Q: We are in a .25/.50 NLholdem home game, 5 players are left. Hero and villain are the two big stacks at the table.
Preflop 5 handed:
Hero ($77.75 from a $50 buy in) (KK) Raise $1.75
Villain ($58.25 from a $25 buy in) Call
Dealer Fold
SB call (after saying,” ok I call one time”)
BB fold
POT: $5.75
SB is likely to call with almost anything once he has money in the pot, but will fold to pressure post flop if he misses. Villain’s call makes me think he has the following range: 5,5-10,10 ( JJ-AA (maybe even 10’s) I think he 3-Bets,which he has done without showdown 2-3 times during the evening, ). AKo-A9o, any suited Ax, suited connectors (maybe down to 5,6 or so—not so sure about this part of the range)
FLOP:
A 10 6 rainbow
SB check
Hero Bet $3.50
Villain call
SB fold
POT: $12.25
I bet here partly as CB, partly to fold out the SB, and also figure if Villain doesn’t have an A he might fold. I think he loses the suited connector part of his range (I doubt he would chase a gut-shot here). we also lose 6,6 and 10,10 because he would re-raise with them hoping I have an A. All of his A’s are still in play as top pair, or some Ax’s giving him 2 pair (A 10 most likely if this is the case). He might float mid pairs, but I doubt it.
TURN: A
Hero $6.25
Villain call
POT: $24.75
I bet here partly as a blocking bet, because if I check and he bets larger, I won’t know here I am. If he 3 bets I can fold easily. When he calls I am almost sure he has an A either as 3 A’s or a fullhouse and is slow playing it.
RIVER: A
Now I reconsider. Chances are he does not have an A, since there is only one left. If he doesn’t have a A, I have the nuts. If he was chasing, he’ll fold to any bet, if he has any part of the board I need to get value.
Hero: Bet $8.75
Villain: instantly all in. At first he doesn’t even know how much he has, then methodically counts out $38 when I ask how much
My heart sinks. As I think, I remember Nate saying on the podcast several times that, in these low limit games, when a guy overbets the pot on the river that, despite the odds against it, he has the nuts (not blaming you, just going over my thought process). I try to reconstruct the hand and can’t really establish anything but an A (A, broadway; A6, A10). I look at him and he seems so strong. Even as I tank and go over the hand he seems way to comfortable. I fold.
A: I have a lot to say about this hand, but mostly I want to talk about the flop and your decision to bet. You say you are betting “partly as a continuation bet”, but I don’t think that really has any meaning. Generally a bet makes sense if it can either cause opponents to fold better or call with worse. There is some value in getting them to fold worse hands that have equity in the pot (ie betting for protection), but that’s less common. It’s best to think in these terms rather than betting simply because you raised pre-flop. I once tried to catalog all of the possible sources of value in a bet.
You talk a lot about making people fold, but you don’t talk about what they will fold. The problem with using your hand as a bluff (which is what you’re doing if you’re hoping for a fold) is that it’s ahead of any hand that is going to fold and has terrible equity against many hands that will call. In a loose enough game, it’s possible to bet KK for thin value expecting that smaller pairs and gutshots will call, but if you are just hoping for folds, I don’t see any point in betting. What you’re really hoping for is not that they fold but that they don’t have an Ace, which a fold would indicate. A bet, of course, won’t actually change their cards, so a bet can’t really give you what you’re looking for.
I think it makes more sense to check the flop and see what your opponents do. If there’s a bet and a call in front of you, you can be pretty sure someone has an Ace and fold, meaning that you got most of the information a bet would have given you without paying for it. If everyone checks or there’s a bet and a fold, you’ll have to consider the situation and put people on ranges. That may sound like an uncomfortable situation to be in, and I’ll address that in a moment.
On the turn, you say that if you check and he bets, “I won’t know where I am”. You also say that when he calls your bet, you are sure you are beat and therefore drawing nearly dead. This illustrates the problem with betting for information. Your primary goal in a poker hand is not find out where you are, it’s to get money into the pot when you’re ahead or take money out of the pot when you’re behind. Relatedly, you’d like to avoid putting money into the pot from behind or folding when ahead. Knowing with certainty where you stand can help with these goals, but it isn’t an end itself. If you deliberately put money in bad to find out where you stand, you’ve got it backwards.
If you bet and he calls, you’re definitely beat. If you check and he bets, you might be beat or he might be bluffing. In the second case, at least something good happens sometimes. Plus, you get a choice. If you think Villain won’t bet worse often enough to make a call profitable, then you can fold. If you think he will, then you can call profitably. In the latter case, you do know (or at least suspect, which is usually the best you can do in a game of imperfect information) where you stand versus his range. You won’t generally be able to figure out your opponent’s exact hand, so the best you can do is make good decisions against his range.
The river is an interesting card. You say “chances are he does not have an A”, but that’s not quite right. The river card cuts his chances of having an A roughly in half, but if you thought Aces were a huge part of his turn range, he could still be quite likely to have one. One of my favorite Nate Meyvis quotes is that “It’s hard to make quads, but sometimes the board does most of the work for you”. In other words, quads is of course a very rare hand in general, but it’s not so unlikely once trips are on the board.
Now you have to assess whether he’ll call with enough non-quads hands to justify a value bet. If so, then you can value bet, and I think your sizing here is good. If not, then just check and fold.
Once he shoves and seems confident, folding seems reasonable to me. You’ve shown consistent strength on every street, you have plenty of Ax in your range (depending on what you’d open UTG, you probably have at least the 4 combos of AK and 4 combos of AQ), and he is shoving anyway. It’s a crazy spot to bluff or try to shove worse than KK for value, so unless you have a very good reason to think he’d do one of those things, folding seems right to me.
I didn’t post the results above, but our correspondent did actually reveal that his opponent held QT. He inadvertently turned his hand into a bluff, but that doesn’t make Hero’s fold wrong. Technically if Hero’s range here is {AK,AQ,JJ,QQ,KK}, then folding without an Ace is exploitable. However, I don’t know that Hero would play all of those hands this way – as I argue above, I don’t think he should – and even though it turned out to be wrong I’d feel OK making the exploitable assumption here that Villain would rarely shove without an A.
The fact that you do get called this far by QT brings me back to my original point about betting KK. If you think hands like this will be in Villain’s calling range, it’s fine to bet for thin value and protection on the flop. You should think about why you’re betting in order to determine whether you should bet at all, though, and in this case I don’t think your reasoning made a lot of sense. Your hand was too good to bluff, and you could have gotten comparable information by checking.
Thanks for writing!
I would have paid off. Please double check my math but I calculated that you’re getting 2:1 on the call and against a range of a2-aj,t9,jt,qt,kt,jj you have 56% equity. I came to that range because this is a 25/50 home game and I made an assumption that villain is betting based on absolute hand strength, not relative. “OMG I has full house I’m all in”.
If I were to refine the range further to only suited Aces and broadway (Ax2x-Axjx,JT,QT,KT) tens then your equity skyrockets to 80%. My calling range would have been any pocket pair Ten or higher and any ace.
What about betting to prevent your opponent from bluffing you off the best hand? I guess that’s a subset of betting to fold a worse hand with equity.
In my experience in these low stakes games there are a lot of villains who will always bet an A high flop if the PFR doesn’t c-bet. Presumably if we know that villain is like that we can bluff catch and call down for value. But OOP and with 3 streets villain can make it pretty painful for us and if we don’t have insight into whether villain will bluff frequently is it okay to just bet here to block his bluffing potential? (on the flop only, I think if we take this line we’d need to check/fold even this turn)
Tough spot to be in on the flop but I think each successive ace makes your hand stronger and stronger. When your opponent shoves all-in instantly, it’s a pure guess if he could possibly be doing this without an ace unless you have some specific reads.
You had some info about SB but what about the villain? What do you know about him? Specifically, when he raises on the river and gets called, what kinds of hands have you seen? How often does he have the nuts?
Had I not seen the results, I was going to guess that villain thought he was trapping you with a hand like JJ or QQ. As it stands, QT is just like one of those pairs on this particular board.
Also, I don’t know how your specific game works but in 1/2 and even 5/5 home games, big raises frequently get called by suited junk and dominated hands.
You raised to 1.75 which is only 3.5x. I suspect you could raise a lot more and get calls from players like villain and the SB (especially the SB). If SB will really call with any hand once he has money in the pot, why aren’t you charging him more to see the flop?
Have you tried raising 10x to $5? Find out what is the most your opponents are willing to call and vary your raise size and make it close to that amount.
Not only does it make you more money, it cuts down on your opponent’s implied odds and makes it tougher for them to outplay you when the stacks are shallower relative to the pot size when you see the flop.
Villain played differently at this event than usual. He usually plays fairly well for this level of play, but rarely chases unreasonably and never shoves as a complete bluff. That night he played a lot looser than I had ever seen him play before, which is why I later stacked him with my straight over his 2 pair.