Villain (old Filipino guy with a tiny bit of LAG in him) opens in MP and I 3bet red AA next in. Everyone else folds, villain 4bets, I call only.

Flop JT7tt with none of my suits. Villain bets, I raise, villain 3bets, I call planning to raise many turn cards.

Turn J, villain bets, I decide to call instead.

River 8, villain now checks, I bet.

I guess you think he must have KK or QQ exactly?

A problem is you shouldn't have any combos of nines in your range except A9ss which villain might block, and 99s which I'm not sure if you'd raise to a donk on the flop. I'm not sure if villain is aware of that.

Just raise the turn

Raising turn seems best. I'd always bet when checked to if I just call turn.

I'm inclined to continue delaying til the turn here, but if you can get him to 3-bet KK/QQ on the flop and bet/calldown the turn, more power to you. The paired jack on the turn should change very little unless you think he might 4-bet pre with AJo or KJs type hands. It actually gives you more outs vs. TT full house, with quad jacks being the only other hand that really beats you.

with the given action, raising the turn seems pretty spewy to me. if we had just called flop i think raising turn could be more playable, but the jack isn't exactly a brick.

i agree with turn delay, but i thought the opposite as played. i would call turn planning to raise river. the j should be a good card for us.

Can we just raise/fold turn? Like he's never going to bluff us here, right? This card also clearly favors our range over his IMO.

yeah i think i agree with this actually. kq is such a great bluffing hand and we have way too many to balance with value hands.
this leads me to think, that maybe we should "spew" a lot harder on the turn. like raise folding kk and even qq tho they're a slight equity dog.
i don't think 99-88 will have a problem paying off river so i'm not worried about protecting myself from getting pwned with those hands.

Why not 5 bet pre HU against the LAG? There don't seem to be any balance concerns, we ensure the flop isn't checked thru, and can call the flop xr and raise many turns.

nevermind. thought we were oop.

I think it's better to wait till the river if you're gonna take this line. At least give yourself a chance to spike an Ace or in some cases a J as well. I think there is a non zero chance that the villian could 3 bet bluff the turn. If he is bluffing, let him bluff the river without Getting exposed to a sticky situation. I'm not overly concerned with losing value if he checks the river given the strength he has shown.

actually, raise/folding aa-qq is still viable in position too. i know everyone here hates fsdr's and "merging", but this is like the ideal spot for both. we just have so many kq's and we have to do something with them.

Would have 5 bet preflop vs a LAG since some bad LAG will literally go like 20 raises preflop without AA.

From GTO perspective argument is that HERO should call even vs a LAG but think it depends and based in description I would 5 bet preflop unless its a cardroom where there's actually a hard cap preflop even if HU pot.

As played, I would play same way and at times,call with intention of delay raising turn on some frequency based on my personal history of similar spots in this session.

More importantly we have JJ/TT/AJ/KJ that has his range in jail. 3 betting less than Jx too often is lunacy from vil's POV

I'm not sure I like the raise fold suggestion. In order for it to be correct, these conditions need to be satisfied:

a) we have correctly identified the margin between our call and raise ranges, which is formed by strong bluffcatchers and weak value hands that get raise folded exactly on this margin.

b) we have correctly identified the margin between our raise fold and raise call ranges.

c) our opponent is so good that we need to have a river raise fold range.

All of that seems quite unlikely to me. I think humans can do better in this spot by just having no value raise fold range; the only raise folding I do in this spot is with bluffs.

our only bluffs are kq, ak, aq and 88-99's. i'm not raise folding any of those and can't even fathom anything but calling 88-99 and aq-ak. 30% of villain's range is ak and i'm not about to let him walk in the endzone when i have kq. + if villain wants to commit suicide b/3betting as any kind of bluff into such a concentrated range of trips+, have at it.
i kind of see what you're getting at, and if we were oop i would 100% disagree with you, but ip it's arguable. using your logic, i'd say you should have no raising range on turn whatsoever just to reserve enough value hands to either bet or raise river with as many kq's as possible.

think i see what you're saying now. this is pretty damn exploitable. if i knew someone was doing this i'd b/3 turn without a 2nd thought with ak and 99 as villain. + leaves our calling range completely pwned on river. yeah, this is no good. i like calling turn 100% of range.

I'd raise AJ+ on the turn, but yeah I think raise folding correctly is just so complicated that even the best players will be wrong about where the margins are often. Since it's so difficult to correctly raise fold value hands, forgoing the raise fold value range seems best; the alternative is to consistently raise fold the wrong hands, which seems much worse than missing that tiny bit of raise fold value on the turn.

It's easy to say that if you knew A player was bet/folding a particular hand that you would 3 bet them with x and x hand. In reality, I just don't think this is happening enough in a typical 20/40 game to eliminate all raise/fold lines. A significant parlay of events would need to occur to get to the point of being bluff raised.

1) The villian would need to be observant enough to register your bet/fold as significant

2) He would need to extrapolate what range of hands you could have( I'm assuming hero is not dumb enough to show the table how smart he was to fold AAs).

3) He would have to figure out what board textures make sense too attempt a 3 bet bluff

4) He would have to be in ready position to pounce when the opportunity presented itself. Notice also that this scenario doesn't come up often.

5) He would have to have the cahones to actually take action.

Etc etc.

Understanding the margins and theory is certainly helpful, but ultimately it comes down to your cards, the board, and your opponent.

I just think the vast majority of players at this level are not going to appropriately take advantage of this situation. I'm going to be aware of those who can. I'm going to exploit those who will never bluff in this spot and who will never have a worse hand.

If you don't think he 4bets AJ pre then it's an easy turn raise.

Even if he does, there's 12 combos of QQ/KK, 1 combo of JJ, 3 combos TT, and 4 combos AJ so you can still raise for value so you're leaving money on the table by not raising turn.

If you guys are worried about being exploited by raise / folding AA, then raise / call it. Barring him being a maniac, we lose to 8 combos tops? KK/QQ alone are 12 combos.

Or call turn raise river. Just don't not raise.

I think if you dont raise turn here you arent getting enough value- you should be losing only to a very rare and small part of his range, maybe TT is in his range for 4-bet, but im not putting him on quad Jacks and you want all of it from QQ and KK. So with all that taken into account, id raise turn and play rivers.