You Made Me Play It, Now I Want The Pot
$1/$2/$10 button straddle
Friday late afternoon. Table has been playing quite passive, as usual Hero has been pushing mos
Good check back.
I don't think the auto-fold range has a lot of Ah in it. I think AhXx with no pair donks as a bluff at some frequency, and AhXx with a pair will x/r as a bluff when it has some SDV. It looks like he may have been going for the x/r here.
Not betting the flop with only the straddler left to act with the hand CO has is absolutely criminal, deserves to lose to someone randomly rivering a 3.
People aren't as predictable as you think in this sort of spot. You'll get called down a lot with stuff like sets, 2 pair, top pair, even occasionally slow played or scared flushes. This is especially true if you have a maniacal image, which you almost certainly do because this is a maniac play. Your range is any two cards and you're bluffing into five players with a hand that
Curious enough to run some numbers here.. giving the other hands a 50/5 range (50th-95th percentile hands, just going to use standard-ish strength rather than try to guesstimate fish range), each hand is: 6.5% 2p or better (4.8% flushes), 31.1% flush draws, and 26.7% one pair without a flush draw. Condensed versus 5 opponents, that's a 28.5% chance of 2p+, 84.5% chance of a flush draw, 78.8% chance of a pair without, and 98.7% chance of either of the last two (hence why I think betting flop small one-and-done is terrible).
I think it is fair to assert that we can force any hand worse than two pair to fold by the river, and even on a monotone board a substantial amount of 2p+ hands on the flop will either x/r flop or donk many turns after calling a small flop bet. And a x/r on the flop is never a bluff with something like the bare Ah. I also think we can get some additional money from the pair-or-draw range before getting a fold from a bigger bet. And honestly I think 2p and sets have a tendency to lead monotone boards.
If a fourth heart is a failure case, ~45% of the time this play works facing a clean runout and nobody holding 2p+. And another (I would argue) >15% of the time, we can bet/fold flop and get away from big hands.
Seems to me like a marginal success rate, not going to go deep into analyzing which streets we stop on and how much we win versus risk, etc. The biggest contributors to the marginality though are the prevalence of flushes and the fourth heart completing V's draws, making me think the monotone board is not the greatest to try to pull this off.
Obviously, the above strategy is maximally exploitative of Villains overcalling, over-raising, and under-bluffing this spot and is extremely vulnerable to counter-exploits... but these are fish we're facing.
This is where I was perhaps the most torn because I no longer need to bluff Ahx or Khx without a pair which I think makes up the majority of Vs range. It really sucks to check and V has something like 87 with heart. Given the number of straights that came in, I think jamming to fold out sets+ is off the table.
Yeah, I think checking back or betting a size to get second pair with a heart to fold are both reasonable here. The turn call is heavily weighted to better flush draws that bricked. I don't think a small bet has merit; you'll lose more to better pairs sigh-calling than curious Ace high hands.
Good analysis here, but also the part you forgot to include in your estimates for how likely a multi street bluff is to work is the possibility of getting hero called on the river by one pair. It's already incredibly marginal if you assume they always fold one pair, but they might just call down the maniac in the straddle because they don't believe him. Also the limp ranges are not well defined, so there's no real way to know which cards improve them (other than the obvious heart).
I'm curious how this hand would have played out if we hadn't rivered the 3? A jam probably gets through but there's a chance the Ah2 might have check raised all in as a bluff or even hero called facing a pot-sized bet? I'm all for taking the max-exploit lines where it's warranted but this is going too far, IMO.
Good analysis here, but also the part you forgot to include in your estimates for how likely a multi street bluff is to work is the possibility of getting hero called on the river by one pair. It's already incredibly marginal if you assume they always fold one pair, but they might just call down the maniac in the straddle because they don't believe him. Also the limp ranges are
Yeah, I wouldn't credit my fish for either calling down 9x (especially if it gets demoted to second pair) or bluffing the bare Ah at any point. In my pool, a player capable of either gets identified quickly and I agree it's not good to run this play with them in the pot. If you're substantially concerned about opponents doing either of these things, then I agree with you.
Also good point about being in the straddle. I don't have a button straddle at my room and am much less likely to try this from OOP in the BB, so in this kind of spot I've overlimped IP and don't have the "maniac could have ATC" tag. And unclear if this 5x straddle is always on, or $10-$15 already feels "like a real bet" for the table, etc. The dynamics for an actual min bet closing the action triggering x/r could be quite different.
