Do you like my river call?

I think it is hard to fold River here, but that pre-flop was crazy call price to see the flop, the board was dry except for a straight draw..... which didn't hit any after

Interesting hand! I feel like this would probably be a fold on the river at low stakes, but I was curious about 1000NL stakes so I ran the hand through my predictive model that has seen billions of spots from all stakes.

On the river, you need to call 51bb to win a pot of 200.5bb, which means you need 25.4% equity to make it a profitable call if we ignore rake.

The model predicts that on the river call, your equity with AQ is ~29.1% which means the EV of your call is +7.3bb.

Which means that the river call was definitely profitable and would have been a big mistake to fold.

The model predicts that the top hands in villains range are:

AK: 32.4%
KK: 25.8%
AQ: 5.5%
AA: 4.6%
AJ: 3.3%
QJ: 2.8%
JT: 2.6%
QT: 1.8%
A9: 1.3%
AT: 1.2%

That means that villain should have one of those ten hands roughly 81.3% of the time.

Villain should have two pair 36.4%, and a set 31.7%.

But they will also have a high card bluff 12%, and an underpair/low pair 8% of the time.

Overall, I definitely don't think you can fold this at these stakes.

Also just a funny side note, but the model predicted that your #1 most likely hand after calling was AQ at 33.7% chance 😀

EDIT: One last thing, but I was curious what the would be the EV of the river call if we were playing much lower stakes. So I re-ran the hand through the model at 25NL, and it now predicts that hero's equity is 22.4% with AQ and the EV of calling is -8.5bb after rake! So for anyone reading this thread while playing low stakes, don't try this at home 😉

Move up where they respect your folding range!

Thanks!

Folding is a huge theoretical deviation, and I don’t think it’s justifiable, even at lower stakes.

I can understand that his bluffing range isn’t easily identifiable in absolute terms, as it consists of low-frequency 4-bet bluffs like Q8s, Q9s, J8s, T7s... and some somewhat counterintuitive bluffs like QQ-TT.

But on the other hand:

1/ AQ isn’t just a bluff-catcher, given that Villain has an easy shove with AJ+.

2/ In my opinion, hands like AK and especially AA-KK will check the flop and/or turn more often than theory suggests (which usually bets them frequently), due to their blocking properties and the low need for protection relative to the texture.

3/ I don’t think the average reg is afraid to B-B-B bluff an A-high board, especially at these stakes.

It’s worth noting that in a basic GTO sim where the opponent only uses a single 20% pot size on the flop and turn—preventing some of his hands from being diluted into improbable bet sizings—folding AQ doesn’t just lose 7bb of EV, but around 29bb.

Really interesting analysis, thanks for sharing! It can be insightful to look at GTO strategies and ranges, for sure.

I am curious though, do you believe that population is playing a close to a GTO strategy?

Even at 1000NL, I would say that population is not playing GTO strategies, as that would imply that it is impossible to win in those games long term for any player. Then at 25NL, population tends to deviate even further from GTO.

There are many spots where GTO would say it is +30bb to call, but in actuality it could be -20bb against population at 25NL, or even worse. Especially on the river, where we tend to see the biggest deviation between population ranges and GTO ranges.

This is why exploits can be so profitable, because the EV of actions can be drastically different from GTO. If there was only a small difference between GTO EV and node-locked EV, then there would be very little profit to exploiting. Just my thoughts, but thanks for sharing the analysis! 😀

I will disagree with everyone else.

First, you do not want to call preflop with offsuit broadways, even AQ. They just play horendously postflop. This is not a "great price", its the normal price in these positions after you 3bet so big

4bet ranges will be something like JJ+ (maybe TT+), AQ+, and then some bluffs that probably contain an A. Vilain's sizing makes me think that he understands the game enough to not go for stacks with less than AQ. Most players wont with less than AK. So we have an almost pure bluff catcher

What are his bluffs? Sure maybe if he has weak suited connectors he might bluff it all the way, but these are very rarely 4betted (as should be the case). So you are hoping for him to be bluffing JJ or A5?? At 10nl???

I would raise flop or tunr.

Pre-flop call is fine. This is 1K NL.

I feel the line in the hand I posted is under-bluffed (hence why I made the thread), but I do not have any data. Just subjective experience. I get some solace that GTO likes my play. But I still do not feel great about it.

I think your intuition is totally correct, the line is definitely under-bluffed.

Another poster in this thread mentioned that GTO believes AQ is a +30bb EV call.

But my predictive model estimates that your EV with the call is only +7.3bb.

So that would imply that players at 1000NL stakes are probably under-bluffing quite a bit in this line (or their value range is weaker than it should be). However, AQ is just such a strong hand here that even against players that are under-bluffing, they are still bluffing enough and value betting enough worse hands to make this call profitable for you.

Yes, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think this spot is underbluffed, with the main argument being the difficulty of finding 'natural' bluffs for a B-B-B line on an AKx board.

I don’t have the data either, only 13 occurrences of B-B-B in 4BP IP on Axx.

But 29bb is really huge—for example, even if I remove 100% of the bluffs from the river bet, AQ still has 24% equity and only loses 4bb of EV by calling, considering that in his value range, AK, KK, and AA have bet 100% on the flop and around 80%+ on the turn, which seems unrealistic to me and could further encourage a call against the AJ-AQ portion of his range.

He would really need to significantly reduce his B-B-B frequency with AJ and his potential bluffs (by more than 50%) compared to how often he bets his nut hands to even consider folding.

I think almost anyone has 0 bluffs here but I can't fault the call really.

Might be wise to exploit fold the river.

Oh i missread the stakes. Then everything i said is likely wrong.