WWYD - late tournament double barrel?

Mm, I dunno about mandatory but it's fine, blocking the best aces and having the out to the gutshot. But the fact that you bet 2/3 pot on the flop should really have tightened the continue range, so I'm not sure you should fire again unless you're prepared to 3-barrel it off.

I tend to prefer betting small and then sizing up turn on flops like these. Keep enough of the range in to force out on later streets.

That said, I did a little solver work, and:

-It tends to prefer the larger to smaller c-bet with KJo, though it mixes sizes. Large is most often with a spade or heart in hand, presumably to block backdoor flush continues.
-KJo largely prefers a turn check after going large on the flop, although there are some bets-- KdJc is actually the most frequent bet (presumably unblocking the backdoor flushes), mixing sizes.
-If you bet small on the flop, there are still a lot of turn checks, but the turn bet size is always large when you do bet.

+1 for betting small otf. I would bet 18k with majority of range. As played I probably check turn cuz ranges are now narrowed and I want to control the pot/preserve stack utility in this stage of the event.

I check back turn here. Because flop bet is large I doubt we are called by anything worse than Ax. Gutters wouldn't call and we block some. There are no flush draws. PP's often fold flop. We didn't improve.

I give up unless the river is a T.

If the river is a K it is a tough spot vs a large bet and a crying call vs a small bet.

I actually don't mind the flop bet size because the flop massively favors our range.

This is a great double barrel spot. We had big RA on the flop, which fully justified our 2/3 sizing. When a blank turns, we should be barreling often, and for a large size. This is about as blank as it gets, since no BDFD developed, and only a 54s picked up equity (a 7 would have been slightly better).

Yes, we strengthened our opponents range on the flop, but IME most players are sticky for any bet size when they flop a pair, so Villain still has a lot of Qx (which we have extra outs against if called) that we can put pressure on.

BTW, it would be good to know who the effective stack is. We are definitely in some ICM land, and if we are the big stack and covering, this makes it better to double, if we are the effective stack and Villain has heaps...less good.

Gave this to PIO. No ICM. Flop is almost a pure bet with all KJo and for this sizing (I gave it 1/3 and 2/3).

On the turn, we bet KJo about 55% of the time. It likes our exact combo with Kd to bet more often, I guess since we unblock the back door floats that will call a flop bet and fold on the turn.

Villain's response is also interesting. They 'never' raise, so we still realize our equity. This sizing is putting pressure on all the Qx, and most of the Ax is indifferent. This is where ICM will come into play; if Villain is covered, they will be folding even more often with their bad Ax.

I was wrong that this is a 'great' card to barrel. The best cards to barrel are all the broadway cards. PIO didn't seem to think that a blank was especially good for us. I think this is because we lost our range advantage with the big bet/call.

One more note; we have just 47.5% equity on this turn, but we have 61.2% pot share. This just shows what having the uncapped stronger range, nut advantage and position can do for you.

We cover, but not by a huge amount. We probably had like 550K-ish if I remember correctly.

I thought this hand was interesting on a number of levels when you ran it through GTOWizard AI, which is why I wanted to bring it up here.

On the flop, if you give GTO Wizard the option it's going to choose 67% as its default size. Which makes sense as with the AQx/AKx boards we have a significant nut advantage and want to push that. It is important to note that we are checking a fair amount with the hands that make sense to check, which is stuff like our worst Ax, KK, JJ-88, etc.

However, what's interesting is that when we give GTOWizard multiple options, it starts splitting between the 2/3 and full pot size, doesn't like the small bet at all.

My instinct here was to go 1/4 pot initially, which I've kind of always done as a default, but I realize that we leave money on the table when we do because it gets harder to get stacks in when we have the strongest part of our range here. We also open ourselves to get raised a lot more - when we go 1/4 with something like, say, JJ, we get raised a lot by villain's 3x which means we then have to fold.

The other good observation was that our specific combo does more checking, which makes sense because we have the Kd specifically we block more auto-folds, but our hand pretty much mixes for 2/3 pot which is fine. Ultimately on the flop, I think it's probably fine to either check this or bet 2/3 pot or even pot sometimes depending on game dynamics.

When we get to the turn using the 2/3 sizing, GTOWizard wants us to bet our combo pure and actually goes with a big non-geometric size. Which I was surprised by, because I thought the nature of the board and our SPR would allow us to go 2e. (which is like 70%) In practice, if you give the solver the option for both sizes it'll split between the two pretty evenly, so it's probably not a big error either way.

In either event, the big size and our combo makes sense, because now we have a combo that unblocks a lot of the backdoor hands that have to fold, we also unblock a lot of the Qx that has to fold here as well. (it is interesting that KQ actually folds pure here)

So in all, I think the big takeaways from this hand for me are that:

1. Sizing big in these spots pre-flop is important.
2. Combos matter when we decide to double barrel, and blocking as few of the auto folds as possible is paramount.
3. The turn double barrel needs to polarize from a sizing perspective.

JG, this all fits in with my finding as PIO as well, above. I was surprised that GTO went bigger than 2e on the turn. This is rarely correct in my experience, other than a shove. So much so that I didn't even give it a bigger size than 2e on the turn. I suspect if I rerun it, giving it the bigger size, the EV gain is going to be microscopic. I did this; our equity went from 55.68/68 to....55.69/68. Or 10 chips. This is late in a tournament, and the extra size is still worth only 10 chips. Of course that assumes we can balance the two ranges correctly.

As a practical matter, just never use >2e, except as a shove.

About that Kd blocker...it doesn't really matter too much here, as Villain is 'always' calling KJ, KT with a diamond, and folding the other Kx. The one spot where Villain is supposed to use the Kd as the swing card is K3dd, ie a flopped pair. Maybe some super GTO players are finding this, but if they are I'd rather not be in the game with them 😀. From experience, you can find other spots where having the unblocker to their BDFDs is more important, but this just isn't one of them.

I think betting so big on the flop is a mistake. You are looking at most likely an A. The question you have to ask yourself is if this player will fold Ax to a second large barrel? I think you might get a fold from A9 and below some % of the time. But I am usually giving up in this spot. I would bet the turn if you pick up a flush draw, but I think you just have to give up and hope to spike a T on the river.

GTOWizard does some stuff where it wants to go bigger than 2e on these types of runouts, which generally forces more middle pair folds (basically you start almost completely folding out Qx) but really doesn't serve a lot of purposes otherwise. It's not like villain check-raises less when you go pot vs. 70%, in fact, they jam a little more. So in practice, I don't think there's much real difference between 2e and pot in these scenarios.

I think the idea behind using your KdJx as bluffs as opposed to other hands is that it's more about unblocking auto-folds, as a lot of the backdoor stuff combos in villain's range have to fold. There's a reason why the equity of barreling the KdJx combos is significantly higher than other KxJx combos. They're also some of our worst hands when we think about our range in totality.

The problem with range betting this flop is two-fold. First, it absolutely sucks when you bet something like JJ (which has some showdown value) and end up getting check-raised and have to fold. And two, it makes it trickier when we have top of range and want to get money in, and we have a lot of hands that are fine doing just that.

If our opponent is folding A9 to a turn bet in this spot, they are making a huge error as all of their Ax continues pure. Our bluffs in this line are targeting Qx and worse.

The big thing to remember here is that we have a huge range advantage. We have all of the sets, AQ in full, AK in full. Our thick value wants to get money in. And because of that, we can actually bet the majority of our range for this big sizing anyway, so I wouldn't want to sacrifice the top-of-range EV for the sake of getting some folds when we have 99.

I do think the big exploit I would make against villains who are going to under check-raise (which is a likely scenario live) is to just take more of my range into a large flop bet range. Which would then preclude me from doing as much double barreling which would then might push hands like KJo/KTo into mostly check mode on turn, as villain will potentially possess stronger hands overall and we probably won't bet as often.

I try to generally stay away from multiple sizings on boards like these because it's really hard to get frequencies correct and we tend to lose value when we go with the small sizing. Getting the 1 big bet with Ax vs. must continues like Qx and middle pairs seems more profitable than small bet/small bet when a lot of those hands give up turn anyway.