OK - it's a line that doesn't make sense though - how often do you bluff for 1/3 pot?

You guys that talk about your equity here are, IMO, mistaken in putting so much emphasis on it, because you're not taking into account the fact that you will rarely get to realise it. To take it to the extrme - let's say you hold 2s2c in a 3bp and the flop comes 678 all hearts. You might have an equity advantage against his 3 bet range , but does thst mean you should carry on in the hand and try to realise your equity? Hell no.

In this hand you have 77, effectively third pair and maybe you have a slight equity advantage against the range you give villain. But how many times is he going to give up river when he knows your range is capped? You simply can not call a 3rd barrel here unless you spike your straight/set so the equity is almost irrelevant. If villain checks, he usually has showdown value. By calling his obvious value bet after flatting flop then checking back river you've let him play the hand perfectly and paid him off. We want him to make mistakes, not play the hand perfectly.

On a more general note, I think that in today's games, where 90% are losing players, you have to be able to analyse deeper than "I have equity advantage so I'll call" and "I have 2nd pair on flop so flatting is standard" in order to be one of the small minority of players that win consistently. Certainly when you move up the limits and the margins are smaller this is going to become more and more important. At the risk of sounding arrogant (which I'm not), if you're looking at this hand and even contemplating flatting turn, or you can't see the merit and theory behind raising flop, and the fact it's a great texture for you to raise, then you're probably a long way from being able to win at any sort of significant winrate at even the higher microstakes limits. If that's you and you've been playing for a while now - and I see join dates from several years ago still at NL5 and 10 - then you should probably get coaching at this point, because it;s honestly not that hard to deposit 20 BI for NL5 and grind it up to 20 BI for NL 10 and beyond, like that shouldn't take more than a few 10k hands if you're understanding concepts and playing solid poker.

Are you guys using cardrunners EV? Make a tree with this hand and reasonable ranges/outcomes and check whether raising/flatting flop is higher EV and same with folding/flatting turn. You might be surprised by the results.

I suppose my main issue with raising here (and I think you've made a lot of good points in favour of it) is that if you're going to suppose that villain's range is strong enough that we can't find ~20% equity, I find it hard to believe that raising into it is a good idea. It's not like we're backing many 5nl players to start folding over pairs.

I don't disagree with most of what you're saying. I think you're making a lot of great points here as well.

I guess I was thinking more about what my range looks like from my own perspective, rather than villain's. I didn't see much point in raising because I'm only going to have 3 combos of nutted hands a huge majority of the time, and I thought that was important. That doesn't really have any bearing on EV though.

I've been a consistent winner up to and including 50nl on a couple of other sites. Poker isn't much of a focus for me at the moment, so I just play nanostakes on the most reg-infested site in an attempt to stay as sharp as I can in the interim.

I wouldn't call myself a great player, but I've been a consistent long-term winner for the past two and a half years. I object to someone saying that I don't have good fundamentals.

fyp

I thibk your fundamentals are fine, I was really talking about the guys who just are really adamant about their lines because they're 'standard' and overvalue things like equity and being balanced and are unwilling to think beyond what is 'standard' to actually arrive at the right play for a particular hand against a particular villain.

What is the Beast?

Hand is fine AP, imo. Might call or shove turn with more reads, 14 hands just isn't enough to turn 77 into a bluff though.

Based on reads, if BB doesn't know that CO is fishy he isn't iso raising here with a wider range to exploit CO and we can put his range {88+, AJ+, KQ} as OP stated. On the flop, we should definitely raise. It's 5nl, so villain is never folding an over pair to the flop but because this is a 3 bet pot, villain has a lot of high cards in his range. Raising on the flop gives us more chances on later streets.

I think to explain better, and correct me if there's a flaw in my thinking but I think this one of those spots where you would want to narrow down villain's range. By raising flop, then betting or raising turn (if villain attempts same weird sizing) villain can only continue with over pairs, AQ, KQ, QQ, flopped sets, and aces. I think the real question here is, not what your raising range looks like but what villains continuing range is vs your raise. As played, he is never incorrectly folding the parts of his range we are behind.

What kind of size should we use if we raise his flop cbet? To be not potcommited and to get him folding