This is a continuation of the Hand of the Week. Discussion of the flop action, which I imagine will surprise some of you, can be found here. Turn discussion is here.
Blinds are 50/100, Villain has about 20K (starting stack), and I have about 25K. Only six players (including both blinds) have claimed their seats so far. I have black Aces first to act and open to 300.
Villain calls from the SB, and everyone else folds.
Flop (700 in pot) Jc 8c 6h. Villain checks.
Turn (700 in pot) 6d. Villain bets 400. Hero?
River (1500 in pot) 2s. Villain bets 600. Hero?
Post your thoughts and preferred action here. If you choose to raise, be sure to think about the size of your raise and your plan for a 3-bet. I’ll respond to comments as I’m able and post my own thoughts as well as results on Sunday.
If villain had bet larger, say 900 chips, I would feel pretty content to just call, knowing that we are ahead of bluffs, possibly some value hands, and are high enough up in our range so that folding would be exploitable. The small bet of 600 into 1500 makes me very tempted to raise, but must consider whether it realistically gains enough value to be worth the times we lose more money or face a three-bet and a hard decision.
I expect villain to be continuing with various bluffs that were draws on the turn and are now complete air. Raising against these is equivalent to calling when he folds, but much worse if he three-bets a balanced range of better value hands and bluffs, as we lose the 2100 in the pot plus the amount of our raise (exactly if we fold, roughly if we make a close-to-break-even call).
Against hands that beat us, I wouldn’t expect a fold too often if we raise a “reasonable” amount, so raising loses the amount we raise compared to calling. (Raising to an “unreasonable” amount as a bluff would be uncalled for with a hand near the top of our range unless we had a strong exploitative reason.)
Against weaker value hands like jacks, we potentially earn the value of our raise, but only when villain calls, which it’s hard to guess at the probability of.
While being near the top of our range may be case for raising, I think in this case villain’s sizing is an effective blocking bet (whether intended that way or not), making our air want to fold and our strong hands want to call, despite getting less value than I would have hoped for.
it’s so thin, but i pop the river to 2200 total.
it’s got to be too thin in a mathy sense, except that you have all of these factors going for you:
1) your line looks like complete bullshit. you checked back the flop with the betting lead, called the turn, and are now raising a river card that changed nothing?? yeaahhh. and there are lots of draws out there?? if villain is decent i think he hand read, talks himself into calling you with a jack.
2) villain has a jack. he just does. his sizing on both the turn and river screams “jaaaaaaaaaaaack.”
3) villain can make the hero-call without risking his tourney life (or anywhere close). this is where the meek are at their boldest.
4) the only thing he knows about you is that you 3-bet T9s last orbit.
so go thin as shit and get the bonus equity of deflating his soul when he pays you off with worse, imho.
Given the story so far, our call in the turn and the board texture, I would guess it’s either a weak bluff after drawing to and missing a flush or small value bet from him with top pair Jacks with a decent kicker.
If he has top pair, he may well think we were drawing to a flush and this is potentially a good spot for him to take the pot with a weak mid pair after semi bluffing the turn and getting a soft call from us.
I think our hand is good here and a raise to 900 is likey to be called. If he 3-bets high then I would be concerned and consider folding, but if the 3-bet was medium/low I would call again expecting to see him show top pair.
But hey I’m probably totally wrong as usual 🙂
Like the posts Andrew – really interesting to read through everyone’s thoughts.
Agree with Nick, a suspicious smallish river raise for value seems in order. It looks shady as hell and we should get called extremely wide. This is like the nut runout, we can only reasonably expect to lose to 4-7 combos and we can get called soooooo wide- all the way to any pair possibly.
We can also potentially induce some great spazz here because out line looks like such nonsense. Which is a minor benefit to the flop check as well.