Hi 2+2. I've recently been working quite a bit on my game + moving up stakes and this is one of my weakest points in my game. I find it really hard to manage wide ranges in BTN v BB spots on turns/rivers where I'm bluff catching or turning hands into bluffs.

In these spots, I know roughly where I am in my range (e.g. value/SDV/bluff etc) but I am doing everything blindly without really knowing if I'm over/under bluffing or over/under calling (e.g. knowing when to bluffcatch or how wide to bluffcatch). Basically, I'm looking for some advice on:
1) Is there any advice you can give me? Or is it just a thing I need to go through in crazy detail and learn until I see patterns in specific lines?
2) How do I know when hands w some SDV e.g. AX need to be turned into bluffs?

I know these questions are incredibly vague but if anyone could give it a go or point me in a direction to improve it would be much appreciated ty

Hero (BTN): 103.18 BB
SB: 100 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 7)
BB: 106.14 BB (VPIP: 26.11, PFR: 20.26, 3Bet Preflop: 8.22, Hands: 1,031)
CO: 68.72 BB (VPIP: 26.32, PFR: 26.32, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 20)

SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has J A

fold, Hero raises to 2 BB, fold, BB calls 1 BB

Flop: (4.5 BB, 2 players) 9 9 2
BB checks, Hero bets 1.8 BB, BB calls 1.8 BB

Turn: (8.1 BB, 2 players) 6
BB checks, Hero checks

River: (8.1 BB, 2 players) 3
BB bets 5.5 BB, Hero calls 5.5 BB

Im affraid you have to go throu it yourself, working with ranges maybe with a solver, do not see a short way.
Here it is just close on flop and river. Flop might be a thin valuebet with this size on the other hand this holding does not improve to strong bluff ott thus check back flop possible.

ive been experimenting using 1/4th sizing with 100% of my range on these types of flops, but still think this is a fine cbet using 1/3 pot sizing.

as shamway said, will just take a tonne of work with solves + equilab etc. its extremely tedious but you can learn some general things pretty quickly

otr I think we can fold vs unk, dk how many q high or k highs float nvm bluffing river, I think most khighs just try and SD

Thanks guys, lots of work ahead then

Yeah I actually use 40% range because of sh*tty site I'm on, 25% sounds good too wonder how people would react to that. If you don't mind me asking, what sizing are you using on turns?

As for the actual hand villain floats pretty wide otf so decided to call river.

people tend to react in polar way, raising a tonne or folding a tonne. mainly the latter.

ott it depends on card/texture, if its a card that's good for my range and brings draws I will size up from like 70-125% pot on turn bet. some turns I may only use overbet when betting and some I will use diff sizings for certain parts of my range

seems fine to me nh

To answer your questions OP:

1. There are no shortcuts, count the combos in equilab and see how many combos x% of your range is.
2. when there are no worse hands to bluff with OR for deception on earlier streets.

What do you mean by deception?

Like betting bottom pair so that you can't get run over when the board pairs the bottom pair.

Also betting strong Ace highs so we can have a wider value range on Ace turns / rivers.

These deception bets aren't clearly value bets or bluffs.

flop valuebet is too thin unless we plan to bluffcatch river imo.
We are basicly hoping for villain to have Ax or KQ,KJ and check it down.
I know this is a spot where there is basicly the "cbet is profitable so bet" and the "chback for SD value" camp.

Im pretty sure that our cbetting range on these flops gets very out of hand once we start cbetting AJ with our BTN range on this board. Its definitely one of the better candidates to chback in this spot. Cbetting 100% even if we bet 1/3 is just super exploitable and i raise the **** out of people with 70% cbet, on this kind of board.

Depending on villains tendencies we might also be able to call a small turn bet.

Thanks TB, makes sense.

I cbet my range on lots of boards BTN v BB personally and found it works very well as players don't adapt to it to well. Then I defend my cbet range well vs x/r, depending on villain, so it's not super exploitable. Splitting ranges is fine too but the EV difference is so small that I prefer a more simple strat that often players don't adapt well to.

Looks fine to me. I think checking and betting are both perfectly reasonable. This is an interesting spot in that you can actually get value with a strong A high when you bet, because villain will need to defend so many high card combos. We're left with a pretty strong bluffcatcher when we check behind though, and can call very often on turns.

I think SinnaJ brings up a good point. A lot of micro players tend to over-cbet, and although most of the time other players won't exploit it, things can get pretty dicey when we start facing a lot of raises from strong players with hands that are closer to the SDV part of the spectrum than the value part.

As far as the river, this is a pretty standard call. This is most likely in the top half of your range, and villain also should have plenty of worse hands to bluff with.

I dont know what you deem to be super exploiotable but just that you defend some of your 100% range vs a ch/r does not counter the argument of it being super exploitable.
Also raising is not the only way to counter your play, as people can also just float you very wide, as you will either have to fold too much to a riverbet (especially if you also fold AJ here) or you will barrel to much on turns.
As played you will lose this pot vs a hand like TJs or other floats, that might just stab turn and GU river if you checkback and call turn with your A high.
I believe that a winning NL50 reg is competent enough to exploit you here.
Especially as cbetting too much in certain spots is a very common Leak of microstakes regs at least in my experience.

While cbetting might not be -EV checking back certainly is +EV aswell. Its just the question what performs better in an overall strategy. Even if Villain overfolds flop and is not actively exploiting you i doubt that the EV of checking back is largely inferior cbetting.

I'm not going to go through every single street and way villain can 'exploit' this strategy. We can then counter villains 'exploitation' such as floating too wide otf + stabbing rivers by widening our call range otr for your example. This then leads to a balanced strat which is just as equal EV as splitting our flop cbet range (yes I've checked), but is more simple therefore often leads to a more +EV strategy as mistakes are less likely with a smaller game tree (obviously providing we aren't making massive mistakes with this new strategy).

Therefore winning 50NL regs has little to exploit if this strategy is performed reasonably well, even adding in some human error. I'm not sure about the EV about checking back specifically this hand, but the EV difference between splitting a cbet range or betting range otf is close to, if not 0. But there's no problem with using either strategy, providing you can play close to optimal. In my opinion, I find it easier to play with less ranges involved.

You dont seem to understand that it doesnt matter if you defend a balanced amount when having a range that is simply too wide. This is also the reason why we dont open 100% from any position. Villain just takes you to valuetown. You cant open your range indefinitely and be like "oh im balanced so im fine".
What tool did you use for the analysis that cbetting to call a balanced amount on the river has the same EV as checking back a mixture of Nuts/Air/WeakSDV OTF?? And how did you analyze this? I imagine that this analysis is quite complex. Did you account for the fact that villain might be raising flop? Betting 100% in a spot where your range is very wide just cant work out from a perspective of approaching optimal play and is a very easily exploitable tendency.
Also i dont see where this is making this easier. Looking at the river spot you should realize that this way isnt necessary easier. Playing against a competent villain will also just get harder when you have suboptimal overall strategy for your range.

To be clear about this: Im not advocating finding a GTO solution for this. Im advocating that cbetting 100% here is just super easy to pick up on (i.e. i see you cbetting, checking down AJ here, or i simply see your 70%+ cbetting OTF). And that the EV of not cbetting this particular holding isnt inferior to cbetting even if villain plays suboptimal against a strategy where you cbet too much.

I do understand this, but this cbet range is not too 'wide' for various reasons inc equity advantage + being IP, villain can't take us to 'valuetown'.

The EV calculations I discussed were done on a solver, but you misunderstood. It was the EV comparison between a complete flop/turn/river strategy of cbetting flop 100% or having two difference cbet sizings + capability to x otf, then continuing to play all turns/rivers, for this specific flop + positions and allowed villain to take all lines possible. In my opinion, it makes it easier because instead of having to worry about all these different lines that hero/villain takes and our different ranges in every situation, we are left with less lines therefore it's easier to think about what our ranges look like therefore our decisions are clearer imo.

Can you explain how 100% cbet range is suboptimal and how you would exploit this? I know you've stated above that you'd x/r more, but it's pretty easy to play vs that strategy. Defend x amount of hands as standard then adapt to how often villain is x/r + what range they're doing this with.

I am fully aware it's often a leak of micro players to cbet too much, due to incorrect situations, sizings, hand strength, bad xing ranges, bad strat vs x/r and on later street, however this is completely irrelevant to this spot as all of these have been considered when coming to this conclusion.

I guessed that i just want to know which one you used. Pio Solver? CardRunners GTO+? Which betsizings were chosen?

You cbet 100% of your 50% preflop range. Lets say you cbet 1/3 so 1,5 into 4,50 if he raises to lets say 4,5 (he could even go smaller) you have to defend more than 50% of your 50% preflop range. Which leaves you with continuing range of more than 25% of all possible preflop holdings against a raise.
Im on an offsite event with work till the end of the week so i cant make any sophisticated calculations right now. However just rougly guessing seems like we have to get to the river with K high a decent amount of the time to not overfold.
To answer your question id just not overfold meaning i bluffraise flop a lot and float a ton. GL calling down my c/r,b,b with AKo and 44

PIO, something like 33/60 otf, 70 turn, 80 river, basic ik but represents what most of player pools sizing are somewhat like + reasonable sizings excluding overbets.

Going by the MDF strat, hero needs to defend about 17% of RFI range on the river. I open 40% BTN as standard, so that will be something like 9x/some AA-TT/22/turned FHs depends on runout seems pretty reasonable to me. Just checked, my river calling range is roughly correct and EV is pretty much identical between the two strategies.

Defending isnt limited to calling tho. You can defend by 3betting flop. I think this flop isnt that good for our range, BB should have more 9X if he defending preflop correctly.

We'll have something like 53/54% equity here, about the same amount of 9x is in both range (this specific villain wouldn't be defending 95s or below as they're overfolding hence minraise). Probably wouldn't 3B this flop often, probably never, given we both have the nuts/nutty combos in our range A9-Q9/22 etc (which block tons of villains calling range too + unblock bluffs), our bluffs are going to have to be near no equity and weakens our b/c range too. There's no real immediate need to GII w A9 either.

Villains raise size would be interesting here i believe. However it is definitely a huge difference if we open 40% or 50% OTB.
Very interesting that you might get away with this with a 40% opening range. However i believe it actually makes it easier to defend more of our range if we have b/3b flop range.
Really interested how this works out once villain uses a tiny flop raise size though.

The 3betting flop was in response to sinna saying he could bluff raise flop a lot, we can 3bet bluff too with hands like 87o.
This thread is going further into different topic than what you posted for so maybe I shouldn't have commented lol

My bad, villain is using 40% flop raise. I think the 50% RFI makes a little bit of a difference, but on most runouts we'll only have to defend overpairs/trips/FHs/some top pairs. Cba to sim again but I think I remember it had a tiny 3B range, A9 at 50% fre then K9/Q9 at tiny frequency.

@Rene, sorry I misunderstood. Nah it's no problem, I just discussing strategy + how to adapt etc plus it's still along the same line of what the post intended.

I didn't realize you were saying you cbet your entire range on this board. I'm skeptical that this strategy is superior to having a checking range, mostly because it's not one that I've ever seen recommended by anyone. Granted, if you've done the database work to determine what kind of board textures regs in your player pool are overfolding, then you'd probably have a better idea of its profitability than most here would.

I can't think of a real reason why it would be worse though, other than the idea of giving competent regs something clear to attack right out of the gate, and always giving villain the option to reopen the betting. I think the idea of simplifying the game tree is pretty interesting.

The strategy isn't based on overfolding (although this is a benefit of this strategy because of players not adapting well). It's not superior as a complete strategy (very close to equal EV, maybe losing 0.01% of pot), but imo in practice it is because of players not adapting well + strat simplification. There's loads of flops this strat can be used for too in BTN v BB so saves lots of time going through each flop type.