Trying to Keep Opponent in the Pot with top set
Hiyo,
I'm primarily a live player currently trying to play as a profession. I live in Germany and play in my local Casino; they play 2/4 with ~2.5% rake and 100€+ buyin (no max). The field primarily consists of very bad players (including bad regs) plus a few pros.
€2/4 NL (9 handed)
LJ Hero (€600)
CO V1 (€500)
BB V2 (€200)
In this hand, I RFI with J♠J♣. There are no good players left to act, so I decide to go 16€ rather than my usual 12€; there's almost no chance I'll get punished for doing this. CO and BB call, the rest folds.
CO is a player I've seen for the first time today. He was playing a heads-up tournament on GGPoker on his phone while sitting on the table. I assume this actually makes him bad; I don't think any actually good player would do this(?). He has seemed on the tighter side; nothing crazy, no 3betting all day. BB is a bad reg but his style isn't really relevant.
Flop comes J♦3♠4♠ (Pot=50€😉, giving me the super nuts. BB checks, I check, CO bets 28€, BB folds. I min-raise to 56€ and CO folds.
So my thinking was something like,
- 1. I could call but there is a flush draw here, and also everyone in the casino just loves trapping with sets even when it's not good play, so it's kinda expected and I'd prefer to do sth else
- 2. A minraise sometimes looks strong, but actually (1) this doesn't look like a small raise, and more importantly (2) I think most bad players just play their cards, and if CO has a flush draw or pair with backdoor equity or anything, I just want to give him the price to call.
But it didn't work, and this is the kind of hand that really bothers me. Like it's easy to get upset about making bad calls or folds or whatever, but actually if I could have kept CO in the pot for one more street and didn't, that's a big deal!
So against the player described here, what do you think is the most effective play? Should you raise larger? If so, how large? Do you think it looks weaker if I just throw 60€ in there rather than counting to exactly double? Or should you take the risk of getting beaten by the flush and call? (And if so, how much time should you take before calling?) Or should you have lead here? I often feel like I don't know the most exploitative play when I get the nuts, and it's hard to improve because I have no database for my live play, and I don't think GTO matters here at all. You can throw all ideas about balancing or playing my entire range out the window here; neither of these two opponents is good enough or paying enough attention here for me to worry about that. I just want to get the max out of this specific hand.
Idk, overall I just feel like there had to have been a way to get more money here. Obviously I'm blocking all the top pairs here, and the fact that the CO bet at all is already a nice surprise, but now that he did he probably has something, so the fold really stings.
paragraphs of justifications disagreeing with people's advice while check minraising top set and saying everyone in the casino is bad and complaining that fish with ~0 equity stab folded. wild thread.
i think spr is low enough to not xr if u decide to x and to have a cbetting range
Hiyo,
I'm primarily a live player currently trying to play as a profession. I live in Germany and play in my local Casino; they play 2/4 with ~2.5% rake and 100€+ buyin (no max). .
Don’t you mean 12.5 percent rake, uncapped? I thought Germany taxed poker so high, even pros lose. If the rake is really 2.5 percent, please tell us where!
Falls Poker in Deutschland so billig ist, kehre ich hinein zurück.
I completely forgot about this thread so apologies for not replying sooner.
Well if I were to 3bet on this board (and as I said in my original comment I'm not convinced that that's the best line to take) then I'd have to ask the question - what is villain's calling range going to be?
You've got top pair blocked.
A c/r looks so strong that you're probably not getting calls from villains medium pocket pairs.
That just leaves the flush draws and open ended straight draws. Your hand is the nuts on the flop but it's not impervious from being drawn out on by those hands. When you min c/r villain needs to put €28 into a pot of €134. If they have a flush draw or an OESD then you're giving them a trivial call.
If I were to c/r then I'd make it at least €100
rake is pleasantly low indeed! Won't tell you which casino it is bc it's small so you could theoretically find out who I am, but there are a few with similarly low rake afaik.
Rake cap is 50. It goes up in discrete steps, so 2.5% was a guess for what it is on average. 4% is worst case.
I completely forgot about this thread so apologies for not replying sooner.
Well if I were to 3bet on this board (and as I said in my original comment I'm not convinced that that's the best line to take) then I'd have to ask the question - what is villain's calling range going to be?
You've got top pair blocked.
A c/r looks so strong that you're probably not getting calls from villains medium pocket pairs.
That just leaves the flush draws and open ended straight draws. Your hand is the nuts on the
Yeah agree with all of this.
Whenever I'm the PFR and have opponents in front and behind me, my default play is to check flop, so I like your check to start.
When someone bets, we can check-call or check-raise, or make a delayed c-bet on the turn if no one bets flop. Whether we check call or check raise flop depends on their bet sizing, the board texture, and our hand.
Here, when V bets over half pot into two opponents, I think we should just check call, not check raise. It's unlikely he's doing that with some sort of draw, unless maybe it's a good combo draw. It's more likely he's stabbing with a PP lower than JJ, or two over-cards, or perhaps Jx occasionally.
When we check-call, we can have a lot of flush draws in our range, so we don't necessarily need to worry that our opponent is going to turn the weak value parts of his range into a bluff on a flush run-out.
All that said, there are scenarios wherein I deviate from my default play and make a c-bet. Doing so here, for a 1/3-1/2 size, seems fine. We can get value from the same sorts of hands that might bet when checked to. We can barrel most if not all turns, and evaluate the river.
I really don't like a check-raise here, as the PFR, on this flop texture, in this configuration, when V bets >1/2 pot. It looks pretty nutted, and any decent V will expect us to bomb the turn on a brick. Other than bottom or middle set, or maybe occasionally bottom 2P, V is pretty capped for value at 55-88, and can't continue with very much of his range.
If we want to check raise occasionally, I would go bigger than a min-click, to polarize. A min-click check raise on the flop seems like fancy play syndrome to me.
Someone with 77 or whatever is going to be pretty unimpressed with a cbet on a J34 board so just get your value while you can. The clickback minraise is just a hallmark nutted hand trying to milk your opponent, never do this if you want a call.
