Terrified with KK

1. OP seems to have a history of playing with ''the best player in the room'' at 1/3. I'm going to assume he's not.
2. Showdown > ''the best player in the room''
3. Population tendencies.

I'm obviously not believing he's the best player in the room and even if he was, the river is still just a check and I'm value-betting because he'll get to the river with worse hands. A range consists of more than just the nuts. It's ridiculous to assume he only gets to the river with 7x and 99.

Now to answer your question, assuming I haven't bet $10 on the river and I checked. Yes, I can see myself calling 9x and TT/JJ. Never folding QQ-AA either but I don't think I have those hands on the river.

But that is not relevant as I'm going to assume most players are worse than me and they'll make bad calls. I think in general that's what we all do.

Please bet the flop - I don't know why you're terrified holding KK in position on 773r. As played we call the turn - on the river we have a clear raise against someone who might have a 9 or something like TT and wants the super cheap showdown. I think I would tank raise to 280 or something like that with intent to fold to a jam - maybe he puts you on spades,T8,etc and tank calls.

I think it's possible that V could actually be the best player in the room, and still take this line with some 3x of spades and $100k in his pocket.

If we look at pre, V's already in for $12, and the pot is $166 coming back around, when he only has to call another $38, so he's getting almost 4.5 to 1. Assuming CO comes along, V's getting almost 5.5 to 1 on a call.

So he flops bottom pair, picks up a flush draw on the turn, and goes for super-thin value on the river, targeting all the ace-high hands in hero's range, figuring hero isn't folding any over-pairs or 9x, and might be scared to raise, given the line V's taken.

He's not wrong. OP didn't fold, and admitted he was scared to raise, with KK.

It may not seem like an obviously good spot for hero to raise river, but we raised pre, checked back the flop, and called turn. We're sending mixed signals. We could have ace-high, or 88, or any PP that just wants to get to showdown. If V had thick value, he would likely bet bigger. His $10 bet into a $470 pot looks like what it is - thin value.

If hero raised turn, he could be doing it with PP's + spades or just the NFD, or 7x, or 9x, or 99. If we jam river, it could look like we're spazzing with AK because V bet so small. We don't know he's only got 3x. He could have 9x, or some other PP that will have a hard time folding when we check back flop and just flat call turn.

If we treat the $10 as a check, hero should definitely bet for value, so I don't see what the difference is between betting when V checks and raising when V bets $10.

I also don't see the point in raising small, to fold to a jam, if V is rolled with $100k on him. I think we can just jam KK, expecting to get looked up light often enough, rather than open the door for V to bluff us off our equity with a jam.

A good player understands that J3s has **** playability and **** equity realization, so it's not a good call.

FWIW, while I'd prefer a flop bet, one of the benefits of checking it is so we can, you know, rep AK and bet (ok, technically raise) the river.

Gnothatin',justsayin'G

Fine, but even good players make mistakes, or deviate, because reasons.

The simple fact that hero only raised to $50, rather than larger, might have led V to call when he would have folded to an incrementally bigger raise. Maybe V decided he'd only call 20% of the time, and randomized his way to flicking it in.

The pre flop call can be terrible, and the rest of his line okay.

My point is I don't see the point in beating Banana up over whether or not this guy is a crusher. We should be beating him up for not c-betting flop or raising river, regardless of his read.

Your opponent doesn't seem that good to me. Double straddling, and then calling a >4x raise with J3s. He's also betting 1/2 pot on the turn with a hand that only gets action from draws with good equity and 9x. Then block betting the river with a bluff catcher (letting us know he's weak).

You need to be raising this river. You should be bluffing vs this sizing so of course you'll need value hands to raise and value looks something like K9+ here to me. You think if he has quads or nines-full he's min-betting? Very unlikely.

so if someone is giving you 50:1 I think you just need to bluff raise 100%. Dunno if anyone ran this through a solver but I swear I've seen these silly bets scaled directly the to strength of their hand. Bet $10 with bottom pair because reasons....

If there’s one thing I could go back and tell me 10 years ago, it’s to stop being scared of live players who show up to a low stakes game with a huge wad of cash. They are 95% of the time terrible, 4.999999% some okay reg, and (at least in my experience so far) never Phil Galfound.

Flop is a majority bet for me OTB.

Turn is a raise a decent percent of the time.

River is a slam dunk raise.

You do not need to settle for what amounts to less than half of the flop pot in value with this big of an overpair just because villain plays big stakes. In fact, him playing bigger stakes makes milking him more mandatory, both in terms of EV and morality.

So, everyone just ignore any reads the OPs give us because even though they are there and have played with these players and it's their hand, they are obviously wrong. We should just stop giving any player descriptions, throw the hand in a solver, etc., and voila.

Someone's getting into the Friday sprit.

1) If our only reads are that villain is "the best player in the room," is "very good at poker", isn't scared money and that he's 5b shoved AA preflop, then you literally should just play GTO against them. Surely we should be playing optimally, so what are we optimizing based on in the absence of theoretical parameters?

2) If OP is going to say he's "terrified" in the post title and I open the HH and see he's facing a 1/47th pot-sized bet with a slowplayed boat, I think it's reasonable to infer that there's some brain stuff going on worth probing at. Which maybe I don't have the mental health expertise to address, but it felt irresponsible to not at least call it out.

"He plays high stakes", "he has lots of money", "he's not scared money at these stakes," "he's won a stack off of me"; as poker reads, these all range from decent to redundant to irrelevant. BUT what they're really good for (and why I suspect they warrant a whole paragraph) is a justification for why hero is scared in a spot where he would be chuckling to himself against his usual opponent.

3) I was going to make a joke in the "AQo top pair vs tight player" thread that there should be a german word for the phenomenon where discussions in LLSNL HHs somehow get worse the more reads are included in OP. I rarely get the sense from these reads that hero has ever actually PLAYED POKER against these people for more than 50 hands.

Realistically speaking how much has this 1/3NL poster ACTUALLY PLAYED POKER against a 50/100NL reg? My prior would be "not much", and the lack of a more relevant history to draw from seems to confirm that.

Maybe there's some marginal value in things less directly related to play but if 10 LLSNL see a data point and read 10 different things into it, how valuable is it really? Are we all just going to argue with each other about whether buying in for cash or chips makes someone more likely to ship over our river raise or not? Isn't there some mode of analysis that could be clearer and more helpful to OP?

The thing is if he is actually a 50/100 reg then he’s not gonna try to play tricky at 1/3 lol, his bet sizings are pretty much gonna be face up and he is gonna vpip 10x more than his normal stake cuz he’s bored.

His sizing gets called by ace high by 90% of the 1/3 population and people dont raise unless they have quads as illustrated by op. So his tiny bet is actually printing in this particular spot.

Not ignoring reads. You were just wrong a few days ago and you're still wrong now.

Ridiculous to suggest river is a call.

Very good question.

Maybe we should just ban all people who have different opinions than yours as it would probably be more productive overall?

Gsigh,imoG

Don’t threaten me with a good time, GG!

am positive everyone saying we can't raise the river is never seeing this hh posted with AsKs or JsTs or whatever and deciding to run it.

i mean everyone is entitled to have an opinion, but when everyone that plays higher is telling u this is a raise, and results indicate that it's clearly a raise, maybe its time to reflect as opposed to double down

I am pretty sure most posters who raise river are folding to a shove. Just seems silly to me, especially when it's so unlikely that he calls with worse -- or even has a worse hand he can call with.

If your plan is to raise/call, by all means go for it.

And results indicate he was not calling. And if he shoved, we owned ourselves.

i dont really get the post to be honest. his entire range can b/c the river if he thinks its a bluff unless you think he is randomly deciding to minbet the river without sdv. can call it results oriented if you want but to me his entire range is probably a hand that can get really thin value vs ace high. when op raises river its going to be very polar (in this particular case giga polarized to likely exactly quads given how you all are approaching the situation, if he can't raise KK surely he can't raise 99 here either right?) and he can most definitely call with any of that range if he wants to

you have very black and white assumptions about the entirety of his entire strategy in a really esoteric part of the game tree

if you're truly worried about him minbet 3bet bluffing but still don't think you can call (i think this is paranoia at its finest) and want to choose a non all in river size, you can call it off at whatever frequency makes him indifferent to bluffing

why do results indicate he was not calling? as a pure hypothetical, what if OP had raised to 30$? do you still think he would fold?

Much prefer to raise turn with JsTs, pretty sure I wouldn't be bluffing JsTs on the river because it blocks roughly zero value hands.

Esp. after the results I think everyone should think twice about categorizing how people will play just because they play higher (even much higher).

But that also goes both ways, in that I've seen some (probably good) higher stakes players absolutely punt into nut ranges because they have the 3rd nuts or top of range or whatever. Like maybe this guy playing higher is a good reason to bet/raise the river, where he can maybe have JJ and can't/won't fold (lol, don't look at results) ... but I'm very suspicious of anyone playing 5/10+ saying you have to raise here, when a lot of players will have at least one combo. of 75 at 1/3.

But also for this specific hand, meh ... there's some chance villain still calls a turn raise and checks river but apart from that OP probably got the most possible (flop betting probably gets folds, river either folds or we get bluffed).

Most posters here realize that betting $10 into $640 is nothing. So you framing it as raise/fold and raise/call is a joke.

Results indicate nothing and by your own faulty logic we could argue that results indicate he would've never shoved. Not how poker works.

With that being said and being 66bb deep. I was always bet bet shoving this run out.

Not just that, he gets to showdown for free. As demonstrated by the people in this thread who will call this river bet and have admitted to checking back had villain bet nothing.

what are these value hands you're trying to block? how often do you get to the river when he bets the turn into 3 when you still have a player left to act with a hand w/o sdv that doesn't have 2 spades in it? what hands would you bluff with?

its difficult because you're not really open to changing your mind

same hypothetical for you. do you think villain folds if we raise to 30$?