[MICRO] JJ getting coolered 2x or should I be getting away from either/both of these?

First hand I don't know if you need to jam there. Maybe could get away.

Second one, you're probably getting stacked here regardless.

Yeah, I'm just really confused about that first spot, and the more I look at it the more confused I get about how to handle situations like that.

If I call the flop bet, there's 104BB in the pot and I've only got 40 behind, so I'm basically committed anyway. If I'm not going to put the rest in, I should fold. Or that's my thinking anyway. Open to other ideas for sure.

But if I'm going to fold to a half pot sized donk bet on that flop, then why I am even playing the hand? That's a definitely better-than-average flop for me. If I'm not willing to put the chips in there, I'm basically treating it like 55 on a set draw, and stacks aren't anywhere near big enough to be getting the implied odds for that, so should I just fold to the preflop 4-bet?

I don't have a very big sample size, but in my PokerTracker DB for this game, I've got 4-bets from other people with AA-QQ, AK, AQ, AJ, A4s, A2s, KQo, and KJo, so a pretty wide range (this is regardless of whether I'm in the hand or not). They've had the overpair only about 30% of the time.

But even with what looks like a pretty good range of hands, given that most of the hands either have me smashed or I'm a flip or a little better, I'm still looking at being -EV on average all-in. Even if everything but the big pocket cards folds to my all-in, which helps a little, I'm still negative EV.

If I flat-call the 4-bet and basically look for a no-A, no-K flop, that's actually around 2x as bad, depending on how often the opponents that miss fold.

There's nowhere near enough money behind to flat call the 4-bet on a set draw.

Makes me think in a randomized online pool where I'm not going to benefit from looser future action because I stacked off with JJ, the actual play is somewhere between playing it more like 88 - just calling preflop, hoping for a set or maybe an extra-fortunate situation where it's more playable in a smaller pot, or 3-betting it for fold equity but planning to fold it to a 4-bet.

That's really more how I used to play it, but this GTO stuff has been going to my head. FWIW, GTOWizard is 50/50 between calling and 3-betting preflop. But once I put in the 3-bet, it's going all the way just like I did basically 100% of the time, putting villain on a range a little wider, but not terribly different than what I've seen. Which is weird, because when I look at all the numbers, it looks like I'm negative EV no matter how I slice it. I guess the fact that it's including TT, 99, etc, which I'm crushing really skews the numbers big-time, but I don't think in real life micros those are going to show up 4-betting very often. So I guess maybe it's those few pocket pairs that JJ is beating not getting 4-bet that really changes the game.

I don't know though, I'm really pretty confused. Which I guess has always been the case about this hand, I've just never taken the time to be confused in this much detail before.

That isn’t good thinking. There is no such thing as pot committed in a cash game. There is only “Is calling a +EV decision”. The confusion comes because if you have already bet a significant fraction of your stack, your opponent often cannot bet sufficiently large to deny you proper pot odds for a proper call. That isn’t the same thing as pot committed though. In some spots your equity might well be too low to call even with the favorable pot odds.

If your opponent jams the turn after you call the flop bet you must call 40 to potentially win 144. This means you need 21.7% equity to make a call profitable. In this case, if we give villain a range of any AK, QQ+ you have about 37.7% equity so it actually would be a call on a turn shove. If villain only takes this line with QQ+, AKs (hearts or spades) our equity drops to just over 10% and we should fold.

The concept of pot committed applies to tournaments because you cannot simply reload your stack after a loss. The hands in a tournament, unlike those in a cash game, are not independent of each other. Instead, the chips you lose this hand will affect your expected dollar value for the tourney as a whole. It usually is better just to shove rather than leaving yourself with a crippled stack and hope to get lucky, even in spots where the chip +EV play is to fold. Cash games are totally different. All that matters is this hand and whether this decision is +EV. Losing a significant fraction of your stack doesnÂ’t really hurt your future EV since you can just reload after a loss. (Generally true, but there could be cases such as when you are very deep stacked, and a whale also is, where reloading to 100 BB might cost you some EV on future hands)

OK, yeah, that's a good point. I guess the key factor is that a call on the flop does force them to fire that second barrel which does I suppose potentially tighten their range and make a fold there a better play, depending on the opposition.

But that "depending on the opposition" is exactly the issue, because in the real (online) world, how do we manage that, when we typically don't have enough player history to know which one of those ranges applies? I think live I always just found it easier to get a sense of people's styles, plus sometimes picking up some tells, and it meant at least some of the time I wasn't so lost in these spots. But online kinda feels like a crapshoot right now. I want to figure it out, but it's tough. I like playing online, but I seem to have a really hard time with all of this without seeing the person sitting across the table. But I want to figure it out. Not playing fast-fold would probably be a good first step.