3! AQo OOP, K-high flop
1/3 NL, effective stacks about 500. No strong reads. UTG always straddles, but most hands are not straddled. UTG+2 raises to 15, I 3! to 50 from BB with AQo, UTG+2 calls. Flop K95,r, I cbet 55, villain calls. Turn is a 3 making a 2-flush. What do I do now? Should I have 3!? Should I have cbet smaller?
11 Replies
I think flatting with AQo out of the BB is fine, but 3B'ing is also fine. I probably would have 3B bigger, to $60.
OOP, I'm just checking my entire range on the flop, not c-betting. If we want to c-bet, we can go smaller in a 3B pot, like 1/3 pot.
As played, I guess check and evaluate.
Oh man, tough questions, all of which come down to how you play your range overall.
I personally 3! AQo 25% of the time against someone with a 15%+ range and less than that (or not at all) if it’s tighter than that.
I make it 1.5p OOP with sufficient stacks, so I’d make it $60 pre. There’s arguments for other strats but probably not out of the BB at these stacks and probably not at loLLSNL
K95r is strong enough for your range given the odds you laid him pre that you can bet close to 1/2p (still not even quite that much if you’re range betting). That’s pretty exceptional, though, and ~1/3p or less is going to be more standard on most K/A high flops.
Turn is ENTIRELY about range construction. Obviously you should have some bluffs, and blocking AK/KQ/AA and having some equity against his continuing range makes this hand as most any hand.
At the same time, ranges are very narrow and are going to be extremely sensitive to how you’re playing 12 whole combos, much less the remainder of your whiffed broadways which also includes some more gutshots and FDs.
I’d play around with some combinatorics math to see which strategies you prefer to take with which hands, bearing in mind that x/shove should be employed some too.
I like check/barrel the turn here because we're playing a range that is pretty capped to 1 pair hands and it's going to be tough to go for 3 streets of value with our value hands. When we check flop and bet turn we're still playing a range advantage vs the villain who called a 3bet.
PF we should raise slightly larger to 60-65 so that we're not going to be laying direct odds to set mine. This smallish open vs the straddle is going to have a lot of 22-JJ in it and most of that range can peel 1 and see what we do on the turn in position depending on how they're ranging our 3bets.
As played we can barrel turn for $125 and shove river and see if he wants to play for it but bet/bet/shove with AK/AQ high is the LLSNL baby's first triple barrel bluff in a 3bet pot, it's the most overdone bluffing line and the most frequent way I see TAG players get stacked is taking this line, particularly OOP. But when we make the decision to cbet flop we're kind of committing ourselves to taking this line on brick turns and rivers.
I like check/barrel the turn here because we're playing a range that is pretty capped to 1 pair hands and it's going to be tough to go for 3 streets of value with our value hands.
Being capped at 1 pair hands isn’t a problem for us at 4.5:1 SPR so long as he’s not able to show up with 2p+ himself 10%+ of the time.
We could open ship the flop and he’d “have to” call with a range that has <50% equity against AK+, which is like a full 1/4 of our range entering the flop.
I posted it because I wasn't sure if I played it well. Part of the reason for the 3-bet was the raise to 2.5x the straddle looked weak. I cbet because the K-high flop was good for my range.
The turn and river were checked down. He showed 96s for 2nd pair. I didn't like the result and wondered if I should have not cbet or cbet less and if I should have barreled as played. He could maybe have a set or something, but with the small preflop raise, it seemed unlikely he had AK/KQ.
Being capped at 1 pair hands isn’t a problem for us at 4.5:1 SPR so long as he’s not able to show up with 2p+ himself 10%+ of the time.
We could open ship the flop and he’d “have to” call with a range that has <50% equity against AK+, which is like a full 1/4 of our range entering the flop.
if flop goes check/check or check/call we're still playing the same range advantage going into the turn.
when we're trying to fold out better it's a 9 or a pocket pair. check/call check/check bet does this without bloating the pot the way bet/bet/shove does.
vs a whale like this you can just cbet flops rly small w/bluffs & go much larger w/value, absolutely unnecessary to cbet this large in your example
if flop goes check/check or check/call we're still playing the same range advantage going into the turn.
when we're trying to fold out better it's a 9 or a pocket pair. check/call check/check bet does this without bloating the pot the way bet/bet/shove does.
So we're not really disagreeing for one very important reason: AQ (and other hands like it) should be playing all of b-b-b, b-x-b, b-x-x, and (to the extent that we incorporate a flop check range at all) x/c-x-b, x-b-b, x/x/x at some frequency. They just make up too large a chunk of our range to take any one line without Fing everything up. (Which is why they're such commonly posted hands here because there is no correct answer on a HH by HH basis.)
Insofar as you bet <100% on the flop, AQo is absolutely going to be the first hand that benefits from checking (at some frequency). I just happen to have studied this particular flop with this particular preflop sizing at these particular stacks and know that a solver is like never checking them. Not just (as in most cases where humans range bet) that they bet often enough that you can collapse the strat by betting 100% and compensating by sizing down a bit without losing TOO much EV; no, like the solvers actually bets so frequently that anything else is noise. But that as much as anything suggests that the preflop size is too small and any larger size will bring our ranges into closer parity, in which case your strats that start with a check will be employed (at some frequency).
I did want to call attention your first sentence on "range advantage", though: a great deal of our range advantage comes from the fact that we had a stronger preflop range and the flop did not do enough to help villain catch up. Each additional card that comes will vitiate that advantage, especially on K95r where almost every card will bring in straights, trips, overcards, or at least flush draws that help them catch up.
Additionally, having a street check through shaves a street off the hand and lets them escape without making a decision for their stack as often (good for our hand in a vacuum but favorable for them from a range-vs-range standpoint). When it comes to A/K-high flops in particular, we force the toughest decisions from our opponents when we make 3 smaller bets (giving split pair type hands "worse odds to fold" if you will), whereas on a board like 953tt we force the toughest decisions with 2 larger bets forcing them to commit as early as possible to overcards and speculative backdoor equity.
So we can't just hit the snooze button on our range advantage and come back to it later.
So we're not really disagreeing for one very important reason: AQ (and other hands like it) should be playing all of b-b-b, b-x-b, b-x-x, and (to the extent that we incorporate a flop check range at all) x/c-x-b, x-b-b, x/x/x at some frequency. They just make up too large a chunk of our range to take any one line without Fing everything up. (Which is why they're such commonly posted hands here because there is no correct answer on a HH by HH basis.)
Insofar as you bet <100% on the flop, AQo is ab
how often is the solver RFI/calling a 3bet with 96s from UTG+2?
I like checking turn here a lot. Once he condenses OTF you're going to have to do some checking OTT in general because he cuts must of the fat OTF by not folding. Your hand has some showdown value which gets nuked if you bet. I don't think bad players are going to push you off of AQ as much as they are supposed to so I think checking works well in practice as well.
