Villain VPIP around 35, PFR 30, labeled him as "small fish stick", stick because he plays pretty straight up, and small fish because he's a little fishy although this hand I don't think he played abnormally.

I'm curious about my 3 bet sizing, and curious about betting vs checking following his flop check. I don't feel raising turn or river are great plays, as I can see him having weaker Ax type hands.

Please let me know what you think and thank you!

Yatahay Network - $0.25 NL - Holdem - 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

BB: 86.92 BB
UTG: 99.2 BB
UTG+1: 118.4 BB
MP: 109.72 BB
Hero (MP+1): 177 BB
MP+2: 112.88 BB
CO: 62.56 BB
BTN: 161.72 BB
SB: 105.2 BB

SB posts SB 0.4 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.4 BB) Hero has A K

UTG raises to 2.8 BB, fold, fold, Hero raises to 7.8 BB, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, UTG calls 5 BB

Flop: (17 BB, 2 players) 7 A 5
UTG checks, Hero checks

Turn: (17 BB, 2 players) 2
UTG bets 4.24 BB, Hero calls 4.24 BB

River: (25.48 BB, 2 players) 3
UTG bets 7.56 BB, Hero calls 7.56 BB

UTG shows Q A (One Pair, Aces)
(Pre 30%, Flop 17%, Turn 7%)
Hero shows A K (One Pair, Aces)
(Pre 70%, Flop 83%, Turn 93%)
Hero wins 38.6 BB

3bet sizing looks fine.

I have know idea why you would ever check OTF here. Just bet big, bet big, jam and take him to value town if he's a little fishy.

Also why don't you think raising turn/river is great when he can have many weaker Ax?

The way to extract value is to put money in the pot so bet the flop, then bet the turn, then bet/shove the river. As played, consider raising his 0% pot sized bets.

This flop is a mixed strat, although majority betting. You should raise turn AP, and bet the river for a decent size.

+1

The problem with what he said is that it turns a situation that is clearly a mixed strat situation into a 100% bet situation, which is pretty dangerous for yourself when you have regs (not this player) tracking your stats. Everyone overly concentrates on exploiting the player at hand while completely ignoring that you are leaking information as to how you play to everyone tracking you.

You can cbet range and be fine if you are afraid of leaking too much info. Plus they need like 10k sample to get info about your xb in 3b pot.
Even if it is mix in theory, that means checking and betting has same EV. If checking has same EV as betting that is because solver will value bet very thin and find ton of bluffs and ob vs check which dose not happens often enough in practice imho.

How do we leak info about our play in general? Don't we just leak info about how we're exploiting this particular villian?

Majority ¼ bet otf.

I knew this question would come up. If we played perfectly, we would just be leaking info about how we play this player. But doing one thing versus a specific player would start to create a habit such that our first impulse when in a similar situation would be to do what we did before. It would be an unconscious leak that we created. That's the real danger of attempting to play exploitatively too often, and to too great of a degree: we create unconscious habits that are exploitable.

Hmm interesting point, though it seems to be more connected to mental game. Also how do you know this will actually happen?

In MPT there is a section where he splits exploitative strategies into 2 sections: Maximally exploitative strategy (MES) and Minimally exploitative strategies (MinES). So here the MES would be to always bet (and big probably). And the MinES would probably indeed be a mixed strategy where we lean a little bit more to betting than we would do in nash. You could also employ something like that, but MES is obviously going to get us more value here.