Fun Table Talk

Bet $30 to make him look and, we hope, fold. Or just check and probably lose 😉

Yeah, obviously we are betting, I'm curious what sizes people go because I was uncertain if I wanted to go small to flush out complete air or go larger to push out moderate hands at the risk of V showing up nutted.

Though checking and losing has its merits because we "save" $2 in rake and the tip :P

Why would you want V to call the turn?

Maybe he's playing the long game by trying to get him to call turn then fold river?

I mean this is more of a story than a strategy post, but these are the types of situations you find yourself in playing live poker. I probably make it like $35 targeting mostly random unpaired hands that beat us. Maybe he even folds a weak pair for that sizing?

If the river didn't change the board so dramatically I could see going bigger to try to get him to fold more pairs. The problem is when the BDFD and King come in, a river bet doesn't really align with the story we were telling. If we had something like a jack he's going to expect us to check back river a lot. I would expect him to hero call pretty wide for this reason, so I would probably just target auto folds that would beat us if we didn't bet.

Also I think you're overselling it by telling him you want him to call on the turn. Haha. When he says he will call $10 without looking just say, "OK $10."

The turn is kind of silly; just because he's not looking at his hand doesn't mean we need to pretend we didn't either.

As played, I would go for a $25 or $30 size, really whatever the smallest bet such that he doesn't call blind. Villain is going to be substantially more inelastic than he should be and we only win if he overfolds against MDF.

Because there's a 70% probability that he has a pair of 4s or worse, I am very confident I can get 4x and lower to fold river nearly 100%.

So if 70% of the time I can get an extra $10, why not?

I was reaching to raise more when he said it.

On the one hand, we can get a guaranteed call of $10 with a super wide range, or we can narrow his range with a $25 bet. That is certainly better if we hit, but we are bluffing more than not on the river.

Do we want to bluff into a larger pot against a stronger range, or take the easy $10 and bluff into a super weak range?

If I had high equity, I definitely go larger, but my hand can't take heat and a x/r blows me off. So I thought taking the easy $10 was best in game and I tend to think so now.

So my initial thought is that you're going to get a lot more fold equity going larger on the turn and then bluffing the river and barring that are better checking back with very poor actual equity.

However, I did do a sim for this and I think the solver is proving me wrong here as given the choices of $10 or check it prefers to bet out 65s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the solver wants to polarize hard getting to the river versus ATC, and so a combo like 65ss is getting bet huge. I allowed up to b225 and it's mixing b100/b150/b225 with everything worse than A5, going with the b225 size almost exclusively with the few offsuit combos with a club (mostly T9o and T8o; I gave you a standard BTN opening range).

Not immediately clear to me what to do versus actual villain but there might honestly be an argument for just overbetting egregiously huge here. If I nodelock V to stop making solver hero calls holding basically any club, it gets even more happy to just b225 all of your air (since the nodelock stops from V catching on you're now FOS with this size). A size like that seems like it might induce some unpredictable calls, but how large would you really go with e.g. A3cc here?

(ed. having thought about it more, I think the key is really just that intuition isn't built for how stupid-wide ATC really is. Versus b225 the solver calls just 9.5% of the time and yet even that frequency includes things like Jc3x and Jc5x pure. Flushes are just over 4% of range and even 70th percentile by equity is a weak second pair.)

Also fwiw, the solver is mostly checking back A-high and K-high type stuff OTF and OTT, which I guess makes sense as everything is continuing so might as well hardcore bluff things with even less equity. I didn't let it bet more than $10 for the turn since it breaks V's nodelock of x/c ATC.

Actually though, I gave it the option of betting $25 and playing against itself (oop range check river still) or betting $10 and blind called, and it is still betting $25 pure with 65ss. So I think the bigger pot with a polar combo like that still dominates, but I can forgive playing silly games with silly fish 😀

And if I lock it to start overfolding to the $25 bet, it mixes the $10 blind called bet again but seems pretty obviously for value as it is almost exclusively using the small blind-called size with higher equity hands.

I decided to size up a bit and bet $50. V tanked and then ultimately folded, flashing a K?!?

In my mind, Kx is a snap call for him. But thanks. Then I thought about it more and I think even with a really bad river, I can go a ton higher, and maybe even a range shove is +EV in theory?

Using Flopzilla, V has a 16% chance of having 2p+. If V is calling a shove 100% with 2p+, that means 84% of the time H is winning $56 and 16% of the time losing $320. So winning $47, losing $51. That's not that much loss for the worst hand in my range, and if V really is calling any 2p, that's very profitable for all my value.

From an exploitative standpoint, something like $150 prints if V calls 100% with top pair. $56 75% of the time, $150 25% of the time ($42 to $38) even with my exact hand. Of course that assumes that V never bluffs, which I don't think he does. If V had raised me I fold a lot. I think against a reasonably aggressive V, my sizing is probably torching because V can bluff a lot. Against this specific V it obviously worked better than I thought, if he's folding TP to $50, then is he folding 2p to $150? Baby flushes to a jam? And madrabbit's solver results seem to suggest the sizing is ok from a theoretical POV. It's just really hard for V to play well OTR after playing so horribly every other street.

In game, I remember thinking initially about sizing down to $30-$35 just to get him to fold his garbage, but then I thought he isn't going to bluff me enough, what size will get anything below Jx to fold? $50 felt like enough, and intuitively I thought profitable if V is folding everything below Jx (and doing the math it is at least as long as V isn't bluffing with stuff weaker than a J. In reflection, I think I could have gone larger, and I would have found a larger size without the flush coming in, but he has a flush less than 5% of the time, and I think I can profitably go larger in theory. In practice against this V, $50 got the job done, and when I saw the K, I was shocked, and his life became much more miserable in future hands. I don't know why he showed me he was folding that nitty lol.

Stunned, tbh. Thought you'd have to go 2x pot to get that player type to fold, and never would have guessed less than pot would work. They always seem to stick around when I try it with air.

I don't get either, why they flash a card when they don't have to. I really doubt they're doing some Caro-esque false advertising about their future play. Shrug.

Yeah, I agree - shocked that Kx folds for less than pot and would also not have guessed that $50 gets meaningfully more folds than $35 (who knows maybe he folds the K for $35 lol).

I mean an announced range shove against a thinking player is obviously a torch; MDF is 14.9% and versus your solver range (which might be stronger than reality if you don't x back some SDV on earlier streets) V even has >50% equity with about 25% of hands (down to middling Jx no club). Versus this player it is probably +EV if you don't announce your strategy, but obviously smaller with value is probably better.

More importantly I'm just skeptical that $320 gets literally any more folds than $150.

In terms of purely unbalanced bluffing against MDF, the notable spots seem to be:

V has worse than one pair almost 40% of the time and will probably fold it to less than b67 ($35) - this was where my mind originally went and actually is less exploitable than some of the others.

V has worse than a pair of Jacks almost 70% of the time and certainly folds it to far less than the b233 ($120) that should make the range indifferent.

V has better than top pair only 14% of the time (I think this factors in removal from H range) which would need to defend a shove ($338 actually), but now you're actually getting back closer to what he might call, or maybe he'll fold most of his 2p?

So honestly maybe going slightly over pot (65-70 ish) to target small pairs is best and getting Jx to fold would just be gravy.

There's no reason to bet bigger than you did. You're overthinking it. This player type is predictably unpredictable. You're wanting to come up with some formula where you can bet bigger to get them to fold 2 pair, which seems unwise to me. Just because they folded top pair this time for 50 doesn't mean they won't randomly call 150 with bottom pair because they had a "feeling you're bluffing." He's arriving at the river with 100% of range and there's no way to go wrong just betting enough to fold out most of his junk. Just price it so you're not losing too much in relation to the pot when he randomly calls you. Anything from around a pot-sized bet or smaller can't go wrong as there's no way he's going to hit MDF. You start making massive over bets and you play right into his hands as it actually becomes correct for him to fold almost always and you're just risking more than you need to to pick up the dead money.