MS $355 Tough Lady
Mohegan Sun starting with 35,000 chips. Blinds are 500/1000 BB ante 1000.
Villain is a woman I have played with a lot at Foxwoods though not since Covid. She is a very good player. Her action varies and she is very unpredictable. She raises a lot more than most women and her range can be widish. She also 3-bets a lot more than most women.
Villain has about 46,000 chips and I have about 75,000. I had been as low as 18,000 and as high as 85,000. I basically doubled up against a guy in a 3-way hand at this level when there was a UTG raise a call and I called with T8s OTB. Flop was T82 flush draw possible, UTG bet 2500 UTG+2 called and I raised to 10,000 fold call. Turn was a 3, check I shoved (UTG+2 had a little more than pot and I thought he was possibly on a draw) UTG+2 tanked and called with JTo and I held.
I have AJs and am in the CO, Villain is UTG and raises pre-flop to 3000. She had previously raised to 2x at this level. Earlier she had raised pre-flop to 2.5x. It could be a little bit about her hand so I thought she could have hands like TT/QQ/JJ here. Folds to me and I call. I rarely would raise here vs a UTG open unless its a Solver type guy. In this case I thought Villain had a big hand and might very well 4 bet which I did not want. I wanted to play AJs.
Flop is J33 with a possible flush draw. Villain checks and I bet 5,000. Villain snap shoves. The sizing is actually right on. If she raises 4x it would be 20,000 which would be almost half her stack. Even 3x would be over 33% of her stack. My immediate thought was she doesn't have QQ/KK because why would she let that check through if I had an overcard like an A? I blocked AA. If she had a J she would cbet 100% of the time. So I pushed out my call before I could really think about it.
Any thoughts are welcome.
The missing factor here is definitely the spazz factor. I always say it's at least 5% that someone does something crazy like this. Nice read on the situation.
At a macro level, this hand is interesting. It's a spot that comes up a lot in low-to-mid-stakes MTT's - we have a hand that's basically top of range and a lot of the conversation is around folding. In this particular hand, we have very few better holdings. Maybe we have A3s sometimes and 33 in full, but that's really about it. Our JJ+ probably 3-bets pre, or at least it should a decent amount of the time.
If we are thinking of folding here, it's because we believe villain isn't bluffing.
But as this spot illustrates, villains - even at these stakes - do bluff. They do overvalue hands. They do spaz out. And unless you've got a really good read that this a nitty old man coffee type, it's ok to just pay off. Yeah, it sucks when villain shows you QQ and we lose, but we're supposed to lose here when that happens.
This isn't to say that the instinct to overfold isn't a valid one, especially in tournaments like these where the population will generally under-bluff. But for me personally, I'm just always going to pay off in spots like these without really strong reads. The more I've taken that approach, the less bad I feel when I lose, because I understand that a lot of the time I'm just going to.
On a side not, if a villain thinks that you're going to fold the top of your range here to a jam and you do, that's a pretty massive exploit to use on a player going forward.
would you have been more likely to fold, less likely to fold, or equally likely to fold if you'd bet 2k on the flop instead of 5k?
or if in total you' only had say 4bb invested (2bb pre and 2bb on the flop) instead the 8bb as played?
I missed this post...
If I had bet 2,000 then her jam would have felt like it was a flush draw or a bluff (could be like TT or AK/AQ which I block a little). I probably would have tanked. I would need her to be bluffing more than 33% of the time... Like 40%. When I think these things through I usually fold. But here I think her jam would be very polarized so in the end I think I still call. Also my 2bb bet would be like a blocking bet (a very small value bet) so I could have anything including air or a small PP. So I think she could c/r all in with PP's like TT/99/88 as well as overpairs, and flush draws.
If she had opened to 2bb preflop and then I had bet 2bb on the flop and she c/r jammed I would have just folded I think because there just wouldn't have been enough in the pot to make it worth it. Also my bet sizing wouldn't have been a blocking bet size but a standard flop value sizing.
