Not the most exciting of hands, but the results surprised me so I'd like some feedback on the river (and maybe the flop).

Villain is an expert. I'd expect for him to wait for the turn with a lot of his range here based on history.

I open AT on the button. Villain defends the BB.

Flop is 964

He check/calls.

Turn is 3

Check/check

River is A

Villain bets.

this is a real confusing one, you could make a perfectly fine argument for b/3b or c/r in villains shoes with value range. seems real poor for him to have a real range that betcalls river (not really seeing it with 9x and certainly not weaker aces).

to me this most often looks like a 9x/6x kinda hand that doesnt want to check call or check raise so it opts to betfold and hope to get paid by worse somehow. and a small % of the time it could be a hand like A4 that is hoping you raise with your "obvious" AK so they can 3bet.

or, here's a random hand i'm thinking of, something like A5cc in villains shoes. could honestly make an argument that it's a good blocker bet and maybe they bluff 3bet if u raise.

personally i would just be checkraising all of my value stuff since it's such an obvious card to go check -> bet, but i think call is best in your shoes against an expert.

flop is w/e, i'll leave that to ppl better than me.

If you ever want to bluff in this spot this is a must raise. Although there are certain opponents who you should just call as they are super polarized


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Funny thing is, I would definitely have raised if the river was a Ten. I just didn't think he would play 9x or 6x like this on an Ace river, although I'd expect he may play it like this on JQ or K river.

Think this is just a call and think we only really beat bluffs and worse Ax.

You have close to the top of your range in a spot where you’ll want to bluff.


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Seems like a bad board for BB to be delaying a lot of his range.

Why do you think that? It seems like a good board and situation to delay to me. The button has a wide range and will be betting the turn often. Villian should have a wide peel range.

The flop favors BB's defense range, which means he wants to x/r more frequently than on less advantages boards. Also, the dynamic nature of the flop means BB should be more inclined to take immediate value, and has less incentive to slowplay.

This line of reasoning is not correct when deciding how to build your action regions for balanced play. On the river, when in position and facing a bet, where we are in our own range is nearly irrelevant. To determine whether or not we should raise for value, we decide how our hand is doing against our opponent's range -- specifically, his bet/continue range. If we are beating enough of his range that bet into us and that will call our raise and taking into account that he might 3bet us . . . then we raise for value. We then balance this range by adding an appropriate amount of bluffs. "Wanting" to bluff more isn't really a thing unless you are exploiting something specific about this opponent -- that he will fold too often when we raise. In that case, we choose to become bluff heavy on purpose to exploit our opponent. Thinking about it as if we need to add more value hands to balance our bluffs is backwards -- there are only so many hands that can be raised for value, adding more hands beyond that is spew.

What hands would you raise for value here? If the answer is zero after this action with a card that smashes our range either we are doing something wrong or our opponent is.


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I think the point is that it does indeed smash our range, and yet a smart opponent has bet into us.

How does our hand fare against his value range?

So to be clear we are raising zero hands here. Leading with a strong hand seems awful in that case.




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A3, A4, AK I think are all raises.
Most other hands that would raise the river would have bet the turn.

Unless we want to balance our river raises by strengthening our turn check-back range.

I didn't mean to imply that we shouldn't raise this hand in this particular spot, it may be that raising is best. I just think we should be careful about describing the manner in which we arrive at that decision.

I agree that when a river card is better for our range that it will move range vs range equities further into our favor than they had been up to that point. When that happens, our opponent should tend to take more passive actions and we should tend to take more aggressive actions than if the river was a brick.

However, remember also that because of the action on previous streets, our range will be capped on this river card and our opponent does not necessarily have a capped range -- especially if the OP's read is accurate that the villain will tend to delay his whole (or a lot of his) range to the turn here. When that happens, our opponent can be more aggressive about reraising us if we do decide to raise on the river so we may not be able to get value as thinly from our raises as we could if our range was still uncapped.

With respect to bluffing, I understand the sentiment that when a card hits our range we can more credibly represent some decent hands when we bluff. However, in my opinion this only matters if doing this exploits some specific tendencies of our opponent such as if he folds too often when we raise on a scare card and calls too often when we raise on a brick. If we are facing a strong opponent (such as in the OP) who is likely to retain solid frequencies against us or will be trying to exploit us over time, then we should attempt to maintain a balanced strategy regardless of the particular river card that falls. My understanding is that we do this by first determining our value range based on our estimation of how each hand in our range is doing against our opponent's range, and then we balance these with however many bluffs we need.

In my game, this particular spot is a snap raise against some opponents and is a crying call at best against many other opponents. In the OP, the opponent in question is deemed to be an expert who is delaying a lot of his range to the turn (for whatever reason, perhaps he is trying to exploit us with this strategy, who knows). I guess the key question then is: What SHOULD this villain's value range be when he bets the river?

I don’t think you understood my comment though. I wasn’t saying that we need to balance our bluffs by adding value bets. I was saying this card is good for our wide range, and therefore a good one to bluff and by not including this hand, which is at or near the top of our range we’ll be making a mistake. I also think an expert leading isn’t as indicative of a big hand as others seem to for the exact reason that everyone is arguing for a call here. In fact, if I wanted to exploit the line advocated in this thread I would xr the strongest part of my range and lead with middling portion thinking that my range looks polarized (getting some hero calls) and getting a bet in better than when I chk call.


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My thoughts from watching a lot of bot play:

As IP I'd at least consider checking flop. This is a hand that wants to get to SD and hates being xr'ed and barreled against.
If IP cbets flop too much, OOP should counter by xr'ing flop at a high%, and 'take the initiative'.
If OOP doesn't xr flop at a high%, IP can adjust by cbetting high%, then checking back turn at high%.
If OOP is very passive and doesn't xr flop or xr turn at a high%, IP can adjust by cbetting high%, barreling turn high%, deciding river.
If IP cbets and barrels too much, it's up to OOP when to put in action. OOP should also play snugger PF.

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I mention all of this because I hate blanket statements saying IP will/should cbet turn at a high%. All of the above applies to most BTN vs BB spots.

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As played, obvious flat call on river. We beat A-rag, but can get 3b by so many more hands that beat us. Still have A3, A4, AK, to use as raises.

It may turn out that I'm just arguing semantics but I still just don't agree with this train of logic.

In my opinion there is nothing inherently good about certain river cards in terms of them being good ones to bluff unless our opponent makes certain types of mistakes. If they don't, then the only reason why we'd want to bluff more often on certain river cards is because we have more value raises on that card and therefore we also will bluff more often. If it turns out that we have no value raises then we should have no bluffs. For example, some opponents (not the expert in the OP) might only value bet this river with two pair+. In that case, we cannot raise for value with one pair no matter how much we feel like we might want to bluff raise sometimes. Also in that case we should hardly ever bluff raise despite the fact that the river card seems to help our range.

So I just realized, it sounds like what you were saying is that if we are in that spot with a hand that we might want to turn into a bluff, we might do so with the assumption that we'd also be raising with hands like AT in our minds. But then when the same situation arises and we are actually holding AT, we decide to play these holdings conservatively and just call. Now all of a sudden we have become bluff heavy in this spot when we didn't intend to be, which would be a mistake. I do agree with all of that.

Right. My first post is if we want to have any bluff raises here we should raise this hand. Otherwise we really have to play it as a call and raise never (or super rarely). I happen to think posters in this thread are drastically underestimating an experts’ range in this spot.


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What do we do if we get three bet?

Given that we have an expert advocating turning a5 into a bluff in this thread I’d pay the man.


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It's true that a lot of people are polarized when they bet this river but is that necessarily wrong?

A lot of people will only bet into the ace with strong hands or bluffs because it hits our range so hard. It doesn't make sense for villain to value bet less than Ax or try to bluff us off pairs. So the only hands that make sense to bet are ones that can beat some aces or are trying to fold out king high. Against this range, I don't feel it makes sense to raise AT.

I'm ok not having any raising range on this river. I don't think it makes sense to try to represent an ace with a bluff because our opponent already realizes we have an ace a lot when he bets. And we aren't going to have hands with no showdown value that have to bluff because these hands should have barreled the turn.

Although I would bet AK and probably AT on the turn, so I end up with a weaker range on this river than some. Once the flop is not check-raised, I don't think the 3 is a scary enough card to warrant checking back the turn. I think our hand can be good a lot and that the bet goes in better on the turn than checking back and calling blank rivers.

I think checking back the flop with AT also has some merit.

I like how the hand was played pre, flop, turn... all makes sense. The river is interesting and from a GTO viewpoint (expert opponent) I'm on the fence between call and raise. While I agree with OTR that we certainly need to balance our value raises w/ our bluff raises here, I think there may be better hands to do this with. For example, are we betting the turn with all of our AK, AQ, AJ combos? How about A3 and A4? At some point we won't value raise an A like A8 or A7. Just not sure specifically where we draw the line to just call vs. the raise. It's close imo.

J Lot

My range is pretty capped once I check the turn.