Trying to Keep Opponent in the Pot with top set

Putting aside this hand for one second, let me give you some general advice. If you are trying to play for a living, I hope you are not *currently* out of work and trying to play. You need to spend time establishing yourself as a winner at the level you want to play for a living at while you aren’t already withdrawing from your bankroll.

Now back to this hand. I don’t mean to be too harsh, but if your game was at a level where you were ready to play professionally you would never have posted this.

I say that for 2 reasons. Firstly, if you say you are pleasantly surprised that the CO bet the flop for you, you should have been betting yourself. And missing a bet with the nuts is usually pretty bad. And secondly, every professional-level player knows that sometimes your opponents just don’t have enough of a hand to call you when you are showing strength, which you clearly are with this check-raise.

Sometimes you get a nutty hand and everyone folds to your bet. That's poker.

In this case CO probably thought he could take it down after seeing a couple of checks with his Ah7h or whatever else he had that missed the flop entirely.

By going for the c/r rather than a c-bet you managed to win that extra bet from him if that was the case.

So a better way of viewing this particular hand might be to be grateful for winning that additional 7bb rather than lamenting the fact that you didn't win more - which was probably never going to happen anyway.

Having said that I'm not sure if the c/r is the best way to go since it looks so strong. And if you're going to c/r I hate the min c/r

The good new is that you flopped top set. The bad news is that it is hard for someone to have anything that can call much when you have top set. I think you just have to call and hope the villain mistakes it for you have two overs or a FD and hope he thinks you miss on the turn to try to push you out.

Preflop: If your hand has value and opponents are likely to call (and it seems like BB is), then you might as well raise more than usual. If the game is as bad as you say it is you may want to consider making your "standard" opening 16 or even 20.

Flop: Bet 30ish. Your hand is great, but the board is hyper coordinated and the loose BB will likely call you light. As played, after the bet from CO I would raise more. If he has a hand like a spade or flush draw he's correct to call after a min raise. A reraise of about 90 total will give him a worse price to draw and get more value out of him the times he has a good 2nd place made hand like AJ, bottom 2, etc.

Just my opinion.

"Hey do you want to put in another 50 and check it down?"

Yeah, I've had similar thoughts. I settled on 12 because I used to only have the bankroll to buy in shortstacked for 100, and then it seemed silly to go higher. Now that I've built it enough to go larger, maybe just going 12 if there's a strong player in the blinds and 20 otherwise is the way. This is another thing I'd love to have data on.

My issue (and I'm not saying this isn't still a better line, just expressing my doubt) is that combination wise, it seems likely for both to have nothing. Pulling two ranges out of my hat and putting them into Flopzilla, man people brick this board all the time (results for CO, BB). So even if BB calls wide, they still are quite likely to fold. But I do like Cbetting in general just because, as I said, these poeple are infatuated with slowplaying sets.

Edit: so say I choose this line and get two calls. Do you also Cbet the Turn, or do we now slopwplay? Suppose the Turn is a 10♣ or a 10♠ and BB checks to us in both cases; how would you proceed in either case? I assume you keep betting either way?

I love this as an idea; no one does this in the casino though, so I wouldn't have the guts to do it. There is another, unofficial place where I sometimes play where this is common; I think if I had gotten the same hand there, this would have been the 200 IQ play.

What size would you use (and why)?

Well, no, that doesn't follow. If there's a 40% chance that I get a bet if I check, and a 30% chance that I get a call if I bet, then I'm pleasantly surprised if I get the bet, but it would have still been a mistake to lead. (Not saying that leading is wrong here, just that this implication isn't valid.) And ofc another reason to check is that it if goes check-check-check there could be an Ace on the turn, and suddenly people will pay me off.

I would think the opposite actually.

a) He's experienced since he's aware of online poker
b) Heads-up tend to be a format with players are very good with fundamentals because it forces you to play most hands
c) That he's able to multi-task means he's somehow comfortable at live poker (again experience)

Could just mean he's card dead.

YOUR logic is invalid here because of how it looks when you check-raise. If you get a call 30% of the time when you bet, you also have to figure how likely it is that you continue to get action on the turn when you bet again. If you get action 50% of the time on the turn when you go bet/bet, that is worth a lot more than when you induce one bet and then your opponent shuts down because it looks very strong to check-raise.

Don’t forget, turn and river bets are almost always bigger than flop bets. Your main goal in this hand shouldn’t be tricking your opponents into losing one flop bet—it should be to set yourself up to win bigger bets later in the hand. Very often the way you do that starts with a flop bet.

I agree with this; I was not saying that the figures (which I just made up anyway) imply that check-raising is the play. I was only pointing out that you can't go from "there'll be a bet less than half the time if you check" to "leading is the better play". A bet being unlikely (which I think it definitely is) isn't enough to settle the question.

To get back to the hand, my main issue with betting is still what I posted earlier about flop connectivity. Most of the time both opponents have nothing, in which case betting will scare them out of the pot, but this could change if they pick up a pair on the Turn. The flop is not all that wet imo; yes there's a two spades, but each flush draw is only one combination, and I'm also blocking some of them. Yes there's a straight draw, but 34 is not the same as, e.g., 67 (and people may even fold a gutshot). It still seems to me like a genuinely close/difficult decision, which is why I've posted it here.

Yeah this is reasonable. If he is a strong player, I think that makes it much more likely that he figured this is a very hit or miss board, and just took a stab at stealing the pot with nothing after both opponents checked to him. If that's the case, check-calling and check-raising probably amount to the same (and are better than leading) since he won't put more money in the pot either way.

I also haven't seen him do stupid stuff after this hand, so yeah you may be right. At the very least, it probably means that min-raising was a bad idea.

In terms of your flop argument, loose opponents in low limit games call with some pretty random stuff, so their range may be wider and they may peel with a larger percentage of it than a reasonable player would expect. Also, if a bad turn card comes like a spade, 2, or 5 the problem is not only that you no longer have the nuts, but also that in the case your opponent does have something he wants to stack off with the scare card will slow down the action, and could eventually lead to you getting bluffed off the winning hand if the turn and river are really scary.

If you bet the flop and a scare card comes on the turn now you have to "play poker." As a basic course of action against loose opponents I would bet again. If your bet is raised by a passive opponent they will usually have the hand they are representing, and you can make your decision to call based on pot/implied odds. Against very aggressive opponents they will use the scare card as an opportunity to bluff and you can call them. Another benefit of betting is a loose opponent will still call you with QJ or something like that here.

Just my opinion.... GL

Bet flop bet turn jam river, if they fold, oh well.

Terrible all the way. Stab 1/3 or 1/4 pot if you really want to keep people in the hand and risk flush draw, not bad if you balance your range enough. Some people might call you down with weak hands looking for gutshot on the turn or you may even induce a raise from one of your opponents.

Completely disagree with this, I absolutely do not want to be balanced against weak players, which I means I absolutely do want to play this set differently (compared to a vulnerable hand like QJ).

It doesn't matter if the good players at the table figure out what I'm doing because I'm not doing it against them.

The most effective play vs a total unknown is to cbet. When you min check raise, you're basically telling him you have a set.

The problem is not your strategy on this hand. The problem is your reasoning, if you are trying to play poker for living, one specific hand where you had top set and they folded should not bother your. How long has you been playing poker? Do you keep track? Even if you are playing against weak competition it's good to have a solid GTO strategy from what you can deviate

@How long: live about 4months
@Keeping track: yes; if we count everything from the first time I set foot into the casino, I'm currently beating the game by .133 BB/hand (this is after accounting for the rake). Obviously I think I've improved since then, but that's the totally non-cherry-picked lifetime stat.
@Solid GTO: I kinda disagree. This is sth I still think about a lot, like, should you approach everything in terms of "What does GTO say" and then "how do we adjust from GTO", or should you start from "what do I think my opponent does in this hand, given what I know about them, and how do I exploit this most effectively?" I've started with the first approach but nowadays I mostly do the second approach, and it feels like it's more profitable. Obviously I can't prove this. All I can say is that I don't care that much about GTO anymore, unless I play strong players (which live is only about 15% of hands)
@Don't be bothered: I'm actually surprised by this sentiment. Why would you want to not be bothered by hands like this? I feel that's a losing (or not-maximally-winning, at any rate) attitude. I feel like I want to have a healthy dose of perfectionism, especially for hands where I win. Like I said in the OP, it's natural to care about cases where you folded to a bluff / had a bluff called / etc., whereas with a hand like this, it's easy to go "ah I won money, so it can't be that bad" -- when actually, not maximizing profit here could be a huge leak! So I'm particularly inclined to be bothered for those cases.

And like, the thread did convince me that min-raising was bad, so if that's correct, it did help me fix a leak. Next time I'm gonna do something else, probably leading, although I might also check-raise larger.

Idk, might be a matter of attitude, but I feel like some degree of obsessing over hands is productive, as long as it's always oriented toward finding improvements.

Problem is this strat is so obvious, even the droolers can see it.

I don't play for a living. I have a 30 BI(at least) bankroll for 2-5 here where the buyin is up to 1K, just for fun. I do stuff at the table that would have you tagging me as a rec fish pretty quickly, yet I would pick up on this pretty quickly.

But watching you do stuff like this would amuse me, so please don't go changing....

Not sure if a huge amount of OP's villains are terrible (seems unlikely playing 2/4 in germany), but given this thread I want to cross book his day job.

I can understand/shrug with Tomark's bet/bet/bet line, but from LJ I'd probably range check this flop (esp. so if I thought both V's were bad) and just call HU.

I'd say over half of all villains are terrible for sure. I'm gonna visit another city next week to play in the casino there; maybe I'll find that it's much tougher and my casino just happens to be very soft.

Can now confirm that you are correct; played with him again today and he's anywhere between decent and a pro.

The fact that it was a heads-up tournament should have probably given me pause; the previous times I saw people play poker on their phone they were always bad, but heads-up is not the format that the typical recreational player will choose.