2/5 ~ How big of a punt is this hand?

I mean...who here is folding JJ when hero uses this sizing on each street?

Maybe just fold pre. But it gets harder on each subsequent street when hero is using small sizing and laying him a price.

He called you down when he hit a set, even though it would be set over set if you really had AA or KK. That doesn't mean that you don't lose a lot of action from a reg when you limp/3! AA/KK/AK.

about a decade ago there used to be a poster in here with the screen name icantfoldsets and I'm pretty much always in that camp unless it's eye wateringly obvious. which it isn't here.

I mean if your claim is that we are better off opening and having people call us with medium-deep stacks and position and that we are going to be in better shape than if we limp/raised, I think with these stack sizes that is unclear. I do think if we are significantly deeper we should shelve the limp/raise.

There is a problem limp/3!ing without a balanced range at 2/5 and higher versus regs. It is helpful to build the pot, but can be exploited if they have a good idea what you have. The fact that this guy wasn't able to fold a set doesn't contradict that.

The hand is sort of a cooler. If hero opened AK and called a 3! or 4!, he probably gets stacked too. If AK opens and JJ flats, maybe all the money doesn't go in. When he calls on the AK board after the limp/3!, you should be a little worried, but hard to control pot OOP at that point.

Sigh. I guess I'll do the sub cosplay today.

As I've said before, everyone lovingly looks at the solver output when it does bluffs but completely ignores that it is way more conservative here.

Like if MP opens then at 200bb SB only 3bets AKo like 20-25%, and that goes down vs. EP. BB 3bets less vs. MP than SB does vs. EP and pure calls EP opens.

Hard to model what EP limp/3bet range should be but I would assume a lot that AKo is very low freq, if it exists. About the only thing going for it is that limp/3bet is heavily weighted to KK+ from population, so as a live exploit it might be okay ... as long as you realize/remember what your range looks like postflop.

Flop size in 3bet pot OOP is more like 20-25%, because we don't want to pile money in vs. JJ and get QQ to snap fold. Also we have at least KK, and are probably supposed to have KTs or K7s or something.

Think about your range more on turn, yeh top two is nice ... but it might be the literal bottom of your range for this line, where AA/KK/JJ are all doing much better vs fish button clicking 44. Maybe you are playing the limp/3bet strat. "well" and also have two combos. of A4s, but that isn't enough balance.

Maybe not that bad when you add two combos. of AKs, but 9 combos. of AK is now the majority of your value range.

Pretending V is a fish for calling it off with JJ is pretty funny when, from V's POV, H has maybe 6 combos. of better hands and at least 9 combos. of worse.

Saying this is a cooler, without reads that V will somehow spew call a bunch of worse hands, seems unlikely to be true. Could argue that we could open+4bet+all-in-pre ... but even then we win all the money 45% of the time, here we put in 90% of the money drawing almost dead which isn't quite the same.

Yeah not at all surprised. Doesn't take a Nostradamus to realize you lost the hand and ran into JJ but I do genuinely think people are making a massive mistake writing this off as a cooler.

I simply couldn't disagree more, I think our pre-flop line is awful and forced us into this spot and there's no way we're good when 220bb go into the middle vs a reg.

Couldn't disagree more. Hate pre, hate post. The idea that villain is a fish because he called down JJ is negated by the fact that hero bet 220bb into a range that only consists of JJ/QQ/KK.

I understand what you're saying but I genuinely do not understand the conclusion to treat this as a normal 3bp when the EP LRR is one of the most notorious strong hand moves ever. So much so that even recs know this line.

How many UTG LRR showdowns have you seen where it wasn't KK+? Genuinely asking.

As for the highlighted, what range does GTOW give v?

Meh I disagree but not sure it's worth discussing the reveal due to the nature of 2p2. We can almost always assume someone lost the hand when they're asking ''how big a punt is this'' so I'm sure most here were expecting JJ. I'm mostly just surprised people are still defending pre and post with the idea that Vs range is wider than JJ+ whilst ignoring stack depth.

Even if I was to agree with pre-flop ranges which I obv don't, I don't think we'll be winning a lot once we put 220bb in the middle.

Plenty if you include me being the LRR 😀

Otherwise, yeah I get your point but it's kind of a weird asymmetry because I could equivalently say "how wide do I see people call when I LRR" and the answer is that it's pretty similar to what they call if I 3b the BB.

I think population-wise LRRs are incredibly tight and strong and the defense to them is not adjusted for this. So there's a bit of a catch-22 here where we have to break the fourth wall and either assume V is someone who is aware of the population trend and is exploiting it, or assume that V is the population. That's obviously a judgment call on how to interpret the hand, and more than anything I'm just curious on what the hand looks like if we treat it like a normal 3bp. If we give V a range of TT-QQ plus a bit of AK/KK reaching the flop, it's just a less interesting hand.

(I'm not entirely sure if we agree about the population response to a LRR, but if the argument is it's actually very tight the question becomes why aren't you open-limping a 10-15% range and 3-betting it all pure?)

V's defend range is actually fairly reasonable for my opinion of population: ATs-AKs, A5s, KQs, and decent fractions of AA, AKo, A4s, 66-TT, and 54s-JTs. Humans aren't flatting A4s-A5s specifically, probably never flat AA, etc. and show up with more QJs/AQo type stuff that the solver folds pure, but I don't think it's wildly unrealistic.

Sim is a little less reliable IMO because of Hero's wacky polar 3-bet range of KK+/AKs, less than half of AKo and then a huge variety of suited hands (A2-A7, KT-KQ, Q9-QJ, suited connectors and some gappers) all at low frequency. I could be mistaken about optimal strategy from the BB versus actual live opponents but I am usually 3-betting much more linear here and have to imagine any hypothetical variant of OP is here too.

Yeah I think we've arrived at the disconnect here. We're basically polar opposites. I play in games I rarely see LRR and the few times I have it was an old lady playing her AA exactly how we'd expect her to play it. I'm basically stuck in 2009 or something.

I'm of the ''we never limp'' generation. Raised during the online boom and took that skillset to the live tables. I'm also for that reason the easiest to exploit ever with LRR as I do a lot of folding vs them. I don't actually never limp behind but I can confidently say I have never LRR in my life lol.

Thanks and fair enough. I obviously disagree with this range but I did concede in an earlier response to you I just haven't played enough LRR hands to deviate from ''it's always KK+''.

So yeah conclusion, I might be the worst person to comment on this lol.

Yeah it's also fair that you might play in high enough stakes that makes open limping always bad - and it's almost certainly terrible in 6max online. I mainly do it as an exploit against the generation of regs and trying recs who have been taught to "punish limping" because this is exactly the wrong thing to do versus a tight open-limp. A deviation where the correct response is "fold more" tends to be really hard for population to counter, even the better regs.

And yeah, I'm not even saying OP definitely should count V for calling wide here, just that I'm curious what the right play is in that case since it's kind of boring to analyze a hand where V has <20 possible combos OTF.

@Pablito - you called it.

As for the rest, way too much to respond to everything, but...

The LRR from an obviously tight player always cracks me up, whether I see it at 1/3 or 2/5, because it's almost invariably AA/KK, and very often it's just AA. It has to be the most widely known and most face-up play ever.

I would think that within any localized population, there may be some small (maybe 5%) sub-set of low stakes players who are capable of LRR'ing as a bluff (I'm one of them, and I'm not doing it with AK). The reason I know I can get away with it is that even with my trashy image, opponents just always assume it's AA/KK and over-fold.

So, I agree that the low-stakes population over-folds to the LRR. I disagree that the population calls too much. They may call 3B's too much in general (I think that's true), but not limp-3B's from EP. They tend to over-fold to those.

When they call the limp-3B from EP, I'd have to think the range is going to be strong, predominantly made up of big PP's, and the better suited AX combos. I'd think the range would only vary slightly, largely dependent on starting stack depth, and I suppose any meta / reads or table dynamics.

What makes this hand challenging to analyze is that we don't know V's view of it. In theory, he shouldn't be calling with any PP's if he thinks he's set-mining, because we weren't deep enough. I'd think he'd be more likely to show up with some suited AX. But if V thinks hero may be FOS - and I think hero's 3B size may push V that way - he may widen his calling range. Yet it's impossible for us to guess how wide it gets.

I suppose all that is a long way of saying (as I already tried to say in earlier replies) that AK/AQs/AJs/AA/KK/JJ all seem like they could conceivably be in V's range getting to the turn, if we're just trying to guess what V is doing in response to what hero shouldn't be doing but was doing.

Like, if we start with the assumption that the LRR is just always AA/KK, and we force V to have that same assumption, then he should literally only have AA here, and nothing else. I emphatically agree the fact that he showed up with JJ doesn't make it a cooler, but it does confirm my earlier assessment that this hand was off the rails from the jump.

All due deference to Pablito for pointing out that V should have JJ if all the money goes in on the river, V shouldn't have JJ on the flop, if V is only doing what he "should" do. If V is showing up on the river with JJ, he could show up with more hands that were dominated by AA pre, including KK/AK/AQ/AJs, and none of those hands should feel great getting stacks in if the underlying assumption is that hero is only repping AA/KK.

It's not a cooler if V thinks hero's LRR is NOT always AA/KK, and therefore he'll continue wider. Which is why we shouldn't be screwing around LRR'ing for a "take my money" small sizing with AK, and then using "here, have some more" big bet sizes post.

So should we x/f the turn or x/f the river?

Are you asking me?

I don't see how we do either. We're pure guessing what V is doing. How do we fold when V could be doing some street poker BS because we started it with our pre flop action?

This hand is 4 out of 5 Bananas on the Stupid Banana scale of WTF is going on in this hand.

It would be a 5/5 if OP x-jammed flop over a big stab from V.

It would barely register if OP just RFI'd pre, flat-called a 3B from V, and then just got taken to value town by check-calling every street post.

Honestly that's a good question. I'm not sure what the best line is I just never arrive to the flop, turn or river this way.

"I'd never do this."

"Okay, but assume you did do it. What would you do next?"

Fwiw, I did some sims giving OOP a more linear Ace-heavy range.

Versus the GTOW IP calling range it's pretty bet-bet-jam happy (although real Vs possibly overfold earlier streets). Versus an IP calling range of TT-QQ plus 50% of KK/AK, the solver will still check/call most of three streets with AK, mixing calling a river overbet jam with specialty focus on suits and we can probably fold versus a typical underbluffing Villain.

lol. Sims don't consider how strong a range the limp/3! is perceived to be by a reg.

Somewhat results oriented views with this hand. However, limp/3!ing AK fairly deep is just awful. You could maybe have a reasonably limp/3! range, but AK should not be in it.

Checking the new posts…

A time ago, I had As5s and the flop was Ad9h5c and like many of you can imagine, I jammed into 4players and was called by 9c9s
Lost way more than necessary
I have at least slowed some with 2pair

Sometimes I’m not clear on what posters think is optimal - I get what they don’t like, but not a suggestion of a better way.

Like I said, I’m not a limper
However, after this post, I am considering limping UTG, just so I can re-raise bluff. Always looking for good bluffing opportunities and it sounds like easy money.

Raise pre to a std. size; get called; bet 1/2 pot on flop HU or preflop size multiway and probably get raised even though there are no draws ... shrug fold and lose ~10bb.

I somewhat recently spoke to a reg. at Mohegan who said she had a genius plan to win money at poker, she'd go to a casino where nobody knew her and limp shove with A5s/A4s. She was laughing as she said it, but in kind of an evil genius way.

If hero raised, it might be a 3! or 4! pot. Villain doesn't necessarily raise his set on an ace high board, and hero doesn't always for TPTK or top 2 pair to a raise. When you make top two pair, it wouldn't be easy to fold.

It is possible to use as a bluff with a suited connector or something. Way better than with AK.