Whale Re-Backraises after Double Flatting

Dude, you have 44, you're facing an all-in or fold decision, and you have no idea if the BB is sitting on a monster.

Although you gave some pretty in-depth analysis, I'll counter with I'm playing 1/2/5 in an unraked home game run by idiots I've been friends with for years

You know the whale better then us. If it wasn't a home game I would for sure fold. Whales can catch good hands from time to time. Say you do jam and he does have Ax anything your still flipping and if he has a TT-KK your super dead EV- even vs a whale.

This feels like a pretty classic case of big mistakes chasing small mistakes.

You made a small ranging error by making a transparent limp, are trying to compensate for that weak range by repping strong, and then defending that BS range on the presumption that villain knows that we have nothing.

The transparent limp is arguably fine ASSUMING A) villains aren't going to exploit it, and B) when they do happen to exploit it, you just say nh and move on knowing that they're not exploiting it enough to have to compensate for it (understanding that it's too late to do anything about it because you can't go back to an earlier branch and make your range not BS).

To answer your question, I do not agree that 90% of the whale's range is AK. I mean, we don't have much to go on and you probably know their game better than we do, but at first blush AK does not even seem like the most likely holding.

So limping seems like a small range mistake (if not necessarily a mistake in a vacuum), backraising feels like a pretty big mistake, and flatting would be an enormous mistake.

lol Well.. I very rarely wanna talk about a hand after, but whenever I do its usually because it contains absurdities with it that excite me, however after reading the responses I think asking people about 3 decisions I made that are super player pool dependent when the people themselves aren't in the player pool is probably pointless. (If someone felt the need to explain to be the whale would be ahead if he happened to have TT there probably isn't much more to discuss 😀 )

Still, I posted it and I did get one interesting thing said by RaisedAnnounced that I'd like to shift gears to. You claim AK does not seem to be the most likely holding. Let's throw out the actual hand and just pretend it happened in a poker room with players we've never met and all I can say about the guy is hes a standard rec.

What range would you construct for the UTG after he flats the straddler, flats the raise to $15 from the BB and then backraises to $225 on the HJ who himself backraised? I know the situation is utterly ridiculous and if your answer is it's too insane to bizzare to make reliable one that is OK, but since you said AK is not the most likely I imagine you have some thoughts on it.

(My holding and how to react is irrelevant for this particular question as 44 must be a snap fold without intimate knowledge of the player, just interested in yours or anyone else's perceived range for UTG player.)

"What range would you construct for the UTG after he flats the straddler, flats the raise to $15 from the BB and then backraises to $225 on the HJ who himself backraised?"

The hands that make the most sense to me would make up the band of hands outside of the top 8% of hands that are a clear value raise first in but are within the top 20% of hands that might look very attractive once a lot of dead money starts going in from someone they think is FOS. I'm talking AJo, KQo, 99-, JTs, A8s type hands.

I just don't see someone flatting the 3rd nuts not once but twice "because it's a drawing hand", only to become an aggro semi-bluffer with it the third time around as a terribly plausible framework to see this hand through, much less THE most compelling explanation at the expense of all others.

Of the 8-20% type hands, 22-99 seem especially plausible because I feel like pocket pairs activate a sort of Martingale fallacy in a lot of players since they're slight favorites to a lot of hands that they might get hyper focused on, but don't appreciate how easily those micro gains get wiped out by the hands that have them crushed. [Pause to look around the room...👀]

"I know the situation is utterly ridiculous and if your answer is it's too insane to bizzare to make reliable one that is OK, but since you said AK is not the most likely I imagine you have some thoughts on it."

It's not that the scenario is so far afield from theory that there's no point in hand reading. It's that it's a situation where I would ascribe a small probability to a wide range of hands, rather than a very high probability to any one hand.

Of course if he's shown down AK in limped pots or he's l/rr'ed 99-JJ type hands before, anything like that would be important reads here.

But in the absence of that, just saying he has AK 90% of the time but you'd eat your hat if they showed up with TT just doesn't sound like hand reading to me. It sounds like motivated logic.

^^ I think raiseannounced is secretly Phil Ivey having fun schooling noobs his logic is always too on point. Def the player I would be avoiding big pots against. Just saying GOATed

RaisedAnnounced
-"The hands that make the most sense to me would make up the band of hands outside of the top 8% of hands that are a clear value raise first in but are within the top 20% of hands that might look very attractive once a lot of dead money starts going in from someone they think is FOS. I'm talking AJo, KQo, 99-, JTs, A8s type hands.

I just don't see someone flatting the 3rd nuts not once but twice "because it's a drawing hand", only to become an aggro semi-bluffer with it the third time around as a terribly plausible framework to see this hand through, much less THE most compelling explanation at the expense of all others."
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OK I agree with your logic that these exact hands would look very attractive if they believe the Hero is FOS, I guess the disagreement I have is a baseline whale will not perceive the back-raise as FOS. I experimented with this later position backraises in 1/2 and some home games with AA, KK and AxS bluffs for some time and I concluded non-sensical backraises get way more respect from recs than they should. I use it now from time to time with a 100% bluffing range.

If we must get back to this particular hand though so bet it 😀 I think i misled you into thinking I believe the whale in this spot thinks I'm FOS. What I'm saying is he sees most of the player pool as 'nits' who only show up with Aces or Kings in my spot. He thinks my range for doing this is wider than the other players but that I have hands like AT/AJ+. There is no understanding that I only have near the top of my range and bluffs. There is of course always some chance he does think I'm full of it, but it won't be because I backraised from the cutoff, it will because because I touched my left elbow while licking my lips on a Tuesday. When constructing his range, the random perceptions are why I do give him those mid low pairs some of the time, but I am just not sure how high of a % of the time they are there.

I think the way a standard fish looks at big hands (TT+, AK) is that these are holdings they are entitled to win a lot of money with. However TT+ are problematic because

"whenever I bet everyone calls calls and now there we are 7 away and overcards always come out"

or in the case of AK.. "It looks good but never wins, I need to either hit an Ace or King to win"

The entire point of limping these 'big' hands is to limp-reraise. They are never in a million years going to get the magical limp-reaise spot they were looking for but flat hoping for a backraise, something they at least subconsciously know hardly ever happens. He had to have backraised not as a plan, but because he changed his mind about the hand.

That leaves him with mid pairs, random trash, and AK for hands that might have flatted the initial raise only. Of these, AK being the only hand that qualifies as a sort of Schrodinger's hand a hand that is both just a draw, but also simultaneously amazing and happy to get it all in PF against perceived "non-nit"
He (in his mind) also has the valid option of simply flatting my backraise with 77-99ish hands. Yes i know putting 20% of your stack in OOP to a 4 bet shouldn't be a valid option, but to him it is because he does it all the time.

---- However.... on the other ON THE OTHER HAND I realize as i write all this it may be only applicable to this particular villain (and a few others) that I have known and been friends with for 5 years. I think i may have tendency to assume his thinking translates at least somewhat to random whaleish villians who may only sterotypically remind me of him.
It's also possible people simply start to play differently in home games with their friends.

I appreciate your insight, because the more I think about it, I think your range is a better range for people in a card room. I make way less "hero deviations" in poker rooms than I do in my home games, yet I am still wrong at a higher frequency in card rooms. So I have to be doing something wrong in my range construction for unknowns.

ok, so was op a rhetorical question or some elaborate riddle that I’m doomed to get wrong unless I happen to know your homey’s zodiac sign?