Decent 20-40 weekday game. Currently 9-handed.

V1: Very loose recreational player. His preflop range here is very wide, including some very bad hands and some surprisingly good hands.

V2: His preflop range here is exactly JJ+, AK.

V3: Loose recreational player. His preflop range here will consist of reasonably strong hands.

Preflop:

V1 limps utg, Hero raises utg+2 with KK, V2 3bets utg+3, V3 calls 3 cold from the cutoff, V1 calls 2 more bets, Hero caps it, V2 calls, V3 calls, V1 calls.

(17.5 small bets)

Flop: QJ2

V1 checks. Action is on Hero . . .

Hero?

Do you check or bet?

Why?

Pretty bad flop but with the backdoor equity I'd probably just bet and hope V1 or V2 raises.

Checking leaves too much to chance.

V2 raising can't be good. You could check and If V2 bets just call. If it gets checked to V3 and he bets you can CR. Given your description it sounds like there is a decent chance V3 has hit this board.

If V2 likes to slowplay his monsters then maybe bet flop and bet/fold turn is a better option assuming you trust your read.

If V2 isn't going to raise the flop with AK you can bet/call and fold turn UIP.

If I was really that sure about V2's range I'd probably check/call flop - check/fold turn if I didn't pick up a draw.

My concern is with this.

It's rare for a villain to be that well-defined. Of course, maybe this dude is really special and you have some super special knowledge. But generally, I'd assume that even tight V's would 3! AQs and TT pf.

With that adjustment, I'd bet flop, planning to reraise against V3, and call against V2.

Without adjusting his range, you are WA/WB vs V2. So I'd check/call.

OP, have you ever been "sure" about an opponent's range and been wrong? if so then you can't act as if V2's range is precisely that. that said, even if he does have that range, he's def ahead of you here (3+3+6)/(8+[12]) = 60% of the time.

and you have equity. you can hit your 2 outer, pickup various gutshot draws and a flush draw on the turn. so personally i think giving a free card to the 8 combos of AK here isn't great and the pot is also now big so i'm not a fan of checking even if we do get raised.

if we get raised otf, we know it's not AK and can play the turn accordingly continuing only if we pickup equity or feel we may be off slightly on our read and then just k/c down.

If your read is correct I want one bet on each street.

Hi guys, thanks for the responses so far. I thought this was an interesting spot because several concepts come into play here and I think determining the best action might be complex and unintuitive.

First, always taking aggressive action "because we have top pair" or "because we have an overpair" is autopilot thinking and limits our skill growth. I'm encouraged that we have not yet had a response like that so far, kudos to the community for that.

This point is important generally and is clearly important in this specific case since almost any change to the assumed range for V2 is good for us -- even if he is even tighter and 3bets only QQ+, AK that is actually good for us here. I agree that it's always important for us to include some margin of error in our reads since it's a game of incomplete information.

In this case, I do happen to have thousands of hours of data on this particular opponent and I trust this particular read on his preflop range in this spot to be ironclad. I concede that ironclad reads are never truely 100% accurate but for the purposes of this OP, let's assume that it is.

It's nice to see that someone has already pointed out the combinatorics which shows that we are behind V2's range on this flop. Recognizing that we so heavily block AK at game speed can be tricky.

AK = 8 combos (we are ahead)
KK = 1 combo (we are very slightly ahead)
AA = 6 combos (we are way behind)
QQ = 3 combos (we are way behind)
JJ = 3 combos (we are way behind)

I'm not clear about whether any assumptions can be made regarding card removal due to what the other two players in the hand may or may not be holding -- they might hold an ace, blocking V2's AK . . . they might hold a queen, blocking V2's QQ, etc.

A small point, but I'm not sure if this is quite accurate -- I guess it depends how you define WA/WB. As seen in my notes regarding the combinatorics above, I think a better description is that either we are ahead, or we are way behind. In other words, AK has 7 outs twice to beat us at showdown. However, when we are behind, we have much fewer chances to improve.

This can be seen by assuming that this is a heads up pot VS V2 and plugging hand vs range into equilab -- we do not have 40% equity vs V2 here . . . we actually have only 37.8% equity vs V2 on the flop, despite holding the Ks. If V3 and V1 had both folded preflop and I had only called, seeing the flop heads up vs V2 oop -- I think that the correct line in that situation is pretty clearly to check and call the flop with the intention of just calling down (including a pretty gross read based river decision). Given our equity and our showdown value, I think we can all recognize that checking and calling down would be correct here even though "we have an overpair".

However, this is not a heads up spot, it's a 4-way spot where we have decent equity, making a flop bet more of an option than it would be in the theoretical heads up spot above.

I think that another important concept in this spot is relative position. . .

In my opinion, if we bet and V2 raises and that causes V3 and V1 to fold, that's a particularly bad outcome for us. There is an old school concept of implicit collusion which might claim that this is a good outcome because those opponents might fold out some equity and therefore our winning chances improve by getting heads up. However, I think that math usually shows that this is generally a benefit to V2 in cases like this (when his raising range has us crushed) and not to us. If somehow the relative positions were different and we were first to act and V2 was last to act, I think betting would have a lot more merit because then the other two players might be putting money into the pot very badly before V2 acts and so our bet generally gets better value. Also, due to relative positions . . .

Now we are getting somewhere -- especially since there is some chance that this action might cause V2 to (incorrectly?) fold AK which would quite clearly improve our winning chances to take down this large pot against V3's weaker range.

Here are some responses so far which favored betting:

This is not a good enough justification for betting in my opinion.

While I can somewhat understand the thinking behind these posts from an exploitative point of view, in my opinion in and of itself these are not good enough justifications for betting when behind. To me, this is sort of the equivalent to "betting to see where I'm at" which is not generally good overall poker strategy.

----------

It may be that betting is better than checking here. But I think it's complex and should not be automatic. I've had some offline discussions about this spot with a couple of very good players and the best action still seems unclear to me. One player had some very mathematical justifications for betting and I invite him to share those thoughts in this thread, but I'm not sure if that will happen.

Keep the responses coming!

My $0.02 even though I know the characters

1) I'm just ignoring the "ironclad" part of OP's analysis of V2's range. V2 is for sure too nitty to be a crusher at the game of poker in 2017, but he's a smart dude who still wins.

2) Even if we liberalize V2's range a bit to add TT and AQ, we aren't happy campers against his continue range (especially since I think he'll say "pot odds be damned, two overs and TT may be dead to running cards anyway" and fold it).

Behind: JJ, QQ, AA (12)
Ahead: AK, AQ (20)

So against that range (and this is probably our most optimistic range for villain), we're flipping in terms of equity, and we have two other opponents to contend with.

Yes, betting lets us play our hand well because we can expect V2 to always put in additional action when he has us beat, and we can safely (albeit grossly) fold a turn brick as we have the Ks (which blocks any remote chance he could have some sort of draw with the Ks, Qs and Js all accounted for). But we can still likely call down and hate it if he bets when we check.

HOWEVER, as stated before, if we check and V2 checks, we should for sure like our hand a lot as V1 and V3 don't play QQ/JJ this way (so we're only losing to QJ and 22) and can happily check/jam against any action from these players (with the bonus of getting AK, which makes up a huge chunk of V2's range if he checks when checked to, to fold, which is nice for us in a pot this size).

I think all things considered, I check the flop, call a bet from V2 and raise V3 (or 3 bet if V3 bets and V1 raises).

I just can't get past the fact that anyone's 3! range (v2) there can be that tight

There are a lot of players who don't 3 bet more widely there.

Villian 2 can't also have [88-TT, AQs] here? I would just bet flop and call down from there we have backdoor spades and lose to exactly JJ ,QQ, and AA. Which make up only 12 combos of Villian 2's range.

Agree v2 is notoriously tight but is human, observes and thinks about other players, and is not as absolutely rigid as you want us to assume. For example, his favorite hand is 33 and he takes pride in working it into spots like this just so he can show it to "serious players." Thus, I'm of the opinion that the best play this early in the hand is the one that's best for out range. Bet.

If you wanted to make some assumptions and do some math that shows where opening v2s range would transition in your opinion from check to bet, I think that would make for good conversation.

Why are we capping Pf again vs a range that tight and villain being a good player as well ?
Might as well open our card face up to the table when we only can have KK,AA.

I already conceded earlier in the thread that it is indeed important to factor in some degree of uncertainty in our reads and that this could be a factor which causes us to favor betting in this decision point. If we included the hands you've mentioned into his range then this is a non-thread and the decision becomes an obvious value bet.

I'm also coming to recognize that where mid-stakes live limit holdem still exists throughout North America, the player type that I'm describing might not exist everywhere -- but if it does, and you do not adjust properly, you will cost yourself a lot of money -- I've seen it happen. So, if nothing else hopefully threads like this will cause some of us to break out of autopilot mode and actually try to adjust to different player types.

Lastly, as for your actual question -- No -- Villain 2 cannot have 88, 99, TT or AQs here. I did not want to unnecessarily complicate the read, but villain 2 also has a cold calling range. That range includes TT and AQs in this spot. In fact, it will sometimes include JJ. But, with similar frequency it will also include AKo. For the purposes of this thread and the combinatorics, let's assume that these frequencies cancel out such that our decision is equivalent to facing a range of exactly JJ+, AK.

To expand, this player type cold calls with hands that actually have you beat -- he does not cold call with hands that are in bad shape. For example, AJo is going straight into the muck without hesitation here. 88 is being folded more often than not. Anyways, probably too much information for this thread but I'm rambling a bit tonight.

The logic here is just not good enough for me. Yes, we are behind exactly 12 combos of his range. But the combinatorics don't lie -- these 12 combos make up the majority of his range. The title of the thread references a "tight range". In tight range spots there won't be very many combos, so we need to be careful about seeing how few combos we lose to without comparison to combos that we beat or the total number of combos. Notice also that the chances for him to outdraw us while he holds AK is significantly better than we have of outdrawing him with our backdoor spades. This factor just doesn't help us here as much as it might in some wider range spots that you might be thinking about, as shown by our less than 38% equity despite having the best hand combinatorically 40% of the time.

While I will sometimes just call with my whole range in a situation like this if it were 3 handed, I think that not putting in the raise 4 handed is a pretty clear error. We are well ahead of villain 2's range preflop (62.5% equity) and the other two players are guaranteed to come along for the 4th bet while way behind. We must cap it here for pure value and be less concerned about balance and information hiding imo.

Hey munga30, I know that you know who the player in question is -- but your read is different from mine. IMO, the 33 thing is basically a myth.

Yes! This is exactly where I was hoping the conversation would go but I'm not sure exactly what math to do or where to start in this spot. We probably don't have to change V2's range by very much to make betting the clear best choice. In fact, it very well may be that betting is best here as is -- I'm just not clear about why or how to calculate that. One of our mutual friends came up with some pretty impressive math off the cuff while discussing this hand over some General Tso's, but he has yet to chime in here to take a crack at it.