Terrified with KK

I can't imagine crafting and defending any analysis that hinges on the above read.

Sorry, Banana, I guess you are an idiot when it comes to player descriptions. These guys know him better than you based on two hands 😉

And, yes, I have a bet/fold, just not here, but go for it.

How can we question villain's description in the forum that brought you gems like "hero is a tag, hero raises 53s from UTG+1".

So, giving reads is useless? So, everyone just say player A, B, C, etc., from now on. That will make it a better strat forum.

Not forming a r/fing range for value because you're afraid you'll get 3b bluffed off your hand is the TINO's version of a station saying "can't win by folding" or a LAG saying "their range is too strong for me to win by checking, so I gotta turn my hand into a bluff!" It's a way to maximize the number of pots you win, not the amount of money.

(None of this is to say we're necessarily folding this combo to a shove this time; it would turn it into a bluff-catcher, which you would sometimes call with.)

man i keep getting sucked into posting here lol

the point of the my small raise hypothetical is there's obviously a size he is going to call these hands you think "he can't possibly call vs". i think if he's even fractionally as good as reported in the op, he will never show up here with 99+ pre given that he overcalled ~60bb deep. probably villain is good at poker and just screwing around which is evidenced by him double straddling, but having a reasonable stab candidate / sizing and then doing something unorthodox most people wouldn't even consider on the river.

with that said large misconceptions in this thread that being good at poker involves never bluff catching. i don't really understand how you can reasonably say on one hand you believe the description that villain is good and then also that he is going to fold his entire range on the river when banana represents i have no idea? a very discounted random slowplay after he bets an amount that's going to induce spew fairly often. i don't want to be mean but you have people that haven't ever / don't play against good players taking the description and warping it into something that it isn't in their minds. i also don't think there's actually many / any regular public 50/100 nl games that aren't private that exist so classifying him as a 50/100 reg is a dangerous exercise. there's a ton of people that can play high stakes if the lineups are good (avg 5/10 reg is probably winning in the vast majority of televised stream lineups as an example)

i don't really get the river argument either. he just isn't going to b3b here, that really isn't going to happen but if it does and you're super paranoid that scary high stakes guy is bluffing here (he isn't), you can call at a frequency that doesn't let him bluff profitably. if hes risking 700 to win 700, you can call half of the time and all of a sudden his elite high level play is not actually making any money. in practice you get to call less bc ur going to show up w 99 / 7x some amount of the time and anyone reasonably good at poker is going to realize this is a horrible spot to bluff (they arent deep, btn is representing very good hand, given the minbet bb should have a hand that can just call if he suspects a bluff as opposed to needing to rebluff, highly unlikely he can rep something credible after minbetting the river initially).

the issue i think is that idk people on here think that getting stacked is a disaster to be avoided and in reality it's just a pretty common fact of life in poker, even moreso in 60bb eff hands when you open to 4+x and it goes multiway. if he has it, he has it here man. i think in practice he will never have it because he's going to bet large otr vs bluff catchers as opposed to minbetting hoping to induce a raise when stacks are such that he can just jam the river if he wants to

the 3b thing on the river doesn't even make sense to me when i look at it. if you make it 400 and he jams, you have 250$ left. i dont get what the worry is. just call lol, you are getting 7:1.

the double straddle and him defending j3ss pre should be enough evidence to show you that the monster nittiness you're projecting onto him is incorrect

Let's forget the argument over whether villain is bad or not. Let's cover all our bases here.

POSSIBILITY 1) Villain is a great player against whom we cannot possibly do any better than playing a strategy that would be optimal no matter how he plays. If you don't believe this is ever the correct way to approach poker, then fine, whatever, skip ahead to the other 2 options.

In this case, a fundamental reason for betting is to leverage the advantage of knowing our hole cards, and so forcing our opponent to maximize the degree (both in terms of frequency and size) they make a decision they would not have made if they knew our cards. For any situation where we can't just shove our entire stack (which forces the biggest potential for mistakes with the most limited set of counterplay for our opponent), we ideally want to form our range such that depending on which hand we happen to hold, it would either be a big mistake to not call our bet, to not fold to our bet, or (important here) **to not raise our bet**.

By not merging our range, we make it so that villain never needs to raise us with anything less than the nuts, which means 1) we're easier to play against, and 2) he is never forced to play for his stack except in scenarios where he's all but guaranteed to scoop it.

For more on this I'd recommend reading MPT's "The Theory of Betting" in the beginning of the chapter on Postflop play, but if that's too fancy-pants solver-nerd-coded for you, take solace in knowing it's basically just an application of the fundamental theorem of poker.

TL;DR: If this is the case, we should be forming a raise/fold range which includes both bluffs and "thin" value. Since he showed up with J3ss here, we can disregard this possibility anyway...

POSSIBILITY 2) GTO's stupid, even if villain's transcendently good at the game, what he's good at is playing an EXPLOITATIVE style, so we can optimize our strategy by counterexploiting him.

So how is he exploiting this field? Well one of the most bog-standard, broadly applicable across both TINOs and (straightforward) fish alike at these games is that people do not raise rivers enough. For once, don't even mean this as an insult to LLSNL players as this is true in every game I've played in apart from a small handful of online midstakes heads up matches.

And this isn't just a population read. OP is "terrified" because he's facing a 0.83bb bet closing the action on the river with third boat, and has successfully bamboozled us into falling for his blocker bet and getting to showdown for practically free. If this is a poker savant who can read souls in just brief stints of live play, he has correctly identified a leak in OP's game and has pounced on it.

So the only person you're exploiting by not forming a raise/folding range is yourself. In fact, the counterexploitation would likely to be to raise more often (perhaps with a smaller size to exacerbate his mistake of not raising us) and this hand would become even MORE of a raise both because of the size and the assumption of his counterplay.

POSSIBILITY 3) Villain is a beached whale who has washed up on the shores of our low-stakes game. This can happen either because he's an actual drooler or because he's an otherwise good player who's just splashing around at a game where the money means nothing to him. Importantly, the REASON that he's throwing EV around like a millionaire throwing hundred dollar bills out the side of a hot air balloon to the villagers below is irrelevant; what's important is that we (as a lowly 1/3NL grinder who does not use benjamins as toilet paper) get our bucket out and catch as much as we can.

In this case, we let villain get to showdown for the equivalent of less than ONE half-pot bet postflop when we had third boat IP versus someone apparently VPIPing 50-60% in this spot.

Me spending two hours of my Saturday drafting a thoughtful post I know will be ignored like all my others ITT:

Very nice, cogent analysis.

But stop trying fetch TINO

Reported for bullying

You guys can throw all the convincing arguments in the world at her, but if I've learned anything here in the past years, it's that Java will never admit she was wrong, not even when it's blatantly obvious. 😃 The best you will get is "hey, if you wanna do X, then by all means go for it. You do you."

(I know I'm being kind of childish calling someone out like this, and I do apologise, but it's this 'extreme mediocrity posing as authority' thing that I just can't stand. Some people are mostly here to learn (I'm certainly one of them, Mediocrity happens to be my middle name), others are here to teach. There's nothing wrong with a little discussion, but I do think it's important to realise in which category we fall. There are definitely some people in this subforum who do not seem to realise this and it can get tiresome to see people doubling down on nonsense in the face of arguments that should be eye-openers.)

Let me try to explain again. Because this guy is supposed to be a great player (with tons of money he doesn't mind throwing from his hot air balloon), he could easily shove this river knowing H will have a difficult time calling. This is for the $60 - $200 bets, not the $400 bet (LOL) someone mentioned. That is why I think we need to call if we plan to bet.

If he were just some random player, bet/fold is fine. And if V thinks H is a calling station or has his own balloon and therefore will call because it's pennies to him, bet/fold is fine. These don't appear to be true.

(I also don't think a great player plays TT/JJ this way, but it's possible, and he might call V on river with one of those hands -- again depending on his read of V, but especially if he's in his balloon.)

FWIW, I have raised/shoved weak / scared money players (not saying that's Banana) multiple times on scary boards and seen them fold big hands (it's amazing how often they show), and I'm sure you guys have, too. This works especially well when you know they don't have their own balloon. Sometimes I even feel guilty about it, but they are grown men, so that fades quickly.

Homey's correct. You really do get fixated on being right, don't you?

Or is it that you get stuck on extraneous red herrings, even when more data appears?

I am used to being right, so, yes. What data has appeared? We are playing live poker against a V who is crushing the game, has played on TV, tours Europe and plays WSOP. He is also used to playing high stakes and has tons of money to throw around, and you want to bet/fold, which is exactly what he expects from an average 1/3 player who just doubled up.

Apparently, we should shove these rivers most of the time. If you are V, are you shoving to H's $150 river bet? If not, why not? It's obviously way more profitable than H's raising.

Would have been awesome if H had raised and V shoved. Dying to know what you guys would post then. Some of you would have waited until you saw his J3 to comment, though.

Based on the **** you post here it's quite evident you're not used to being right. You have yet to post something logical.

How so? As V, are you raising river if H raises to $60 - $200? It is obviously the best play since everyone would fold. H basically never has a 7 here.

Posted before the reveal:

I stand by my earlier statement, even after the reveal. V might actually bluff catch, if he levels himself into thinking hero would never jam a PP, and must be bluffing with AX.

I’m not interested in hypotheticals.

I already said I’m bet bet shoving this run out and as played I’m looking at river as villain checked and I am betting for value.

He does have TT/JJ/88 plenty of 9x as he was the double straddle and that’s what your entire logic is based on “he doesn’t have much 9x” here. Yeah well you’re wrong. Which btw, is rather funny, because in your logic villain does have 7x here but it’s rare he has 9x which was my problem with your analysis from the beginning. Terrible range construction.

This whole thread is a hypothetical.

And I never, ever, put V on a 7, and I don't think he's calling with a 9.

Enough.

Wrong and wrong. Good for you on being consistently clueless.

i don't really understand what you think you lose to in that case lol. there's 0 chance hes overcalling a 4x after a btn iso with 99 given stacks (possibly ever). i didn't even realize the open was from the button until now, is really bad hand ranging going on itt

would recomend u consistently try to make good people fold 9x on 773 9 7 when draws brick (while in your examples of betsizing, laying them 8:1 and 3.5:1 respectively) and see how that works out for you

@java you keep overlooking everything that people are telling you about how to mathematically approach him bluffing if that's really your concern (call at whatever frequency makes him indifferent, you don't need to call every single time he bluffs for it to be losing). you keep talking about what you would do as him or how v should know what you would do, but none of that really matters. if you really think you have node lock level reads on all parts of hs regs play, you should quite honestly move up to high stakes. youd absolutely print if you could destroy the regs like this. given thats unlikely to be the situation, maybe be open to being wrong and listen to what people are saying?

If there's a double straddle, there are 4 blinds, so it's not a normal button PFR range.

I think everyone who’s left arguing ITT has at some point stated what they would do facing a shove. You’re also still complaining about having a raise/fold range against a good player is without ever addressing the whole treatise I wrote on that topic alone.

Seems pretty clear to me you’re not really reading and engaging with the points being made and think we’d all be well-served to stop engaging in the argument ourselves.

Skimmed through discussion. If you cant raise/fold your entire range or even call off depending upon sizing then I think you're just suffering from a slight case of the MUBS. This is a rather trivial spot tbh and if you're spending more than 10 seconds in the tank on it then you're likely underrolled for whatever stake youre playing. I dont even remember stacks/pot size but if someone gets cute with a $10 bet into a $500 pot and I have KK then I'm either raising to like $75 and deciding if i look thin (so I can call a raise) or greedy (so I can fold to one). Or I'm making it $300 in his face and sigh calling it off unless i'm like 1000BB deep.

As I recall this hand immediately went off the rails when we didnt cbet flop at which point everyone's range is so distorted nobody knows wtf anyone else is doing. It's ok to rep the big overpair when we have it because it enables us to range our opponents willingness to bluff at it. But when we underrep our hand we dont know if V is just overplaying theirs, missed a trap, FOMO betting, or total air. Most of these can be ruled out if we play a little face up whilst still giving them leverage to try and bluff or valuebet without any of the other chicanery mixed in between.