Aria 1/3 NL cash: too aggressive with AKs?

Your play is OK and your thought process is reasonable. I would prefer to go larger pre-flop (4x OOP). I also think I would bet small on flop and shove turn. However, as played, you got Villain to call pre-flop with a bad, dominated hand, and then you got the money in on the flop as the equity favorite. That is a good result. Just happened to get unlucky here.

His huge pre-flop raise with KJo is pretty confusing. I wonder if we are missing some details here? Was this the first time he had made this play? Were other players involved pre-flop? Is this guy just a maniac?

You could bet/gii on the flop and usually shove the turn if called. That would represent TT-AA better. That flop will hit him often, but you have a huge draw. You were 54% to win on the flop and there was about a 1.5 SPR. You are going to get stacked sometimes.

With this SPR, it would be tricky to play AK on some boards you miss.

Villain's preflop play is awful, but typical for the stakes. Preflop sizing seems really big 9xBB. Not sure if that is typical for the table. Probably he should fold that hand in ep. He obviously should fold to the 3!, particularly since at 1/3 OOP against a large ep raise, you should have a really strong range. He would be crushed against TT+. However, 1/3 players who get that much in preflop aren't folding top pair. Plus you could have had just AK/AQ or just a flush draw with that shove.

This logic is flawed. OK the opponent might be a bit clueless from the vase open sizing, but early vs SB you might well not see a 4bet range at all here.

1/3 players don't play that way. They open 9x with KJo and call a 3!. Even a good player in a tough game deeper might not 4! much in this situation. A lot of people in a 1/3 game don't have a 4! range or if they do it is KK/AA or AA.

Obviously, you go with the nut flush draw, straight draw, and overcards with SPR of 1.5 and don't need to worry much about what he has. Even if he turned JJ for a set face up, folding would only be a little better than pushing.

Yes, it's probably too aggro on this board, against this V, when each of you takes these lines. Old dudes hate folding once they've entered a pot, especially if they opened for a raise, and even more especially if it was a big raise.

Think about this, would you take this line with 2P+, or just an over pair? Or would you just bet 1/3 to 1/2 pot? It looks like you have exactly what you had, two overs plus a draw.

His ginormous open is weird. I'd have expected an old dude opening that size to show up with JJ+, if not exactly JJ, or maybe TT. For some reason old dudes and rec-fish seem to hate seeing a flop with those PP's. They also seem to play every combo of JT, including calling a 3B.

So, if we give V that range of TT+, AK/AQ and JT, plus throw in some KQ, KJ, and QJ, it's pretty ambitious to expect him to fold when we jam $275 into $150.

I'd rather play the flop as a check, possibly a check raise if he bets small, or make a delayed c-bet on the turn if the flop checks through. But again, with this hand, on this board, against this V, I might just take an extremely defensive line and check turn a lot.

There is SPR of 1.5 and you have a monster draw. You can't specifically put him on JJ/TT/AA/JTs/66, the only hands you are not a favorite against. You can't check/fold. Check/calling and folding a blank turn is too weak. Maybe he has 99 and will fold to the shove or a shove on the turn. Maybe he has AQ. He had KJo, so he could have all sorts of marginal hands.

That's literally what I said pal

You got called by worse as you are an equity favorite, so I think your play was fine.

Whether you check, bet small, or jam the flop I really don't think it makes a huge difference in terms of your expected value.

You took a gamble and you lost $350, but were a slight favorite to win. You didn't make a $350 mistake. Honestly, 9 times out of 10 if 2 actions theoretically have the same EV and one action is more aggressive, the aggressive action is probably going to outperform in poker. More players make the mistake of not being aggressive enough. You didn't do anything to beat yourself up over.

You are just value cutting yourself here. If we are not taking spots like this, we are forcing ourselves to fold much more with marginal made hands in other spots (a trivial call becomes a fold because we are not making the most with our monster draws). It's fine if we want to take the lower variance route, we just have to realize this, and follow it throughout our whole play, or we can tip from being a small winner into being a small loser.

Your first 2 sentences are interesting, on the one hand you state that old dudes don't like to fold, but then you postulate that we would bet smaller with a better hand? Why would we do that? Old dude ain't folding, right?

I think in theory we probably would want to have pure value hands that could jam the flop that are more vulnerable and targeting Jx like QQ, AJ. Then we have hands like JJ, TT, AA that are probably better to bet a smaller amount with. These hands are less vulnerable and okay to get value from things like Tx, 99, etc. But our semi bluffs really benefit from folding out hands like Tx, 99, etc which have equity to call if they know our hand, but don't have equity to call hands like QQ.

Interestingly I think solvers actually prefer a small bet or check from a hand like AKs. It just has so much showdown value and equity. It prefers jamming hands like AK and AQ with no flush draw at this SPR that can easily still have 10 outs twice with overs and a gutter, and get better hands to fold too. That said, I don't think it makes a huge difference to just jam AKs here

Jam is fine and we can do this with AJ (are we 3b that though?) QQ KK so he can’t happily snap the KJ.

Actually, I think bet/gii on the flop, shove the turn if called is better than shove flop. That is how I would play TT-AA and it is easy to play whatever he does and whatever the turn is. Bet flop / shove turn more looks like an overpair or set. Shove looks more like just AK/AQ,Asxs. He isn't folding KJ, but he could weaker pairs that you want him to fold or better call the flop and fold the turn.

If an old man opens 9x at my game, its almost always JJ+. Did you have some sort of read that this is his standard raise size? Im all for 3 betting AK, but a raise to $26 is like half the 3 bet is already in there.

You put results in OP, if he had KJ here then you played it right, but the preflop gave me huge pause when reading thru it before seeing the results. I just assumed it was gonna be JJ+.

Yeah, I would flat call the ep 9x OOP.

I don't understand what you mean by value cutting ourselves here. Are you talking about my preference to check-call / check-raise flop? I'd rather check-call or check-raise this hand in a 3B pot, when V is an OMC who opened huge. It's not value cutting to check-call with our draw, and check-raising is bluffing, to rep the big over-pairs or JJ that are in our 3B range.

Old dudes don't like to fold value once they enter a pot, but will make a nitty fold to certain lines. For instance, here, I wouldn't expect V to fold very much to a small c-bet, but he should fold 88-99 and AK to a bigger turn barrel. He should also fold those hands to a flop check-raise. They'll over-fold KK when there's an ace on board, and will over-fold all big PP's when the obvious draws come in.

If, let's say, we had JJ here, and we think V has TT or an over-pair, we want to bet small, to keep him in the hand, and possibly induce a raise. We'd probably play AA the same way on most board textures, and especially this one, given V's enormous open size, indicative of JJ/TT, and the JT-high flop.

When hero jams from up front, he's making it easy for V to play perfectly. He can snap us off with his value hands and fold his AK and 88-99.

You don't want to check and have it checked back. That is why bet the flop, shove most turns is best.

We really want to see a river when we take this flop. Checking is bad because it makes it more likely we're faced with an iffy spot on the turn where we may have to fold.

We don't care about maximizing fold equity on the flop- this hand has great equity against any range.

I would be careful about doing this long term, better to play our range the same way, regardless of our actual holdings.

What are you talking about? I've been consistent here, saying I'd either check or c-bet small with everything in our range, rather than over-bet jam from up front:

Like I said, I think I'd play the flop as a check call, maybe a check raise. But I could see betting small, 1/3 to 1/2 pot, or making a delayed c-bet on the turn.

I'm playing my entire range that way, in most spots, against most V's. But with this hand, and against this V, given this pre-flop action, I'm going to lean towards taking a defensive line, especially on the turn.

Without any further info, I'd honestly consider a nitty fold preflop when an old guy opens to lol 9x in EP (our RIO vs IO suck OOP) and with no other dead money in the pot. Otherwise, I might just flat and hopefully bring in the BB (whom we likely have a better chance of making money off of).

Next time don't post results as it will bias responses.

A typical old guys EP 9x open range is TT+/AK. A typical old guys 4bet shove range is AA. But he's also never folding an overpair postflop plus this flop has setted him up a lot. So all a shove does is target chopping AK (which he might even check back on the flop). So with little FE, I probably just check/evaluate (mostly calling to bink, perhaps shoving if I sense weakness in the bet size)

Against wider guys, sure, whatever. And it looks like this guy turns out to be one of those guys. But that certainly wouldn't be my initial population read.

GcluelessoldwhiteguynoobG

rts

I think the hand was played fine. Sure, he opened up for 26 pre which is 8.5 bb's but we have a premium hand in position and he wasn't described as an OMC of nit who only raises aces and kings.