QQ 10/25/50 9967T

River seems like an easy fold.

I think it is pretty tough because we are quite shallow and we have checked to a whale who might auto bluff and the board has become better to bluff each street.

Some Vs, might find a check otr with hands like A9 or K9, and also might (probably should) bet smaller.

But 9t 98 88 86, 77, 66 etc make sense.

Also some of his bluffs have run into show down value. 7t. At. He might also have some 1 pair hands that shut it down now like A6.

He's been playing pretty normally and not just haphazardly dumping money in the pot. And you're kinda hoping he is just going for it with A2 and 54, so I think you can fold.

Also: kinda dislike the flop check. We are shallow and likely to be called by any pair or any draw. If someone has a 9 whatever. Turn cards like an ace can either beat us or kill our action.

yeah, I think this is a cbet spot

It's a bluff catcher, so call some / fold some based on reads, tells and gameflow. Don't think we can really help you out based on information provided.

Just repeating what others have already said.

Flop is a pretty standard cbet.
By checking, you turn your hand into a bluff catcher and, as such, you should have some sort of a plan.

OTR, you have to be good ~33% of the times to justify a call, so it's about V's bluffing frequency.
Unfortunately, without knowing V, I doubt anyone can give any solid advice.

The exercise isn't finding specific combos they would bluff with. Any two random ass broadways are bluff candidates.

The question is will they actually triple those hands? Whales certainly will so it's a mandatory snap against most, but this is just a rumored whale who hasn't gotten OOL in some unknown timeframe so who knows.

I personally trust *my* reads over rumored table reads and would just fold, but I also don't necessarily trust HH reads over rumored table reads for largely the same reasons so [shrug].

I think the line is good and river is just dependent on what all the other posters said mostly. Game flow, live tells and feel are all in play here.

Well that's having an insane live read - for someone to show up with KQ here for example they'd have to be out of their minds blasting away when our range is still uncapped. If you have that knowledge then this thread is pointless - if we're going to assume the opponent has a brain then we have a discussion.

The exact matter up for debate is whether or not villain has a brain. FWIW, I'm inclined to think they're *not* out of their minds and so I would fold.

If you're properly protecting your checking range you should have plenty of 66-TT, A9s, K9s, a little 9Ts, 98s, and 87s so you don't have to call a hand like this on the river. If you aren't properly protecting your checking range, flop prob works best as a range bet.

Disagree with those who said to cbet on the flop. OOP vs 3 players, definitely a range check.

Easy fold on the river.

Well, this just isn't true. In theory you're calling with plenty of A6+, and I honestly prefer a strong absolute value hand over blockers here since whales will show up with the most preposterous value-bluffs on this sorta runout.

The only question is whether they're airballing or not. If they are, they're overbluffing and you should snap with all bluff catchers (except maybe like 76- type stuff that might lose to a "bluff"). If they're not, they're underbluffing and you fold all these.

Again, I'm personally not stacking off based on scuttlebutt alone, but it doesn't take *much* more than that to make this a call.

I swear putting people on ranges makes them worse at poker at a certain level lol.

Ok uh, what isn't true? That OP should have a bunch of much stronger hands to call with in his range, or that he doesn't have to call with QQ, which is one of his worst bluff catchers?

That we should have enough "66-TT, A9s, K9s, a little 9Ts, 98s, and 87s" to not have to call anything else in theory.

I guess if what you're saying is that we should bluff catch here but QQ is outranked by other bluff catchers, then our disagreement is very narrow.

Again, I happen to disagree because I'm not shocked when a fish flips some incomprehensible range merge like T7 or their own 76 here. But also, I think ranking bluff catchers is a highly overrated solver-brained endeavor to begin with, especially in live poker where you just have to look at your opponent and see if they're nervous or not lol. I think literally any informational input (tells, MDA, gameflow, HUD stats, variance aversion because you're shot-taking, etc) is going to far outweigh the actual EV difference between QQ and 76 (which, even in theory world, is literally 0.0).

But again, that's narrow grounds for our disagreement to be on, so sorry if I overstated how clean cut I thought your misstatement was.

It's a weird argument because it's all moot anyway if villain is just a buttoned down player that other people at the table have bad reads on. But even if we agree it's a fold, I think our rationale and the factors going into our decision flow are going to be important to reliably apply good advice in game.

At 72 bbs?

I'm way more worried about missing value against PPs, 6s draws and highly optimistic calls than getting stacked by a 9. You also might be successfully bluffed on a lot of runnouts.

I guess you could do tons of checking if you think Vs will bluff too much or value bet worse a lot but QQ seems like one of the worst candidates.

So many turns out draw us, kill our action or allow us to be bluffed.

Lmao bro I never once used the words theory or solver, everything I've said is straight up basic poker strategy. QQ is a **** call here because you have tons of better hands and tons of better bluff catchers, ideas that people were implementing long before gto ever became a thing. If you consider that "theory" insofar that you're going to grind your little axe about it then you might as well just stick to "decide based on vibes" for literally every decision you're ever approached with in this game.

Kinda feels like I was steel manning your argument. In the absence of theoretical constructs, why would it matter how far you are from the top of your range? I can assure you nobody talked like that before Applications of NLHE because what would "have to call a hand like this" even mean in a world before MDF?

Sorry if it feels like I have an axe to grind with you. I'd be the first to say I'm an inveterate reply guy, and there just aren't enough interesting hands posted on this forum to sustain my compulsion for arguing here.

No, you weren't steel manning my argument lmfao. You've got a really ****ing bad habit of assuming what other people are thinking and saying, all while ignoring their words or adding your own. Like you literally call me a liar, then claim you're steel manning my argument all while sticking it in a nice little compartment where you can freely throw a tantrum about gto. A compartment I've been actively rejecting. Absolutely disingenuous, blatantly and intentionally so.

The most obvious of which is how many people were saying you need to consider ranges, not individual hands. MDF is an extension of that idea and that idea existed long before solvers were a thing. You've literally never heard "You kinda have to call here" prior to solvers? Again, disingenuous.

Given the fact you're an "inveterate" reply guy (leak btw, that's not a good thing), I think I'm gonna go ahead and stop here as it's utterly pointless. Peace.

Interesting spot. He's a whale as in he's loose passive and when he bets big he's nutted? Or he's a whale as in he's always splashing about and over-values his hands?

On paper, he's supposed to have a really strong hand here when he bets the flop, but it's hard to figure out what strong hands on the flop keep betting big when a one-liner comes in. He's mostly repping boats or a straight draw that got there.

I dunno. We played our hand like we were bluff catching, and now I'm not sure we're strong enough to bluff catch.

Think we might have been better off blocking the river and folding to a raise, maybe? As played, I kinda want to make a disrespectful fold.

Sorry I called you a liar. I sincerely did not mean to or think that I did.

I do love chatting language and logic and so it's a bummer to not get into the history of "theory" going all the way back to 1978 looooong before solvers--that'd be real fun for me even if it would be taking away time from wrapping up my work week and helping my wife prep for Thanksgiving.

But I certainly see your point that going back and forth would be pointless, and I agree that there should be peace (and love [and apple sauce]). And more importantly, it's unfair to OP as it's a bit of a sidebar from the HH (though I do genuinely think a fundamental misunderstanding on bluffs and bluff catchers is muddying the water on what the decision flow should be in this and similar spots).

But maybe some day in some thread two people (not necessarily you and not even necessarily me) will come together and hash that out, and what a beautiful moment it will be.

Alright so I fucked up uploading the gif, but I think I'm just gonna keep it that way. It feels somehow perfect. Something that was meant to be a fun li'l meme but through some tragic twist it got lost in digital translation, and Will Farrell's just left there despondently staring straight ahead, muttering the once-funny line like Bart being forced to say "I didn't do it" for the 500th time.

Even this post seems oddly fitting, trying to judo my own fuck-up into a serendipitously fitting argument (if you REALLY think about it).

Enjoy the rest of the thread, y'all, I'm going to go satisfy my other compulsion: masturbating at myself in the mirror to an audio mashup of all the times someone has called me a smart and funny boy when they didn't know I was recording.

Okay, to get us back on track and to more clearly illustrate what I think are the important inputs and what an alternative to old-fashioned ranging looks like, here's a matrix I started to build:

The wider villain's preflop range is (B2)* and the more they bluff with air (B18), the higher your EV for a bluff catch overall will be. And the more they make merged bets (B21), the more QQ will be preferred over A6 as a bluff catching hand. (But A6/76 type hands will have less combos in the value columns, and so the more strictly polar our opponent is, the higher those numbers will be.)

Obviously I haven't populated the rows, and I gave up (for now) on building out the framework I got to the river branches, so this isn't actually a functional tool (yet). But hopefully it's useful for illustrative purposes to show how very specific ranging doesn't matter when villain might just click buttons with K5s or whatever.

If you don't think villain is a button clicker (because you haven't observed them clicking buttons and "whale" can mean so many things and other people suck at reads anyway and they have some incentive to deceive, etc), then B18 is going to be a very low number, and you just shouldn't bluff catch any hand full stop.

You should also note that the likelihood of them bluffing all 3 streets with air will decrease exponentially as B18 decreases, making broken lines the more likely overbluffed lines.

Whether you agree or disagree with actually using a spreadsheet to precisely calculate different thresholds for different factors, I think a matrix like this essentially captures all the relevant factors for any sound justification for a call/fold, and a forum response to a HH is just translating that into English (and the rest is semantics and egos).

Even my most vibes based comments are speaking to how you can downwardly adjust the value combos, and my case is that this will have bigger effects on your calling decision than factors not captured in this matrix.

*Having a wider range won't actually have much effect here since this board and runout hits the wide preflop calling range hard, so it's going to add pretty equally across their range.

All of this in depth discussion warrants a reveal on how the hand ended.