Bottom Boat, go for max value? Or is that value owning ourselves?

I’m just calling. I don’t see anything that you beat calling a raise here. I think you got max value.

He check raised a lone ace? And bet into a flush? Play is consistent with AJ. I'd fold before I raised.

Fold pre

I just call the river. I can't imagine he calls w/ worse, even w/ only $800 behind. Hand is played fine otherwise, I think.

Don't raise the river, you are very often behind and when you're not, most of the hands you beat won't call a raise.

Preflop is marginal. Flop sizing is perhaps the most interesting question, I prefer larger but interested in other opinions

Pretty easy fold pre, might call if opponent is an absolute whale and will stack off infinite bbs with top pair. Otherwise you’re just burning money trying to set mine long term not to mention the occasional set over set which will be a disaster.

As for the hand, just call

Just read the spoilers: you showed first and he mucked or he just mucked without you showing?

I quit playing 22 33 44, maybe I just run bad, but I get killed in big pots with those little sets.

Like 55 or 66 isn't really better here. I would want to play 77, but even that might be bad/borderline.

There are times where it's still kind of fine to go for pure set value, but esp. at low stakes a huge leak people have is punt calling any pair and almost never making 10x+ when they hit. And they never see/realize how bad it is.

Here it's esp. bad because it's 5/10 and UTG limped and UTG+1 raised 5x. Then you have BTN,SB,BB who can all 3bet, and are way more likely to do so if they have any idea that you are often calling just to see a flop.
Also if you don't hit a set it's very hard for you to realize your equity even if it's HU.

At 1-2 where UTG is much less likely to limp/3bet and everyone behind is much less likely to 3bet, it's closer.

Also it's a pretty big mistake to not know what villain x/r flop with and bet turn+river.

Maybe I'm leveling myself but I put V on JJ/AJ and it's a trappy play OTR to make it look like V is scared of the flush card and make H shove for him. I'll only call.

EDIT:

Grunch:

PRE - WTF is V doing raising 5x at 5/10? Is that normal for this game?

If not, I might just fold pre, if we think it's a sizing tell. I guess it's okay to flat 22 from the CO, to set-mine, but I'm already not loving it.

FLOP - Well, that doesn't suck, as far as boards go.

Think we can size up here, maybe even full pot, because we'll have a $hlt-ton of flush draws. V is very unlikely to fold an AX, and unlikely to call with very many PP's, so we're mostly targeting AX.

When we bet 1/3 pot here, I'd expect V to raise a fair bit, for more than pot, so this is starting to get dicey, when V can have AA/JJ.

TURN - Once we bet-call flop, I don't know what to do facing a 1/2 pot size bet. I don't know if he takes this line with all his AX or flush draws. I guess just flat call, and pray we're good on the river.

RIVER - I mean...you could have AJ, or A2, or even JJ when you bet-call the flop x/r. Maybe occasionally you call turn with 54ss, but I doubt it. So, 22 is the fourth best hand you'll ever have here.

Definitely never folding. Just not sure what worse will call if we raise. Like, does KJss even bet the turn or river? This sort of feels like it's never not a bigger boat, but maybe occasionally he does this with AK/AQ.

I'm not giving him 54ss either, by the way. But he could have all the other combos that beat us, the way this was played, which is why I guess just call.

Going back to pre, that 5x open from UTG sort of screams JJ, so it won't surprise me if that's what he had here.

Just read the spoiler, and somewhat surprised V turbo-mucked. I assume he had air or KK/QQ turned into an ill-advised yet sort of understandable bluff.

Going back to the flop, we'll never have AA/JJ when we flat in the CO pre, and probably not AJs very often. If V is capable and thinking, he'll know he has all the AA/JJ/AJ in his range, and can rep all those hands when he check-raises, which he'll do, a lot, when we bet 1/3 pot on a two-tone / two-Broadway board.

If we bet pot, there's almost zero chance he x/r's. We retain the betting lead, and can barrel off on turn and river. If V did this with KK/QQ, he might still call turn, since our AX combos get cut in half, and our range becomes more weighted towards flush draws. He might even raise turn.

who is in the hand sb or btn??

Go way bigger OTF, you unblock Vs value and its three ways with FD. Raise Turn, river card kills your action from AX.

Can’t see folding or raising on river.

I hate responding to old threads that randomly get bumped but how is everyone saying this river is just a call?

Are people missing that Villain bet less than 1/3 pot on a flush completing river? Does a better hand than 22 ever play that way?

Villain bet $400 on the board-pairing turn (FH doesn't bet this big IMO) and then $500 on the flush-completing river, leaving himself $800 behind.

He had $1300 in his stack with $1600 in the pot and he didn't jam. 22 is the nuts here.

As far as "he won't bet/call a worse hand" goes... Villain will be calling $800 to win a final pot of $4200. I don't know if I believe that the average Villain is folding trips or a flush for this price. Either way, I'm going to make him make that fold.

I'm assuming OP insta-showed because they wouldn't be left wondering if they left value on the table if villain mucked without a showdown. (Which is the correct thing to do when you nit-call the river with a boat, btw).

I think it's a combination of

1) The fact that villain iso'ed in EP and made a pot-sized x/raise as the preflop raiser in a 3-way pot and followed through on every street on a board where they have lots of boats. (Honestly, OP's probably second-guessing themself because they're half surprised they scooped the pot lmao.)

2) If OP's not ahead, this bet seems to clearly signal they're either bluffing or blocking having to play for stacks, and there but by the grace of some strategic amnesia would they make such a bet to save half their stack only to then call off the second half of their stack with the 5th- nuts.

I think you do have to at least TRY to make him make that mistake for 80bbs though. I think everyone kind of talks themselves into this same sort of logic with blocking bets that they're like too weak to raise for value, and end up making life WAY to easy for people who go for it.

I've seen it in LLSNL thread after thread where villain's blocking bet works way better than it should even against the supposed tight-aggressive population here.

I have opinions too, and I disagree with the "correct thing to do" a lot.

Part of the value of calling the river is that V shows you wtf he took this line with. This could be a huge amount of information, sure it might be AxKs or KsQs or whatever that doesn't mean much but those aren't the only options.

We get so little information live, just rolling over the winner on the river is as bad as preflop.

If I'm in a home/private game that's one thing, but at a casino be prepared for me to tell you it's your turn to show first if I've got the nuts.

Maybe old threads should be allowed to RIP?

Nit rolling a backpack reg is whatever. Clearly you're both there to maximize EV and written rules overrule unwritten rules so they can pound sand.

I personally don't think it's worth embarrassing a whale for a lot of reasons, but a lot of those things come down to soft values that might matter differently to different people (what image you're going for, poker networking, etc).

I will say the thing about live is how much god damn information loss there is at every level. Very very few people (pros or otherwise) see every showdown, and fast showing your hand in as many places as sensible makes a lot more info slip between the attentional cracks. Even if a reg happened to be paying attention for the 2 seconds that your hand was face up, they probably didn't catch the action and won't necessarily know what to do with the information so long as no one rehashes the action.

Pissing off a whale by having them think they've won the hand only to somehow, impossibly showing up with a boat is a great way to have the hand be top-of-mind for the whole table for time immemorial.

Not that I'm arguing that the actual value outweighs the value of not showing down your hand the 50% of the time that it's no good. Just that people in general overvalue hard informational advantage at a live table and undervalue attentional advantages.

May I ask for some clarification? Are you suggesting hero should raise river?

I understand hero has a boat, and if V was bluffing with a flush draw, his flush got there. But hero has bottom boat, the nut flush card is on board, V x/r'd the flop and barreled turn, and the flush didn't come in until the river. V would have to be pretty aggro to be playing a flush draw this way.

Even though he has a boat, it seems like hero is pretty close to the bottom of his range, relatively speaking. V could have all the better boats, and it's unlikely V is betting worse for value. Hard to think he'd bet trips, and might not bet a flush. Even if he's betting trips or a flush - I can't imagine he'd call a raise.

When V is so polar, does it make sense to raise linear (and thin), when there's so little left behind? Or is that the point - there's so little left behind?

IMO one of the biggest excuses/reasons to shove river is that if V shoved river we'd call.
This doesn't mean we have to, because he "should" be polarized and the better hands call and the worse hands fold. But that doesn't mean he is polarized.

The next excuse/reason is that depending on reads I might be folding some AJs preflop (and there's only A♣J♣ possible anyway) due to the size, and we really aren't supposed to have A3s/A2s (and 33 has to fold before river), so we have maybe 4 better combos. and have to call a bunch worse hands.

I didn't talk about river much before because I didn't think it was that significant (it's not obvious to me if we get +4-8bb out of it in the long run vs. some blocker bets that call, or -8bb+ when he's polarized but we don't have to show), but RA is suggesting it's part of a larger symptom of not raising blocker bets correctly ... and that might be true.

I guess my view of this is that I'd rather raise as a bluff to fold out the weaker parts of V's blocking range than raise with thin value if we think we can only get called by better.

I take it that's what RA was referring to when he said, "but by the grace of some strategic amnesia would they make such a bet to save half their stack only to then call off the second half of their stack with the 5th nuts." How does V call a jam with worse?

I suppose "polar" is a relative term here, in that V could be block betting with some hands that have decent showdown value, like flushes and trips. But I was thinking he could just be sizing down with his better boats, hoping to get called by worse, because his line looks so strong, and hero can't have very many really strong hands in range.

To RA's point, maybe V levels himself into calling off the rest with his trips or flushes, when a raise would be super-polar, as faulty as the logic seems. Or maybe the correct answer here is to just always jam with boats, even bottom boat, and not worry about V block betting with a better boat, or folding trips / flushes.

Well, if we're raising, it's because villain isn't very polar. I think regs' biggest weaknesses in these games are no polarizing enough, and I think you'll see even more of that with a blocking bet with a strong relative strength hand like trips or a flush.

It's a tough spot. Not necessarily a "close" spot EV-wise, but one where the EV is extremely sensitive to factors that are hard to divine and have a huge margin of error.

That's why my post is so wishy-washy. You happened to be catching me in my minimax era, so I hate to use a strategic approach that's pretty "risky" in terms of how much EV we miss when we're wrong, and minimizes risk on our opponent who can successfully get away with saving the second half of his stack by blocking us.

Actually counting up the combos, though, it's hard to justify unless we think there's any chance villain is x/PSRing bare top-pair OTF 3-way, and it's usually safe to assume no to that.

Understand I'm looking at this through the lens of someone who plays low stakes cash - 1/3 and sometimes 2/5. I don't see many opponents de-polarizing with relatively thin value here, check-raising the flop and barreling the turn and river with flush draws or trips.

I have no idea if this is "normal" at 5/10. If we think V is taking this line with flushes and trips, and better boats, but can also have some bluffs, and we don't mind taking a high variance line ourselves, I guess I understand why we'd raise bottom boat.

At 1/3, this line from V isn't "polar" in the sense that 99% of the population is nutted 100% of the time, and 1% is just punting 20% of the time.

At 2/5, I see some opponents who are capable of finding thin value bets with worse, but few of those are likely to have any bluffs, and won't bet-call with worse if we raise.

When I say V is "polar" here, all I mean is that the natural bluffs are hard to find - basically just KK/QQ with 1 spade. Maybe a 5/10 reg is able to make that play. Most 1/3 and 2/5 regs aren't.