KKJTss/u for 85bb Pre-Flop v. Whale

I guess a little of both. 😃

there's a huge amount of psychological power - both internal and external - that can come from taking huge beat after huge beat for big pots and then just smiling and reloading. they want the shop to be open. if you show them the shop never opens for that sort of business, you gain a little bit of that phil ivey / doyle brunson power over the recs.

that also means btw that you should not celebrate the wins. a little smile, a head nod, a raised eyebrow to acknowledge that you got lucky or whatever. no big reactions, no doug polk style running around the room like a maniac, just be professional, take your wins and your losses in stride.

My opponents frequently say that I never go on tilt. I think they like when I show some emotion and even humor sometimes when I’m losing.

Against this guy it’s a fist pump jam.

Jam is obviously fine.

I think mixing in some flats (25-35% flat?) is probably better than a pure jam, especially since Hero can over-realize his equity post-flop as the short stack, but not enough info to have a strong opinion on this.

I hate Mississippi straddles in general.

This is what I was thinking; flatting is the standard play. But I jammed (and ran into AAJ5ds) because of the dynamics at play.

I definitely prefer a (mandatory) UTG straddle and try to encourage everyone to do that instead. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s good that most players in this game at least straddle on the button to make it bigger.

What's the benefit of the flat - are we expecting to find any c/folds on some boards?

I think it's just an obvious jam. You can do the "mixing" (i.e. flat) with KKJTr.

The main benefit is that we give up to 3 villains the chance to call the 200 and make bigger mistakes post-flop than the +ev Hero can lock in with a jam pre-flop, on top of the extra profitability of being short.

So here are some casual numbers: Hero is maybe a 60/40 favorite at best vs villain range.
A 40 favorite vs 2 villains.
a 28 favorite vs 3 villains.
A 22 favorite vs 4 villains.

And Hero will also overrealize the most equity vs 3+ villains because he is short, and villains will make more incorrect folds because Hero's remaining 650 will force them to risk 2x-3x that amount against remaining players.

This is just a strong multi-way hand, that is going to be a very profitable against a fishy lineup, even OOP.
The overall upside of flat is higher, because villain(s) can just punt off the rest of Hero's stack as huge dogs or drawing dead. Even when the pot stays HU, sounds like steamy villain is going to make a lot of bad/incorrect bets vs check, which is immediately profitable.

Sure we can find x/folds, but the main reason to mix flats is because I think it will increase Hero net profitability and balance. In this configuration it probably wouldn't even be much of a mistake if Hero only jam AAxx exactly. In perfect GTO-world I assume a solver is mixing between call/jam and fold different KKxx hands here, but KKJT is always going to be one of the better calls because it benefits the least from ISOing a villain HU.