$1/$3 — Tricky River With AA

In general speech is indicative of strong hand, though sometimes if they've been quiet and see you tanking and want to discourage a call, bluffers may say something. Not sure that is an uber strong tell though.

By River, I'm not sure he has many bluffs in his range here. Perhaps AJ (but you block that). I just don't think he has many bluffs here. He's going to have mostly made hands - big hands that want value, along with single pair hands that mosty likely would want to get to showdown (like QJ). Also persistent bluffers don't tend to say things like "I'm the only one who bluffs". So, I think I just let this go on the River.

Turn is also interesting, I get the check, but I think I might continue here.

Also don't show your hand to him unless you're pretty sure you are confident it will get you good reads.

Open limping UTG is bad. Limp-calling a big raise is bad. So based on this hand alone, I would say this player is loose passive calling station.

I’m good with preflop and flop. On the turn, you are ahead and could get calls from KJ, KT, QT if V truly is a station. But KQ, JT, and 99 are also in his range. I check call.

I fold the river. Open-limp pre followed by a call has a lot of Kx. What is he bluffing with here?

Don’t show your cards.

So your villain is a vain blowhard with a stack of frequent-flyer miles. Big ****ing deal. If he had the bankroll or the stones, he'd be somewhere playing 2/5 or higher.

He's not Daniel Negreanu. Of course you had AA — nothing else makes sense there. He has Kx or 99. Let it walk.

well you said hes a thinking player and your range is capped (you never have a full house or straight), so do with that what you will.

personally i find it hard to believe he would turn Qx into a bluff here but some players spazz when checked to.

With smaller monsters OOP vs 4 limpers I might go slightly bigger preflop to offer that poorer of IO, but with AA we really want action so I'm fine with preflop.

SPR is 4 and we've got an overpair, plus the combinations of likely sets are small (although KQ/JT is real enough), and we're up against someone who we're guessing can bluff. So even though I'm a little uncomfortable here, I think I'm feeling committed for stacks. So the only question is how to go about getting them in.

The board isn't that drawy, although there are some action/hand killing cards. This board should often smack us (so I'm not so sure how often he takes the bait if we check). Think overall I'd probably lean to getting stacks in with 3 reasonable bets. So I'm cool with our flop bet.

Some of the hands you listed on the turn don't beat us. Against someone who may bluff, I don't mind showing some weakness here after a weakish looking cbet. There is some value in just check/calling it off to keep his bluffings / value owning stuff in. Although pretty much any face card can kill action/hand, so could also jam at this point too and follow thru with the commitment plan.

Ug, gross river as now all his value owning hands become value town hands. So now we really have to hope he floated the flop kinda wideish to use this nice bluff card. The problem is that there isn't a lotta airballs he can get past the flop with (even J9/T9 often just take their showdown value). But could also just go back to preflop where we setup a commitment spot, and perhaps sigh call... but there are a heckuva lotta reasonable combos that now beat us.

I typically don't read anything into speech play.

GgrossspotG

While I don't have a problem with a turn bet, this isn't the reason to do so, imo. We're perfectly fine showing we're uncomfortable with our hand if that's going to cause our opponent to put in money when behind (and meanwhile we don't want to show we're comfortable with our hand if that's going to get our opponent to fold worse).

GcluelessbetreasoningnoobG

Agreed, sometimes turn check is not about being uncomfortable, but about pot control and easier to call by river. In this way V would be more hesitant to try to bluff on later streets, instead of auto bluffing when you go check on a wet board with a capped range.

For this hand, once he puts you on AAs, he should know how hard it is for average 1/3 player to fold AA facing aggression. For that reason, I lean towards fold. I do think he has the capability to turn Qx into a bluffing hand by river, but the betting size would be bigger in case he is bluffing I imagine.

The speech itself is probably worthless, we have too little samples to actually interpret anything out of it.

Why not to show our hand?

Turn bet seems ok.

Results:

So after 4 mins tanking and all the table looking at our hand, I end up making the call and villain mucks his hand while saying "Good call".

Kind of regretting showing my hand because at least I could've seen his when I called.

Maybe some pocker pairs like JJ, TT make sense to me. Or some gutshot or some weak Q. Can't see any other hand here.

My reasoning was that if he had :

- KQ, KJ, KT or 99 he would x-raise the flop. Worse Ks than those, I doubt he would limp preflop and call my raise.
- KK or QQ is out of the question since they would open-raise and not limp
- Pocket pairs like TT, JJ, 88,77...etc seem to be his hands.

So according to this analysis and him being a bit bluffy, I called thinking that we only lose to JT which is in his range.

My main thought is that Villain is terrible at poker. There is no hand that he should be limp calling with preflop UTG, especially at this depth.

By the time you get to the river, you should be careful about entirely ruling out holdings based on the way that Villain played his hand preflop. Bad players do all kinds of stupid **** preflop.

As for the table talk, it's player dependent. For some players, I'd read it as weakness. From others, I'd read it as strength. I'd ignore it unless you have played enough with this guy to have a sense of what it means.

V talks about how average 1/3 player plays fit or fold, then goes limp calling pre, call cbet, bet turn got called, decided to bluff river hoping H folds his hand which has AA, AK, AQ in the range. The bluff itself is not terrible but if he believes in his perception of average 1/3 players he should really do this with less frequency.

Somewhat tangentially what are the rules in terms of asking him or dealer to show a mucked hand?

I've never tried and I assume it may be seen as an arsehole move.

Grunch:

I got as far as our "knows his stuff" V open-limped from UTG and then called our raise when all my mental gears seized up.

I mean...where the eff does he get off talking trash about 1/3 as he's playing 1/3? Eff that guy.

Anyhooo...

PRE - I mean...obviously raise.

I'd almost always go bigger than $25 when there are 4 limpers in the pot already, and we'll be first to act post. How big I'd go would depend on the stack depths, my reads, and how splashy the game was playing, but...at least $30 as a default, and maybe $35 as a default if I think my image is as doo-doo as it so often seems to be.

If the game is playing "eff you and your silly raise" splashy, I'm making it $40 and praying someone was going for a limp-3B.

FLOP - we're HU and OOP as the PFR in a SRP, and the board comes KQ9rb? Just check.

Our hand doesn't need any protection. We could already be behind. It works well enough as a bluff catcher. If V wants to FAFO, I say let him. He really shouldn't be bluffing at anywhere near the correct frequency on this board, which is to say, he's not going to be bluffing anywhere near often enough for us to be scared he's going to blow us off the best hand by triple-barreling with geometric sizing holding a hand worse than ours.

If you're going to c-bet from OOP, either go much smaller, or much larger. Almost half-pot isn't doing anything to define V's range, at all.

TURN - I wouldn't often get here the way you did, but if I did get here the way you did, I'd probably barrel for a small size, planning to check-call most rivers.

My reasoning is that if we check he's going to bet at a high frequency, and we'll just be guessing about what to do. If we bet large, he just folds all his garbage and continues with hands that are either ahead of ours or drawing to a better hand. So just bet small, like 1/2 pot, and see if he wants to FAFO by raising, which I wouldn't expect him to do with worse than top 2P.

RIVER - As played to this point, after raising pre, c-betting the flop, and check-calling the turn, it looks like we have some kind of hand, so if he was betting with something strong, I'd think his thick value would either go much smaller, or much bigger. This sizing looks a little too in-between to me, and I'd be inclined to bluff-catch, because we induced him to bluff with our line.

His speech would make me even more inclined to call. If he was concerned you'd fold, he wouldn't want to appear relaxed enough to talk to you. If I'd heard him running his mouth about being a globe-trotting crusher and the only guy at the table who could bluff, that would just align with me thinking he's a little too comfortable running his mouth, even in spots where others would be too nervous to even look at you. If he was bluffing, and wanted you to fold, I'd expect him to be quiet as a church mouse.

Now off to read the rest...

Woo-hoo!!! I was right! Yay, me!

As a general heuristic, when someone runs their mouth at the table, I think they end up playing tighter, whereas if they bluff too much, they'll try to look stoic. But either way, when we give them rope, even if they play tighter, they're going to start bluffing on "scary" boards, because they tell themselves they can rep something scary, and they think they can out-play the other low-stakes fish.

This guy's story doesn't hold up when he limps UTG pre, then calls our raise, and our 1/2 pot c-bet, then he starts betting "big" (what fish think is big, or more than 1/2 pot) on the turn, when we slow down and check. If he was nutted he'd bet smaller to make sure we call, or bigger because he's greedy. This line and sizing from a low-stakes rec screams "weak bluff".

I don't think he's doing this with JJ or TT. Probably not QX. Those hands would be happy to get to showdown, IP. And I'd think he's just opening all his PP's from 77+, maybe even down to 22+, and most of those just fold on the flop.

This is something that wasn't good enough to raise pre, that he knows is no good on the turn, like a gutshot with a trashy pair - J9 or T9 would be my guess.