Poor play OOP with top set?

Personally, I would bet the flop small (maybe $45) and check the turn, but I understand why you would check flop. Once you check flop, I think you HAVE to bet turn though. Villain will not fold medium pairs or strong A-highs to either line.

AP, I kinda want to check-jam this particular river. Anything that is calling $145 is fairly likely to bet-call a jam IMO, and this way you might still get villain to bluff with his air.

So you flop top set in a 3-bet pot OOP vs. a passive player who's "just bleeding down, " and you decide to just not make any money?

I think adopting more ch flop ch turn river take action type lines even on boards where youre not obviously way ahead of opponent is absolutely necessary in today's environment, at least in the region i play in. A lot of new GTO type schooling has you checking your entire range even as PF betting lead when OOP and at first i really hated it but as I started implementing it more and more, I really saw the benefit especially if you tend to open a little wider than everyone else from upfront.

That said you can probably delay C-bet on the turn something small - 40-55 say, maybe size up so it doesnt seem like youre milking too much. I think less experienced live players over fold to the down bet in spots like this - basically treating it like its a 4 or 5bet preflop and you have a hot cup of coffee simmering in front of you and maybe a 2 for 1 coupon to Red Robin is occupying your cupholder (sorry imma run this ****in joke into the GROUND ya'll)

point is: if you know nothing about em, jsut 1/2 pot it. default assumption is opponents ranges are fairly inelastic and so the hands that call a 25-33% pot bet here all call 50% pot. maybe make it shy by a nickel or somethin.

if they're decent, a PSB or overbet can look cute given that the board favors their range more than yours, but you need to make sure their image of you isnt "serious card player."

overall though,
i think its fine. If they had something and didnt take a stab, they are very unlikely to now bet if checked to on the river so youre up against a range thats mostly bluff catchers and the occasional AX. I'd wager if they had a decent A (two overcards to the J) they wouldve stabbed in position so its likely a mid tier or lower.

So that said, I like bigger sizing and pray they hit 2 pair with the Ace or think youre just full of ****. Considering the hand that is most likely to pay you is the two pair one, the bottom of my sizing here is 1.25 Pot say - and since they probably dont have an exact count of what the total pot is, you got room on either side.

Usually i try to get this bet out quick without much pause/fanfare to give it a little more of whiff of bluff. Here's the thing - loose passive guy is never raising the river bet without the nuts, so downsizing to induce is a fantasy.

If he calls for whole stack 25% of the time you're doing better than if you tried somethin silly like 40 that gets called 100% of the time say.

In other words, I think jamming is totally cool and fun and hip. but anything big though is ideal. it also warms up new friends to your overbets, and if they're religious, they start to think you're some kinda heretic and wanna start an inquisition, so its really cool when you run good after this too.

A loose passive villain bleeding money. We hit the nuts, and we decide to check twice.... wtf am I not getting?????

If V1 is loose passive and he raised pre, it's unlikely he has sets in his range. It's unlikely this board hit him since he should have a ton of Ax and high cards. We are also blocking most Jxs. It's hard too get paid off.

If someone hit the set, namely V2, they should tell you at some point in the hand, in which case it will be time to shovel as many chips in the middle as you can.

The river hit our opponents' ranges, so betting big is appropriate. You could also go for a check raise.

I don't mind checking the flop on the fairly dry board, but you need to bet the turn, particularly as the board is becoming more connective, even though he shouldn't have low cards. Also, what are you representing that you would 3! and check the flop and turn with? River could put out a one-liner to a straight. River bet and sizing seem OK.

When you 3! and check twice, it looks like AK/AQ or a maybe a slow play, so you really shouldn't get much action on the A river, but bad players will have trouble folding an ace.

I’m not trying to balance against a loose passive who won’t stab. Bet 20.

GRUNCH:
Preflop looks good.
Checking the flop is fine. Generally I lean towards just going for value vs recreationals, but with the low SPR I think the check actually works really well. You can still get the money in over two streets if needed, and you give him some rope to take a stab at it and unwittingly commit himself to maybe calling of with hands he wasn't intending to GII with

Checking the turn after flop checks through, however, is really just awful. Fish at low stakes tend to play very passively in 3BP's; you're losing a ton of potential value from hands as strong as AJ that may very well check back the turn. Also, say that he DOES bet the turn — a x/raise here looks so strong that you're much more likely to force a fold than by taking literally any other line, and if you just x/call then you're stuck either donking the river like a fish or leaving him the easy option of checking back all his hands with showdown value that REALLY don't want to face a river bet.

Pre is awfully big, but it worked. I c-bet -- get some money in there. I guess you were hoping to x/call or raise, but he's passive, I just lead. As played, bet the turn!!! As played, whatever. I hope he called w/ worse.

I'll admit deep and OOP against a passive opener with not all that much dead money that I probably don't 3bet here as much as others. But obviously fantastic preflop result (i.e. isolating the shorter guy who's bleeding money).

SPR is lol 1.5 so we can get chips in whenever we want. Dood is described as passive (so I wouldn't expect an induce to bluff to work) and loose (so he's going to call a lot postflop when he shouldn't). On such a drawless board at this SPR and OOP I don't hate a flop check. But I might lean to a lol super small bet like $30 that he'll have a hard time passing up with anything.

As played, really hate the turn check against this guy. Really have to start betting here to make it a trivial play for stacks on the river.

And I would actually shove the river. With his check backs there's a good chance he had nothing on the flop/turn. So he either still has nothing (where he's not paying off any bet or bluffing)... or he's binked an Ax (which this guy is never folding).

I find it interesting that one of the huge benefits of your raisey preflop play is to make it easy to play for stacks postflop when you bink... and yet for some reason you sometimes make that extremely difficult to do given your postflop play.

GcluelessNLnoobG

ok so i think its necessary to state a few things about the hand that i think people are glossing over:

1) what range does villain call 75 with preflop, but more importantly: how does that range interact w/ this board?

2) hands the villain is most likely to call on flop (pocket pairs), the best ones would be inclined to bet, what value hands does villain hold that check back here IP regardless of passivity of recreational players - they still can toss a bet in a 3bet pot when checked to on a dry board that likely misses both Hero and less so Villain's range*

3) We flop the effective nuts, barring villain playing AA/KK in a dumb way, isnt it more likely villain's range is predominantly hands that are low and no equity here against hero's perceived range?

i generally advocate fast playing value more often than not but this specific board just strikes me as a perfect opportunity to let villain catch up to something they wanna put a LOT of money in that wont necessarily cause us much concern to give 2 or 3 free cards.

* lets game this out a bit too: take A6s for example - sure, villain probably calls a bet on the flop. turn doesnt improve them, we check they check, river doesnt improve them, we...?

If we DO in fact think villains are passive in 3bet pots do we then ignore that assumption and pretend they're gonna turn A6s into a bluff on the river the times they dont smash 2 pair?

Poor example because this is precisely the setup we want. If we check down to the river and villain hits 2 pair, a big overbet on the river is gonna get looked up a healthy ammount of times.

Do we think small bet flop, check check turn, and they hit perceived gin card of an A that we have ENOUGH information to check the river back?

I'm saying the EV of betting flop while high as far as certainty of getting called is still less than the EV of a check flop check turn lead huge on river given that we can make stupid overbets here and get looked up lighter than 2 pair even. Additionally, this allows us more room to check our lower equity holdings having let villain's know we are capable of checking monsters as well.

Its both good for NOW and good for LATER.

One other point: as you get deeper stacked mistakes compound. If you played an opponent who opened fairly tight but constantly was hammering you with giant river bets, I guarantee most people’s strategies would buckle against that pressure.

This account is new but I lost access to an old account so i wanna offer historical perspective : the number of threads that qualified villain as “top crusher” were generally the type that utilized every possible opportunity to obfuscate their holdings and often times came with a comment along the lines “they always make huge bets and raises on the river”

Why? Because it’s hard to hit big hands and it’s bad start to hero call with regularity. So this presents a divide of opportunity to take advantage of.

Most lower stakes players from 1/2 - 5/10 even follow a somewhat predictable pattern of aggressing with value as soon as it’s there. Now often times this is the correct approach, but you HAVE to identify the times when you can take your foot off the gas but then mash that Mf’er to floor on a later street. Back then this wasn’t called “balancing lines” it was generally falling under meta game, and river play especially is still steeped in meta game especially in live environments.

Addendum:
I took a decent sized roll (what was left of it after i blew up a nice chunk playing like a complete ****ing moron due to run bad and shitty mental health etc) and stuck it into a house. Could I reasonably extract it form equity now? yeah sure i could. but you try convincing a spouse to just "trust me, i wont **** this up again (again)" to just yank 25K+ for funzies, especially when it'll take some portion of time to produce results that WOULD be convincing. So i'm starting over at the bottom once again. I've played more in the past 3 weeks than i've played in the past 5 years. right now I'm at an unsustainable 35bb/100. lets see where that swings in another 1000 hands though, i'll try to chime in for ya'll on my progress. I unfortunately dont have all the time now to devote to poker as i once did either. i have a business. i have a career that got ****ed by covid that im slowly trying to realign that would have me traveliing something like 4months out of the year both in the US and globally. (i was in asia for 3 months on tour in this career almost 2 years ago). i like that ****, i wanna keep doing that. I love poker, and maybe i'd make more money playing poker but im able to create more personal joy doin the other things, even if the money isnt as good as it potentially "could be" if it were possible to say that I wouldnt blow up another roll when i hit a really bad stretch. I've worked on that part of my game when i wasnt playing. i see a therapist now too. maybe conditions are better for me to puruse that? who the **** knows. but when i think of what i wanna do with the hours of my day that make me the happiest - as much as i love the ****ing game, there's other things that just do more for me.

tryin to offer some semblance of a CV if the arguments themselves arent convincing enough as presented, perhaps historically relevant information could help

Unknown loose passive players who flat a raise and then flat a 3B typically have a WIDE range. When the A sometimes comes on the river, villain will sometimes have hit it. Mostly it won't come, and just as often he won't have hit it. There's also a fair chance he "put you on AK" the second you check the flop. On the river A all of his non-A one-pair hands that might call flop or turn— not to mention any draws that got to see two free cards — can now easily fold the river.

This is to say, we shouldn't be building our strategy around those times that Villain does in fact hit one of his 0 - 6 outs. Checking the flop works, but checking turn after is just losing EV.
Especially since this should be a pretty great turn card for villains range — he could well have low 2-pair hands, as well as a number of straight draws with a pair that are never folding.

Yeah I agree with this for sure and im realizing i shouldve been more specific with what i was saying -

As a general strategy, what you suggest is more a default action/higher frequency. What i was speaking to was specifically this scenario / runout wherein we have the absolute nuts and an opportunity to burn someone w/ a check check lead big line that if called, will pay out dividends in terms of putting "The fear" in villains at the table when we check our range from OOP.

PRE - looks fine.

FLOP - just c-bet small, like $40. Pray V raises. Otherwise just go bet-bet-bet.

TURN - barrel small.

RIVER - get it in.

Result:

another quick point about hand reading -

even if villain is garbage, they have some bluff in em outside a few specific archetypes and they werent described as such. and by bluff i dont mean 2x pot. i mean they'll take 97 and throw somethin just shy of half pot sometimes.

So logically deducing villain's more likely holdings via the action provided (as i was suggesting in a post prior to results) - is it not more likely they have a hand that is maybe too good to bluff with on an earlier street that they perceive could hit a gin card river (eg. holding an A and thinking the 3 outs are good) and barring that A river would just check behind, which wildly enough has a slight touch of truth here (in a macro sense of taking your A high to SD vs bluffing with your AX combos that whiff)

in position, even a passive player will do the following:
made value would take a stab.
higher equity semi-bluffs would take a stab.
a tiny % of absolute garbage might take a lil stab
the SDV hands in between garbage and some perceived low equity will take it street by street (some passive types may take 88 or 77 to SD, others might be more inclined to turn it into a bluff earlier)

unless Passive means "THEY ONLY CHECK OR FOLD ALWAYS", then the above is non zero and i'd argue likely closer to a general depiction vs outlier/rare

I'm not standing on this because i wanna say "oh look i was right" im standing on this because i firmly believe you gotta find an occasional alternative to fast play value on boards that are absolutely unlikely to cooler you with some free cards given prior action. Bad players dont think of the game in this fashion, and whether villain is a nit, passive, or loose agro win every pot syndrome type - i guarantee its more likely by a large margin they're still bad players.

I am really glad the river was an A -- and especially that it wasn't a 2 or 7. LOL. He was never folding on the turn.

V has $275 going to the river, with $165 in the pot. We should just jam and pray he spiked an ace. We're not losing value because he's not calling with his TT or worse at that point. If he had any sort of hand, we'd have heard from him before the river. We left $130 on the table by betting $145.

But really, it would have been better to just go bet-bet-bet starting with a small size on the flop. Go $40-$45 on flop and $100 on turn, he'll have $130-$135 left with $445-$450 in the pot. Hard to screw up the river at that point. We can just jam and lay him over 3:1 on a call.

Overall, my takeaway is that you somehow managed to not get stacks in with a set on a non-scary board in an SPR 1.7 pot. That takes quite the effort to accomplish. Even still, you coulda made up for all that / corrected the combined flop/turn mistakes by simply jamming the river (when it is actually fairly obvious at this point that the only hand that is going to call any bet is Ax plus there's actually a decent chance that is what he has).

Gnotyourbestmoment,imo,butweallhavethemG

If we bet too large on the river he will have a pretty easy fold with any ace rag.

A guy who is just "bleeding down" and the pile of chips in the middle of the pot looks about as big as the pile of chips we're pushing in?

GIdoubtitG

Agree with this.

There's also this, from OP: "We've been running bad this session and people could see us as tilted. Our KK and AA have been beaten x3 and people have taken note."

So, hero's table image is tilty-spewy, and V is a loose-passive, bleeding down who double-flatted a 5x open and a 5x 3B pre, and hasn't bet despite hero checking to him twice. If we were ever in a spot to over-bet the river and actually get paid, this is it.