Flop the nut straight in limped pot—board pairs on Turn

I think the way to go with these nutted hands in your game is you just gotta bet and raise a lot. Once the pot gets above $50, every chance you miss to bet $100 is value you can’t make up later unless there’s like a river 3B or something.

I’d probably make it $100 total on the flop, and I’d definitely bet turn and river.

Bet bigger on your first bet, overbet the pot, not huge, but 30-35.

No reason to think villain is ahead yet. After the flop action they shouldn't be on a bluff but villain doesn't need a great hand. Your small flop reraise isn't going to fold out very many hands, only the really speculative raises with weak over pairs like 88 or things like A4s will give up and even then they might take one card to see if they improve.

I would lead turn and if raised call. If your raised on turn then villain's range has to be narrowed down to fairly strong hands and I would check/call river. If villain doesn't raise you on the turn then lead river again unless river card is really bad, another 5 or pairing the board puts a lot of hands ahead of you.

In this game, and on this board, I think I could get behind a full pot bet on the flop. With 5 opponents, someone is going to have A3, or 2P, or a set, or at least a draw that's good enough to continue.

On the other hand, I might like a check-raise even more. It's a limped pot. Someone is going to either have a piece or stab at it.

When V raises, why are you min-click 3B'ing him? If we bet $10, and he raised to $24, he's saying he has a piece of the board. Pray it's A3, and raise to $100, not $50.

That turn card sucks. All his sets are now boats / quads, and his most likely 2P combo of 54 is also boated up. He's not putting more money in with 42, and maybe not even A3.

Our hand is too good to bet-fold, so with the $100 cap on the betting, I think I'd just go into check-call mode now, and pray he doesn't bet $100 on turn and $100 on river. If he does go bet-bet, I might occasionally find a nitty fold on the river, because he'll almost never be bluffing, and it's doubtful he'd be over-playing A3 or anything that isn't a boat.

RESULT: I bet $100, he raises all-in to $195. I know this needs to be a fold—even with the great price I’m getting this is a full house ~100% of the time—but I call and he tables pocket 4s and I’m drawing dead.

It occurs to me that your spread limit game is somewhat like PLO, in that you really can pot control by check-calling.

Doesn't seem to be any point to value betting our hand, especially not for a size that pot commits us to call off when he jams.

I get it. But when he has exactly $200 left when we arrive at the Turn…he can put another $200 into the pot even if I check-call twice, haha.

I think maybe the right play is to bet $60 and fold when he makes it $160? But in my head all I could think was “this guy knows I bluff a lot, he may very well have put in $50 on the flop with just a 5, and now he’ll call off the rest of his stack with trips.” Which…was probably wishful thinking.

I think I'm starting to figure your game out. Random thoughts, for whatever they're worth...

In this game, when you find yourself in situations with a nutted yet vulnerable hand, I think you want to take a max-value / max-protection line on the flop, by betting / raising big. Once your hand is no longer the nuts, then I think you want to slow down and let your opponent do the betting.

If you do that second part - letting V drive the betting - you're allowing him to continue with both bluffs and worse value. If you're still driving the betting and increasing the pot size, he'll be folding out bluffs and some worse value, leaving his range heavily weighted towards thick value.

So, in this hand, when it's a limped pot and we see 542 on the flop, you bet, and V raises, the most obvious hands in his range are 63 for a chop, A3 for the wheel, or some 2P / set combo. You're way ahead of that range, and should want to get max value on the flop, by 3B'ing him to the max limit.

Once the board pairs on the turn, suddenly we're losing to 55, 44, 22, 54, and 52. If V has A3, or if he happened to limp in with 42, he'll most likely be done with it, and won't put any more money in.

But go back to the flop, and imagine if you 3B to $124 - he might fold a lot of his 2P, and maybe even some of those sets. But he's never folding A3. If he continues with every combo that makes a boat on the turn, that sucks when he boats up, because we're not deep enough to get away from our hand.

But think about how we'd play the rest of the hand if we were deeper. We can just check-evaluate, meaning we might check-call if he bets $100 on turn and check-fold if he bets $100 on river, knowing he's never bluffing or betting worse than 63 for value. We lose value by bet-calling instead of check-calling.

The spread limit structure of the game would seem to greatly reduce the value of trying to run a multi-street bluff culminating in a river jam, and reduces the implied odds of chasing draws on the flop. When we can pot-control by just check-calling for $100, or check-folding on river, it really limits the value our opponents can extract from us, and the value we can extract from them.