I'm glad we are talking about this. I am genuinely curious about the thought process, here is what I think:
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Originally Posted by RalphWaldoEmerson
Maybe, but my guess is if we are cbetting this we are also cbetting many of those medium strong hands as well. In other words if we are cbetting this we are not that likely to be effectively balancing elsewhere...
Betting our entire range is a mistake, which cannot be remedied by checking our top. The solution is to stop betting merged.
It's profitable and exploitative to bet top/middle and c/fold bottom due to population tendencies, but that's not what we are discussing.
If balance is our goal, then c/c middle of range is the default best play, because middling hands -very broadly speaking- get mostly called by better and totally hate to get raised. This is for a c/c plan. The situation changes obviously, if we want to establish a c/r range.
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Anyway, it's more about blockers for me than absolute hand strength. We block calling ranges on flop so heavily here that it doesn't make sense to cbet. If we hold AKJT no heart (which I suppose is one of the medium strong hands you're referencing) it makes a lot more sense to cbet imo because we 1) don't block as many top pairs and 2) need protection against baby fds/backdoor combo draws or whatnot which may fold flop to a cbet. Why does it make sense to favor *medium strong hands which lack blockers to equity* in our checking range vs. *super strong hands which have blockers to equity*?
I understand where you are coming from. This is however an analysis for this individual hand, basing the decision on how to play it more or less based on its vulnerability, not on what this does to our overall range.
Fastplaying the top of your range is balanced by bluffing. Since it's kind of hard to have a big hand on this board and lots of outs against continuation ranges, the prime bluffing candidates are hands with Ah and Kh (but no flushdraw), at least I would think so.
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Personally I check this combo 100% unless there's a big fish in the pot. No it doesn't unbalance our range because we have all combos of KK whereas our opponents have far less of them as a % of overall range. Even after playing a XC with a bunch of our KK otf, we still have enough KK in our cbet range to be unexploitable.
I'm a little in over my head here, I trust you understand the combos better than I do. I would still think that removing flushdraws from our betting range, makes it easier to be floated or raised by flushdraws. For example, if we bet the AKJT no hearts (for protection), then we are obviously folding to a raise. V. could now do this with his flushdraws, because we check so many of ours.
We have more KK, V. has all the 22, most 77xx and most K7xx.
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- Do we never cbet with the dry Ah or dry Kh here?
Sorry I'm not sure what hand class you're referring to
Bluffs. For example, we could have the AhQdJdTs. Are we gonna check/fold that hand OTF? (or folding pre?) What do we do with the AhAdJd9c?. How about QhQs7h9s?
Last edited by Caterina; 05-29-2020 at 02:07 PM.