Quote Originally Posted by spoonitnow View Post
I decided to type out a response to the first question. Here it is.

Our opponent seems like he's going to rarely have big pocket pairs or AK in his range here, but without reads on what he likes to 3-bet otherwise, it's hard to say outside of that. We can probably be expecting him to raise some sort of balanced or semi-balanced range on most boards, and to call with a lot of medium strength hands; though he is OOP here, so he will probably do this less.

Our range for opening the CO here without BU or SB reads will probably be something like broadways, suited Aces, K8s+, Q8s+, J8s+, T8s-64s, T9s-54s, 22+ with some minor variation around the edges.

1. Q 9 6 - This flop is cool because it's very wet for our typical range, but not very wet for his. What I mean is that we have a lot of straight draws (JT, 87, T8 plus tons of gutshots) and lots of broadways with both backdoor flush and backdoor straight draws, but it's hard for him to have a huge range of draws to play around with himself.

He's probably calling as low as TT and as high as AQ or KQ. That gives a range (with # of combos in parenthesis) of something like QQ(?), 99(6), 66(?), AQ(?), KQ(12), QJ(?), JJ(?), TT(6) of the hands he's not folding for the purpose of getting to a showdown. If we estimate that he'll have about 1 combo of QQ, 6 of 99, 2 of 66, 8 of AQ, 12 of KQ, 8 of QJ, 5 of JJ, and 6 of TT, then the midpoint of his range is about at the edge between AQ and KQ. So all the hands AQ+ are probably +EV in a vacuum for us to value bet.

Since he doesn't have many draws in his range at all, it's hard for him to add a lot of bluffs before he's spewing. For that reason, I don't think we have any reason to expect that we will have +EV semibluffs (3-betting) in a vacuum. Moreover, I wouldn't expect him to look to exploit us by raising a very wide range without history, so my 3-betting range is going to be very unbalanced with the first possible 3-bet bluffing hand being JTs+bdfd.

We could choose to have no 3-betting range at all. If I chose this plan, then I might lose some minor EV with a hand like AQ that can be more vulnerable to free cards since a K can hit, but I'm not all that thrilled to stack off with it on the flop anyway. With that in mind, I think I would bet/call with some range down to about KK, then bet/fold down to about KQ or QJ.

On the bluffing end of the betting spectrum, I would expect semi-bluffs with a gutshot to be +EV in a vacuum, and would be betting all of them along with all OESDs, broadways with a bdfd, and all AK/AJ/AT.

Then I would check everything else, along with QQ and some non-zero amount of AA/AQ/KQ hands so he can't just bet turns and put me in a difficult spot.

Thanks for posting this in full. It gives a good clear 'logic' process that helps.
More of the same please.