5/10/20 deep stack against good player

this hand is mostly as brutal as it is because of how we played it preflop.
3betting large then flatting a large 4bet makes our range look weird and capped. it also sets us up for a lot of marginal spots where we're out of position. we're also folding out none of V's weaker 4bet range which can be kind of wide here in position against us and probably does include hands like KJs/AJs at some frequency this deep. it also has pocket pairs that bury us in a set vs TPTK situation.
our range looks like AK/AQ/KQs/JJ/TT.
1000 straddles deep I think we've got to 5bet here. I like a 5bet to around 3.3k.

as played a lot of this comes down to psychology this many straddles deep. V's story is obviously "I have a boat/quads" but what is he looking to get value from with massive turn/river bets.
our image as perceived by V is very important here. if he thinks we mostly flat AK then this is kind of payoff wizardry. if he thinks we mostly 5bet AK then this can easily be a ballsy bluff to get AQ/KQ to fold since there is only one combo each of JJ and TT.

what is your history with V? has he seen you flat 4bets with AK this deep/in general?

5bet pre
as played calling flop is fine
as played the turn is setting us up for a nasty spot on the river. this V type is usually going to be bombing river when we check call/check.
as played on the turn call river. unless our image is that we're mostly flatting a 4bet with AK then fold river.

V is the type player that likes to talk hand and doesn’t mind show his hand. We talked about hands on the table sometimes. He once referred me as a winning reg. He thinks I don’t bluff big on river. Also he knows I 5b with AK a lot times. He saw it before and I even 5b jam AQ into him before. However, I feel he has been trying to play explorative against me. I made a big fold against him in smallish pot a couple months ago, after that he has been trying to put me to test. A month ago he check raised me huge on turn with flush draw(I folded). He made comment because I made big fold to him last time. Also I saw him done it many times, when he sees weak player, he just attack attack attack.

See above, I think he sees me weak sometimes. If I bet big on river I usually have it. But he also snap called my 5b jam with AK before. I think he thinks I have Ak sometimes but probably low frequency

How often do we 5b here? I really like your thought process. Are you saying if V expecting us to 5b with AK, then this call? Basically he is expecting to make one pair type hand fold? Do you practice solver? V can 4b with pocket pair? How often do you think you would do this?

this is a wild hand. i honestly have no idea what u should do. would probably call but man wtf. on one hand hes like never really supposed to cold 4 anything that beats u given positions, on the other hand think that's less relevant when he puts in 10k. im really confused what he keeps betting with lol. even ak seems thin to me otr (for any size let alone this). i guess u could see aq or a5 or something that wants to make kings fold. is really odd bc his range should be like {KK+ and bluffs} and his bluffs aren't really supposed to have you beat here but like man. gonna suck if he shows up w ajss or w/e. is really tricky spot because you're weighing hand reading / preflop tendencies vs him being able to put in 500+bb on a bluff in kind of an atypical spot. really have no idea what he has though man. agree that akss seems like reasonable 5b candidate here and u may just not want to have much of a calling range pre in general despite being deep. gtow at 300 looks like KK+, Akss, AKo discounted and some a5ss stuff for bb (am looking at hj vs sb vs bb) but again like its probably a minor ev error if he throws in qq or w/e sometimes. vs the actual gtow pre range u basically cant lose outright. again, taht relies on him knowing that and executing it but its worth keeping in mind. i guess id give him the money

i kinda think he sizes differently post w qq? but man i have no idea. its really weird he just kept betting lol

if you call and lose id quit. for sure the game, maybe poker in general

It doesn't doesn't look weird or capped in a super deep game like this.

I have no idea how gto preflop ranges look like 1000bb deep.

Because playing so deep oop sucks, especially as the caller against an aggressive V, I'd tend to 5bet pre.

As played pre, flop and turn seem somewhat standard, although again, this deep who knows what the gto plays may be.

On the river, I really have no clue, unfortunately...

Honestly, I would defer discussions on this spot to seasoned live pros and coaches only.

You should be raising flop id think. Royal draw and overs to the Q, and id think your calling range would have way more QQ JJ and if anyone has Jx id think itd be you. Also his sizing is so small. Id make a small raise like 30-40% of pot, and if he calls im not shoveling money in even if i hit.

As played who knows. Its probably dumb and bad logic to do this but in these supet weird spots, i think “does anything make sense?” And it tends to cause me to thinknof exactly 1 hand that makes sense, or zero which would make me think “call”. Here its JJ. He bets super small OTF to just suck bet you into calling with anything. T turn gives AK a straight, QQ TT a full house, so he bets bigger, and river T, now a TT has quads and he wants to extract max value from TT QQ and the occasional AK call.

And as others said maybe its AJs or whatever. Im just folding, but its probably marginal, im sure hes capable of bluffing here

The fact its posted here means its probably a bluff, but im not sure it is usually, so im not sure results will shed a lot of light on what we should do.

no it does because of reverse implied odds. strong pocket pairs and AK are going to want to 5bet to define V's range more or just take it down preflop or lower the SPR to where it's possible to GII on the river without going bet/bet/overbet.

let's say you flat the $1120, flop comes out K95 you x/c, turn K you x/c pot, river 7 you x/r all-in V shows 99 and scoops 40k pot that's a disaster outcome that you avoid by just 5betting.

if he's seen you 5bet with AK a lot and even 5bet jam AQ then this is probably a call because your perceived range doesn't have a lot of 5 card hands in it so why would he be betting so large to get a call from 2 pair.
essentially you played Ak like a trapping hand vs this V and now you've made broadway and your perceived range doesn't have many combos of broadway in it. the problem with playing AK as a trap is often the hand you make when you play for stacks isn't the nut flush or aces full of kings it's something like TPTK vs a ton of aggression or a straight on a paired or flush board.

the problem more with AK suited as a trap is because when we're playing for the nut flush we're also blocking the second nuts. I'd rather flat with ATs here OOP than AKs which I think should just be a pure 5bet.

playing 1000 straddles deep, exploitatively you can 4bet with pocket pairs at a pretty high frequency in position to a size like 40-50 straddles if you expect to get 5bet at a very low frequency to either take it down preflop, take control of the aggression post, and also reduce the SPR so that you can play for stacks when you hit a set.

lol I feel I don’t know how to play poker anymore. I have been crushing the game, V is only player in the game that I don’t know how to adjust. I used to play tag against him. Also I used to play “street” poker, when I get AK I’m getting my stack in. So I signed up GTO wizard try to see how GTO “thinks”, I started to do randomize stuffs, flat range, nuts range and I’m on 3500bb downswing/played bad since I signed up GTO wizard a couple months ago. I tanked a little bit on river before folding. The two points you mentioned didn’t even cross my mind. He probably didn’t think I have AK, another one is I thought he wouldn’t have small pairs in his range but he showed me 88. How do you learn all these stuffs and process all the information during the hand?

I played for a long time in deepstacked private games with a mix of some of the best players in my state and absolute single digit IQ whales before solvers ever came out and developed my game til I had a solid overall understanding of what "standard" play then was as well as how to maximize how much I could win from the bad players before other good players got to their stack. When online poker was a thing in the US I used to play against top players back then like Dan Colman, Greg Merson etc heads up and short handed like 20-30 hours a week and profited after rakeback/leaderboard bonuses in those matchups.

When solvers came out I did some study with them for awhile but I honestly haven't done solver study in years, I used them for awhile for like 6-9 months when piosolver first came out. If you didn't come up in the era before solvers, what a lot of players today miss is that solvers largely just confirmed what top players at the time considered standard, except in a few edge cases. The main adjustments that were totally alien to top players then were things like what 3bet ranges out of the blinds should look like, practically everybody was 3betting out of the blinds at way too low of a frequency. Also some other things like selecting low-mid pocket pairs as bluffs on some board textures which tbh very few people even do today. They also helped refine betting sizes but that's kind of marginal and the first thing you adjust with an exploitative approach is bet sizing anyways. But for the most part if you already had a good game solvers were just a way to look up a line you would take and confirm with the computer that it was correct, maybe adjust your bet size north or south by like 10% or find a few more bluff candidates that you might never use because the pool you play in pays off too much to begin with.

tbh to me this hand is all psychology based and solvers have very little to do with it. i haven't ran this hand through a solver but it wouldn't be surprising to me that 88 is actually a bluff here to the solver, solvers do like selecting low-mid pocket pairs as bluffs on a board like this given a line like this. but the psychology is more important IMO. V probably perceives you as being afraid to make a mistake, which you probably are, you're studying with tools to try to eliminate mistakes, you're not comfortable playing against him, you're on a downswing, etc. Add in that he probably isn't ranging you on AK and the solver goes out the window and this hand just becomes "I can just blast and get him to fold everything except 2 combos of quads".

Didn't you just state in another post that you played for a long time in a deep-stacked game? If so, I'm surprised you would look at any two cards preflop when you're 1000BB deep and think, "How am I going to GII with this hand?"

you should look at stack sizes and your AKs and think that vs this size of bet from this size of stack V is often going to make a lot of disguised hands that are going to obliterate our TPTK and when we make the nuts V just folds because we block the second nuts.

if we go $3.3k here pre V just folds his 88 and we win $1200 pre with ace high which is a pure win. I guarantee he is never 6betting 88 here. this isn't $1/$3 100bb deep where nobody has a 4bet/fold range. V definitely has a considerable selection of combos that he is playing as a 4bet/fold.

the same situation I outlined earlier could have easily come up too. we flat AK, we flop K85, we turn K, we get it all in on the brick river and we get scooped by 8s full. you could say that is a cooler but it's not, it's a spot you can just avoid entirely by playing this as a pure 5bet.

yeah idk alot of buzz words in this thread that i not going to respond to

maybe you shouldn't play 1k bb deep. would think his play is a torch at several points

studying isn't why you're losing. misapplication and reversion to mean is most likely the reason.

i think if you don't know what you're doing you are going to absolutely die if you 5b pre

i dont think his sizing looks like JJ at all. i think if somehow he had a value hand it'd be Jx. even like QQ or w/e doesnt seem that likely to me because he makes it probable with the river size that Jx / Tx dont x/r. is kind of why i thought it looked weird. i think pretty much everyone in the thread is just saying random things lol. also results got released too quickly

Thanks, psychology is my weakest game.
I guess I will post more hh here now on

Its true, I don’t know if he takes this size with QQ. I know that he is very balanced, I saw him does %20 pot flop %80 turn and pot size on river with value hand. But I also saw him checked back when he flopped huge. I feel I saw him bomb river more often when he sensed weakness on turn. Also I’m not sure how often can Jx take this line.

i mean he probably isn't balanced if he does this w 88 lol. pre is like a sub 5% frequency thing and should probably just get simplified out. i'm also doubtful that his is size with value and again he just doesn't really have value combos that go for it on this run out (if u have gtow, look at research mode for pre only sims and look at how 300bb ranges play here preflop and try to come up with plausible value betting combos for him - they don't really exist). i think he just decided to bluff this hand and got carried away and it happened to work out

Totally agreed about misapplication part. Personally, I like the deep stack game, I usually covers the table. It applies pressure to a lot players. I quit the game shortly after the hand, I even told V that I would quit if I call and lose. I’m sure V is going to put me test again til I “stand up” for myself, I just hope I don’t run into his nuts next time

i mean if he just showed u a massive bluff where u hero folded and quit as a result (and you're a rec), he is probably going to have it the next time lol

would worry less about psychology, what does he think i think he thinks i think and worry about just getting good at poker. if the game is actually real, getting decent is probably worth low-mid 6 figures in ev and you don't even know your preflop ranges lol

300bb is extremely different from playing 1000 straddles deep.
I like everything about V's line but I wouldn't be expecting to get AK to lay down.

can you show that? the ranges are going to constrict to the same hands {AA, bluffs} very very very quickly. even at 300bb sb is 3betting something like 3-4% of hands pre and bb is cold 4betting 2%. there just isn't room to be wider than that given how tight sb needs to approach an ep open oop deep. sure people that don't study deep simplify to 3b or fold but this leads to getting annihilated deep. this is 6 handed btw, am sure op is playing 8 or 9 handed live

yeah.
at this stack depth you can 4bet large facing a large 3bet with a pocket pair and spot yourself good odds to set mine in position, which is what V did in this hand. at 300bb you can't do that.
this is also a 3 blind game not a 2 blind game and it's a HJ open not an EP open.