[2NL] 6m AA OOP rivers nut flush on baby flush board

[daviddem]

Villain is 25/21/3.5Agg, fold to 3b 33% (1/3), 92% cbet, fold to cbet 33% (1/3)

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold'em, $0.02 BB (5 handed) - Full Tilt Converter Tool from Play Online Poker, Site Reviews & Poker Forum | FlopTurnRiver.com

saw flop

SB ($2.90)
Hero (BB) ($2)
UTG ($1.02)
MP ($3.89)
Button ($2.26)

Preflop: Hero is BB with A, A
1 fold, MP bets $0.06, 2 folds, Hero raises to $0.19, MP calls $0.13

Flop: ($0.39) 7, J, 5 (2 players)
Hero bets $0.24, MP calls $0.24

Turn: ($0.87) 3 (2 players)
Hero bets $0.50, MP calls $0.50

River: ($1.87) Q (2 players)
Hero ?? ($1.07 behind)

Discuss best way to get the rest of the money in.

edit: as a sidenote, I'd have a hard time rivering a nut flush with AA if it was not a baby flush board... dumb me

[supa]

Bet $1.07

[MadMojoMonkey]

jam turn

as played

[rpm]

bigger pre. river is a clear jam imo

[daviddem]

Why jam the turn?

rpm do you always 3b bigger than pot OOP?

Does he ever call a river jam if he is not holding a ? I don't like checking because we loose a ton of value if he checks behind, but on the upside I am pretty sure he would bet any if we check, and possibly bluff if he is not holding one.

How about a smaller bet as a compromise between checking and shoving? He might call it even if he does not have a flush or shove over with a or even shove as a bluff over a seemingly weak bet?

I am probably overthinking it though and just shoving is probably right.

[Hoopy]

Does he ever call a river jam if he is not holding a ? I don't like checking because we loose a ton of value if he checks behind, but on the upside I am pretty sure he would bet any if we check, and possibly bluff if he is not holding one.

I think he folds everything but a decent heart to a river jam, and probably will only bet with the Kh unless you have a read he likes thin value.

[The Bean Counter]

$0.24 pre for value since early signs are that villain doesn't like to fold once he's in a hand (plus we're oop).

Not jamming river as we won't get called apart from maybe Kh. Would bet small (maybe $0.25) to hopefully induce a jam or at least get a crying call from Jx.

[spoonitnow]

I like how the hand is played as long as we shove the river. Three-bet size could be slightly larger OOP pre-flop, but that's about it.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Why jam the turn?

'Cause for some reason I thought you were IP and stationing down.

OK, so I don't recommended open jamming OTT turn OOP,
buuuuuut...
When Hero bets $0.50 OTT, is it for value? Clearly. So Hero is betting to induce a call. Villain called $0.50. Will Villain call $0.52?... $0.60?... $0.70?... $0.80? Many Villains will call any of these bets and barely notice the difference.

I think you can bet more OTT and expect the same call... so while a jam is a ridiculous overbet, and probably too big, there's more value to be had OTT, in my opinion.

The more you can get in OTT, the lower SPR's OTR, making it more likely that Villain will make a crying call with a wider range.

[JKDS]

I like the turn sizing. Villains likely range is Jx, overpairs, naked heart, maybe some bizarre pair+stdr, and i think its very hard for him to continue in a 3bet pot for more.

I disagree with mmm's reasoning, just because you dont know what villain's threshold is. Like, if he couldnt call fast enough...then ok a little more is great. But this could have been a crying call ott, and even just a little more may have got you a fold instead.

For the river...i think you're being results oriented.

[rpm]

rpm do you always 3b bigger than pot OOP?

i don't generally think in terms of what "pot" is preflop, i just have standard sizings i use as default unless i've got a reason to deviate. for me 3.5xOOP is "standard" and i'll go bigger/smaller when my opponents is going to play badly by calling or folding too much and is unlikely to exploit my sizing

[Icanhastreebet]

No brainer river shove.

[brucesmall]

Well, why not just go all in, if he has called every other bet, why the hell would he not this bet? Imo he is sitting on a mid pair, or connectors that are suited....What'd he have??

[spoonitnow]

What is your river range?

[daviddem]

Do you mean river betting range or range when getting to the river after betting the turn?

It's going to be quite hard to do because I cannot remember whether I was ready to 3b light preflop vs this villain. Can I do it assuming I was not going to 3b light?

[spoonitnow]

Do you mean river betting range or range when getting to the river after betting the turn?

It's going to be quite hard to do because I cannot remember whether I was ready to 3b light preflop vs this villain. Can I do it assuming I was not going to 3b light?

I mean your range when you get to the river. The point of knowing this is that you can come up with ideas about how to play your range in this situation. This is more important (and more instructive) than trying to figure out how to play individual hands.

[daviddem]

So let's say I do not 3b light pre, I would 3b 99+,AT+, KQs preflop for value vs this particular villain's button opening range.

I probably cbet the whole range OTF, except 99, TT which I would c/c.

OTT I barrel JJ+, AhT+, AJ, KhQh. So I guess that is my river range.

How do I play this range OTR?

- bet AhT+, KhQh, KhK, AhA
- c/c or c/f non heart AJ, JJ+ depending on bet sizing

[spoonitnow]

KhQh isn't in your river range because the Qh came. Aside from that, is there any particular reason that you're never bluffing here? That you're never checking a strong flush?

[daviddem]

I'm not bluffing with this range because all my hands are well ahead of his folding range.

I tend to check the weaker part of the range because it has very good showdown value vs his check behind range, and I can sometimes play it as a bluff catcher.

I don't like checking the top of the range because he probably checks behind with most of his range except strong hearts (realistically only Kh, maybe Th) and bluffs, and there are not that many of these.

edit: however shoving looks very strong on this board, and I could only really expect a call from Kh, which is why the idea of a smaller bet to either get some value from a wider part of his range, or induce a bluff-shove.

[spoonitnow]

I'm not bluffing with this range because all my hands are well ahead of his folding range.

I tend to check the weaker part of the range because it has very good showdown value vs his check behind range, and I can sometimes play it as a bluff catcher.

I don't like checking the top of the range because he probably checks behind with most of his range except strong hearts (realistically only Kh, maybe Th) and bluffs, and there are not that many of these.

edit: however shoving looks very strong on this board, and I could only really expect a call from Kh, which is why the idea of a smaller bet to either get some value from a wider part of his range, or induce a bluff-shove.

@bold, if this is true, then you should bluff more.

[spoonitnow]

I'm not bluffing with this range because all my hands are well ahead of his folding range.

This isn't necessarily true, and even if it was, you don't have to be behind his folding range to have a good bluff. You're saying that he'll probably fold some flushes on this board. You could even make his life difficult for playing a king-high flush if you wanted.

I'm up late and can't sleep, so I started playing around with this for myself. Long story short, in the below spoiler tags, I use some math to find close-to-perfectly-balanced strategies for Hero on the river in this hand assuming all bets are shoves. This balances both the shoving range and the checking range. I just did this for fun, but I figured I'd post it since someone might get something from it.

...

So for an example balanced strategy, we could shove 13 hands for value, about 5 hands for bluffs, check/fold about 9 hands, check/call about 7 hands as bluff catchers and check/call about 7 nutty hands to balance our checking range for a total of 41 hands.

Here's how we would play this example range based on the number of hand combinations in each range:

Bet 5 pairs of jacks
Check/fold 4 pairs of jacks, 3 pairs of kings and 2 pairs of aces
Check/call 1 pair of aces, 3 sets of jacks, 3 sets of queens
Check/call 3 king-high flushes, 4 ace-high flushes
Bet 13 ace-high flushes

This strategy above seems pretty reasonable.

Anyway, the point isn't to play perfectly balanced anyway. The idea here is to get an idea on what a balanced range looks like so that you can use that as a starting point for deciding how to exploit the guy. If you think that he's going to fold way too much to a shove on this river, for example, then you should make your river range weaker by bluffing more (or possibly value betting less if you think he'll bluff more when you check). Using the reasonable balanced range I gave above as an example, you might decide to bluff with 10 hands instead of five and change your checking range accordingly.

Spoiler: Show

You suggested that your range was approximately JJ+, AhT+, AJ on the river with a board of:

7 J 5 3 Q

Here's how your range breaks down in order of hand strength from lowest to highest with the number of hand combinations in parentheses (assuming you play these hands the same way 100 percent of the time for the sake of example).

AxJx(9), KxKx(3), AxAx(3), JJ(3), QQ(3), KhKx(3), AhAx(3), AhTx(4), AhQx(3), AhKx(4), AhJx(3)

9 - Pair of jacks
3 - Pair of kings
3 - Pair of aces
3 - Three of a kind, jacks
3 - Three of a kind, queens
3 - King-high flush
17 - Ace-high flush

If you shove, your opponent is going to have to make a decision about how to play hands that beat your three of a kind in queens and lose to your king-high flush. Hands that are worse than this are almost always going to fold, and hands that are better than this are almost always going to call. We're targeting the range of hands that he actually makes a decision with.

Without taking out the rake for the sake of simplicity, your opponent will need to be winning at least 1.07/4.01 = 27% percent of the time to make a call with (for example) a ten-high flush if you shove on the river.

Suppose you're betting F combinations of your flushes. To be bluffing 27 percent of the time, you'll need to be betting B combinations of the bottom of your range so that B/(B+F) = 27 percent. A quick calculation gives us a useful formula.

B/(B+F) = 0.27
B = 0.27(B+F)
B = 0.27B + 0.27F
0.73B = 0.27F
B = 0.27F/0.73
B = 0.37F

As an aside, guess what else 0.37 is? It's bet/(bet+pot) when you make the river shove. That number shows up a lot in poker. This formula tells us that the number of bluffing hands in our range will need to be 37% of the number of value hands for us to have a balanced range. In general, if you're in a shove/check situation where you'll be betting a polarized range, a quick shortcut to find a balanced bluff frequency is that your number of bluffs should be bet/(bet+pot) percentage of your number of value bets.

Anyway, if we decided to shove all 20 combinations of our flushes and 7.8 combinations (on average) of our single pairs of jacks, for example, then our opponent will not have a correct way to play when he has a ten-high flush (or any of the other in-between hands). We can scale back these numbers appropriately to put nut hands in our checking range while remaining balanced if we wish to do so.

Note: It's worth pointing out that we could also expand our value betting range to include sets of queens if we felt the need to. We could then scale up the number of bluffs that we had accordingly. We're not going to do that, though.

This leaves us with several suitable hands that we could use as bluff catchers in our checking range if we wanted. We can combine these with some percentage of nut hands if we want to make life tough on Villain.

-- The Checking Range --

If we check and our opponent shoves, then he'll need us to fold 37 percent of the time. If we really want to piss him off, then we could set up our ranges so that we were folding exactly 37 percent of the time. That would really rustle his jimmies.

But what about his value bets with something like a Ten-high flush? If we only checked with bluff catchers, then he could bet all of his flushes and get paid off 37 percent of the time. We can't allow him to print money like that.

Villain needs to be winning at least 50% of the time when he value bets with marginal flush hands for it to be the correct decision when compared to checking. If we really wanted to piss him off, then we could make it so that one-half of our calling range would beat those marginal flush hands.

This means that our checking range really just breaks down into three parts like this:

|---- c/f (X) ----|---- c/c bluff catchers (Y) ----|---- c/c nuts (Z) ----|

We know that we're only going to be folding 37 percent of the time, so that X is going to be 37 percent of our checking range. We also know that Y and Z have to be the same number of combinations to make his bets with marginal flushes have about a 50% equity against our calling range. A quick calculation shows that Y and Z are each 31.5 percent of the checking range. To sum things up so far:

B + F + X + Y + Z = 100% of the range

B = bluff shove
F = value shove
X = check/fold
Y = check/call (bluff catcher)
Z = check/call (strong hands)

We need to do some work on the equation B + F + X + Y + Z = 1 to figure out the right proportions for our ranges to balance both the shoving range and the checking range at the same time.

B + F + X + Y + Z = 1
X + Y + Z = 1 - B - F

Note that X/(X+Y+Z) = 0.37 since X is 37 percent of the checking range (X+Y+Z).

X/(X + Y + Z) = X/(1 - B - F)
0.37 = X/(1 - B - F)
0.37(1 - B - F) = X

We found earlier that B = 0.37F when the betting range is balanced.

0.37(1 - 0.37F - F) = X
0.37(1 - 1.37F) = X
0.37 - 0.51F = X

So we put in F and we get out X.

Remember that X/Y = 0.37/0.315 based on the ratios we figured out earlier.

X/Y = 0.37/0.315
X/Y = 1.175
1/Y = 1.175/X
Y = X/1.175

Now we can put in F and get out Y. Since Y = Z, this also gives us Z. Long story short, we can put in F and get the rest of our range now (B, X, Y and Z).

-- Fleshing out the ranges --

What all of this means is that we can pick how many combinations we want to value bet, and our formulas above will spit out how to play the rest of our range to keep our betting and checking ranges balanced simultaneously. It's important to note that there are several different ways to play a range that's balanced, and we'd need to evaluate the EV of each one to determine the balanced strategy that performed the best.

Instead of doing that (because it will take fucking forever), we're going to operate on the assumption that we always wanted to check/call with a flush and never anything worse. This will narrow down the possibilities. Since 20 of our combinations were flushes, that's 20/41 = 48.8 percent of our range. We would require that F + Z <= 0.488 so that we aren't shoving or check/calling with anything other than flushes. Some quick work on a spreadsheet shows that we'll have to shove with at least 13 combinations of flushes to avoid ever check/folding a flush (when we shove 13 flushes, we check/call with about 7).

For a reminder of what our range looked like:

9 - Pair of jacks
3 - Pair of kings
3 - Pair of aces
3 - Three of a kind, jacks
3 - Three of a kind, queens
3 - King-high flush
17 - Ace-high flush

Here's an example of a balanced strategy where we never check a flush: bet 20 hands for value, bluff about 7 hands, check/fold about 5 hands, check/call about 9 hands total. Here's how the example range would play out:

Bet 7 pairs of jacks
Check/fold 2 pairs of jacks, 3 pairs of kings
Check/call 3 pairs of aces, 3 sets of jacks, 3 sets of queens
Bet 3 king-high flushes, 17 ace-high flushes

This strategy will probably seem somewhat unreasonable to a lot of people.

[kickass]

gotta love balancing spoon!
not that i feel balance matters any in this spot vs 5nl villain

my question is if we only gets called by Kxh wouldnt he bet it when chked to? if the board didnt contain JhQh id be pretty fucking convinced to shove this river cos too much chks back that would call but in this spot he never has a hand that can call hes not a fish so he doesnt have JxKh or KhKx and if he does hes betting it anyhow he may has ThTx. villains calling range looks far to weak to me but he can turn tonnes into bluffs or thin vbets if we chk.
other hand if he chks back the king we feel pretty fucking stupid and 3 barreling is awesome.

[davisrei]

Villain is 25/21/3.5Agg, fold to 3b 33% (1/3), 92% cbet, fold to cbet 33% (1/3)

Discuss best way to get the rest of the money in.

edit: as a sidenote, I'd have a hard time rivering a nut flush with AA if it was not a baby flush board... dumb me

Okay, metagame time.

How has the game been progressing before this?

What is the villain's table image?

Had he been putting constant pressure on you on the flop and/or turn?

Does he often raise if you check to him?

Has anyone caught him bluffing?

Has he won a hand recently against an air bluff?

Has he been "keeping the table honest?"

Is he mad over a recent loss, or did he just win a big pot with thin value?

Is he willing to bet for thin value that you've seen?

Does he seem capable of making a tough fold, or does he get invested in his hands by the river?



What is your table image?

Have you been a rock the entire time at the table?

Has he seen you make several tough folds recently?

Has he seen you raise the turn, then c-bet, to then c/f the flop a lot?

Have you been caught bluffing recently?

Have you caught anyone bluffing recently?

Has he seen you make a hero call against anyone recently?

Have you recently had a run of good cards that didn't go to showdown?

Has he seen you bust anyone out with solid holdings?


Think about all of this, then ask yourself...

If I raise, will he see it as a possible bluff with a marginal flush?

If I raise, will he have a hard time folding a middle flush?

If I raise, will he see me as a rock, and fold anything but K ?

If I check, will he see this as weakness and attempt to bluff me with two-pair or a weak flush?

If I check, will he be conservative with a middle flush and check behind me?

If I raise a small amount, will be be more likely to reraise with a middle flush?

If I raise a small amount, will he be conservative and call or fold behind me?


Basically, the more invested he gets in his hands, and the more distrustful he is of you, the more you should raise on the river. If he respects your raises, or tends to see checking as weakness, then you should be more inclined to either put in a small value raise or to attempt to induce a bluff by checking and indicating that the 4-flush board shut your hand down.

All-in-all though, you should be more heavily weighted toward raising than checking unless you have a good read that the villain likes to bluff a lot.

[spoonitnow]

gotta love balancing spoon!
not that i feel balance matters any in this spot vs 5nl villain

my question is if we only gets called by Kxh wouldnt he bet it when chked to? if the board didnt contain JhQh id be pretty fucking convinced to shove this river cos too much chks back that would call but in this spot he never has a hand that can call hes not a fish so he doesnt have JxKh or KhKx and if he does hes betting it anyhow he may has ThTx. villains calling range looks far to weak to me but he can turn tonnes into bluffs or thin vbets if we chk.
other hand if he chks back the king we feel pretty fucking stupid and 3 barreling is awesome.

What makes you feel that the bold is true?

[daviddem]

One thing that is getting at me about our bluffing range: is it not the case that we should bluff with the top of our-c/f-range-if-we-were-never-bluffing? So should we not bluff bet our pairs of kings before we bet our pairs of jacks?

Also in your math above we are supposed to be c/c the nuts some times (if Z is non zero). But in the final range breakdown you gave, we are always shoving the nuts.

[spoonitnow]

One thing that is getting at me about our bluffing range: is it not the case that we should bluff with the top of our-c/f-range-if-we-were-never-bluffing? So should we not bluff bet our pairs of kings before we bet our pairs of jacks?

No, you should bluff your jacks before you bluff your kings. The kings are much more useful in your checking range since they're more likely to win at showdown if it checks down, and they're more likely to win at showdown if you need use them as a bluff catcher. In the AKQ game, it's similar to why the IP player checks kings and bluffs with some queens.

If we were checked to in position with one bet left, our range would look like this:

<-- bluff --|-- check --|-- value bet -->

Out of position with one bet left, it looks like this:

<-- bluff --|-- check/fold --|-- check/call --|-- value bet -->

If you're interested in reading more concrete proof that these configurations are ideal, then check the half-street and full-street AKQ or [0, 1] games. These are also ideal for exploitative strategies that perform well, not just unexploitable strategies.

With multiple streets of betting left when facing a bet, especially when the ranking of hands in your range aren't as clear-cut, these configurations can change. A good example is facing a raise pre-flop. Our range could very possibly look like this:

<-- fold --|-- 3-bet bluff --|-- call --|-- 3-bet for value -->

The reason for this difference is that with streets left to come, we have the option to semi-bluff. On the river, we do not have this option, and our only value from bluffs comes from fold equity.

Also in your math above we are supposed to be c/c the nuts some times (if Z is non zero). But in the final range breakdown you gave, we are always shoving the nuts.

I was giving an example of a couple of different balanced ranges. The one in the spoiler tags is balanced, albeit not ideal. The one before the spoiler tags does check the nuts sometimes.

As an aside, Z does not have to include the nuts. Z is just the top portion of our checking range. If we are always betting the nuts, for example, then Z wouldn't include the nuts.

[Pascal]

Damn spoon you owning threads hard

[MadMojoMonkey]

For realz.

Every time I read spoons posts, my mind is blown. Actually I've been wondering why I suck so bad that re-reading spoons posts still blows my mind. Why can't I get it?

[spoonitnow]

Related to the difference between river spots and non-river spots:

The percentage bet/(bet+pot) will tell you how often to bluff in all-in river spots to be unexploitable when you bet. You take that percentage of your value betting range, and that's how often you should bluff. For example, if you were shoving 2/3 of the pot with 10 combinations for value, bet/(bet+pot) would be 40% and you would need to bluff with 40% of 10 combinations = 4 combinations for your betting range to be balanced.

With cards left to come in all-in situations, however, you can bluff much more often if you have good semi-bluffing hands because they can still win sometimes, and when they do win, they win a part larger than the one you're betting into. That's related to why you can (and usually should) be so aggressive like when you turn a backdoor flush draw with something like A J on Q 9 5 7 after continuation betting the flop.

This is why you choose semi-bluffing hands to bluff with before choosing hands with low equity earlier in the hand. On the river, however, showdown value is the important thing since you can't semi-bluff.

Of course, you should be more aggressive with your semi-bluffing in non-all-in situations too, but it was just an example.

[spoonitnow]

For realz.

Every time I read spoons posts, my mind is blown. Actually I've been wondering why I suck so bad that re-reading spoons posts still blows my mind. Why can't I get it?

Check your PMs.

[daviddem]

As an aside Spoon, I would like to encourage you to republish your ex-blog or make it into posts on the forum. There were very valuable info and concepts in there. I thought I had most if it saved somewhere but I can't get my hands on it now.

[spoonitnow]

Sucks for you sucka.

[seven-deuce]

The percentage bet/(bet+pot) will tell you how often to bluff in all-in river spots to be unexploitable when you bet.

Can you use this to work out how often to call if you are against an opponent that can bluff jam the river?

So for example if the opponent bluff jams the river for 2/3 pot and you have 5 combos of the nuts and 5 combos of the 2nd nuts in your range which your obviously calling, then the bet/(bet+pot) would still come out at 0.4 (40% of 10 combos that your definitely calling) so would you add 4 combos of the 3rd nuts to avoid being exploited by folding too much?

This just truck me when i was reading through this and is probably totally wrong but worth asking nonetheless.

[MadMojoMonkey]

If you use the pot fraction for the bet, then bet/(bet + pot) is re-stated as bet/(bet + 1).
In this case, it was stated that the shove is 2/3 pot, so bet is 2/3 and the pot is now 1+2/3.

So your pot odds are (2/3)/(2/3 + (1+2/3)).
The numerator is always the current bet to you, and the denominator is always the total amount that someone will win.

a 2/3 PSB works out to 2/(2 + 3 + 2) = 28%

If you call and win as little as 28% of the time, you will break even.

You should call with any hand that will win at least 28% of the time.

[spoonitnow]

Can you use this to work out how often to call if you are against an opponent that can bluff jam the river?

Yes and no. Yes because it does tell you how often you'd be calling to be unexploitable to bluffs, ie what your calling frequency would be if you're playing unexploitably. If your opponent is betting $2 into a pot of $3, he needs you to fold at least 2/(2+3) = 40 percent of the time to be profitable with a bluff. If you call with exactly 40 percent, then it's the same EV for your opponent to either bluff or check behind a bluffing hand that never wins at showdown.

No because....

If you call and win as little as 28% of the time, you will break even.

You should call with any hand that will win at least 28% of the time.

What MMM describes here is the optimal exploitative way of handling the situation. That just means making every +EV call possible and never making a call that's -EV in a vacuum. This is not always the same thing as being balanced (aka playing unexploitably).

[seven-deuce]

Was re-reading this thread, can you use bet/(bet+pot) to figure out a balanced strategy on earlier streets when the bets aren't all in?

[eugmac]

Cool thread, glad it got bumped.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Was re-reading this thread, can you use bet/(bet+pot) to figure out a balanced strategy on earlier streets when the bets aren't all in?

I'll take a stab at this one:

You can, but you need to know the equity of continuing vs. folding, and you have a ton of variables as far as turn and river unknowns and bets yet to come. So, if you can understand all of that stuff on the fly and make solid probability estimates which take into account your reads on villain and everything else that is poker, then yeah.

bet/(bet+pot) is your minimum required equity to continue profitably in any betting situation.

[daviddem]

bet/(bet+pot) is your minimum required equity to continue profitably in any betting situation.

Not quite, that would be ignoring implied odds.

[spoonitnow]

Was re-reading this thread, can you use bet/(bet+pot) to figure out a balanced strategy on earlier streets when the bets aren't all in?

Nope because hands that are behind usually have equity, so it's more complicated than that. The best coverage I have seen of what you're talking about here is the multi-street [0,1] games in Mathematics of Poker. Long story short, you're going to be folding less than bet/(bet+pot) instead of exactly bet/(bet+pot) to be balanced.

Not quite, that would be ignoring implied odds.

This is also true.

[seven-deuce]

Ohrite, i must read that chapter and see if i can grasp it.

I was just thinking it would be cool if you could model a situation where you are HU to the flop or the turn vs a villain and you could balance your ranges like above and then start moving hands about to see how to exploit different players.

[Pelion]

I know this is a pretty old thread now, but just to respond quickly to the point about wanting to bluff when villains calling range is very tight i.e. K+.

@bold, if this is true, then you should bluff more.

This is a board where that isn't really true. We hold A, so we know villain can have at best K and be unsure about calling with even the top of his range, so theoretically we should bluff more.

The problem is, if we want to bluff it means we don't hold the A, which means there are now a tonne of ways villain can have the nuts.

Knowing where the A is massively changes villains range for the hand.

[seven-deuce]

I know this is a pretty old thread now, but just to respond quickly to the point about wanting to bluff when villains calling range is very tight i.e. K+.






This is a board where that isn't really true. We hold A, so we know villain can have at best K and be unsure about calling with even the top of his range, so theoretically we should bluff more.

The problem is, if we want to bluff it means we don't hold the A, which means there are now a tonne of ways villain can have the nuts.

Knowing where the A is massively changes villains range for the hand.

Holy shit never thought of that, so if we happen to get to the river with the bottom of our range which we would want to bluff the river with, we wouldn't hold the A and could be bluffing into the nuts, and we wouldn't know "i should be bluffing more here because he's gonna have a really tough decision with the K T etc."

So in a way his range gets stronger when we don't hold the A and it gets weaker when we hold the A ?

We know his range is capped at a king-high flush when we hold the A and if we don't hold it we don't have this information so we can't decide "we should be bluffing more in this river spot in general"? because his range becomes stronger?

This shit's getting tricky.

[spoonitnow]

I know this is a pretty old thread now, but just to respond quickly to the point about wanting to bluff when villains calling range is very tight i.e. K+.






This is a board where that isn't really true. We hold A, so we know villain can have at best K and be unsure about calling with even the top of his range, so theoretically we should bluff more.

The problem is, if we want to bluff it means we don't hold the A, which means there are now a tonne of ways villain can have the nuts.

Knowing where the A is massively changes villains range for the hand.

You're right about all of this except for the assertion that this means we shouldn't bluff more. We can still make calls with the 2nd and 3rd nut flushes difficult decisions and induce mistakes even if he can hold the nuts. The question is about the hands that he can fold, not the hands he can't, and the chances of him holding the nuts are taken into consideration with that.

[spoonitnow]

We know his range is capped at a king-high flush when we hold the A and if we don't hold it we don't have this information so we can't decide "we should be bluffing more in this river spot in general"? because his range becomes stronger?

You won't run into this problem if you're thinking about how to play your range against your opponent's range because your current cards don't come into consideration.

[seven-deuce]

Ohrite, i see, so say we arrived at the river with the very bottom of our range and with the same board we would still jam because we're still putting him to a tough decision with his middle strength hands say like the 9 T K and we'd expect to be getting enough folds to be profitable.

We can't just decide we can't bluff here because he could possibly be holding the nuts, because we could be sacrificing a +EV bluff shove, for a 0 EV check/fold?

And because say we analysed this off the table when we knew we would have to have bet/(bet+pot) % of our value hands as bluffs and when we are shoving on the river we would want to have a balance range? Is having a balanced shoving range HU at the river going to be more +EV than only shipping for value?

The thing i can't fathom with all this is say we again arrive at the river with the bottom of our range vs an opponent who we know is capable of folding second best hands so we want to have a balanced shoving range on the river to gain more EV from him, do we just auto jam here? As this is one of hands we would be adding as part of our %of value bets as bluffs so do we just bluff jam with this hand regardless?

[Deucebag]

its 2nl - he's calling a shove

[Pelion]

We can't just decide we can't bluff here because he could possibly be holding the nuts, because we could be sacrificing a +EV bluff shove, for a 0 EV check/fold?

Right, you can't say "we can't bluff here because he might hold the nuts". Every single time you bluff there is some chance villain holds the nuts.

But you might say "we can't bluff here because the nuts makes up a huge portion of his range", which is pretty likely if we don't hold the A.

The question is about the hands that he can fold, not the hands he can't, and the chances of him holding the nuts are taken into consideration with that.

The question is about the ratio of hands he can fold to hands he can't fold. When we don't hold the A, villains calling range is much wider because you can add a bunch of A hands. Much wider calling range = much less reason to bluff.