 KKQ with Kc would also make great bet/fold combos.

One thing to note is that our hand isn't that bad a check back either. We can peel some turns and bluff even bluff raise some turns with KK and Kc blocker. As our opponent's range becomes stronger it starts to make sense to check back and look for a good turn to either call down, value bet, or bluff.

Just curious to know the extent to which we’re planning to barrel on various turns. Part of the reason I believe this is a clear bet/fold on the flop is that we can bet large on a decent amount of turn cards. Since we also have protection with our blockers, if we choose to bet a club turn, or even a J, we can perhaps do so with a smaller sizing. But, yeah, recognise that against a stronger SB range, we’re probably best checking flop and realising our equity IP.