Quote Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Now the turn card comes, we adjust the range that we have for Villain, make an evaluation of each betting option, and then pick the one that we think is best.
Ok, let me take a stab. He called the flop bet, which tells us something. The turn check may tell us a little, but could also be deceptive since we had the initiative, so I'm not going to eliminate too much of my range based on that.

Based on the Flop call, he's pretty likely to have some sort of hand (from overs to flush draws to the nuts). Hands that beat us are a small part of this range 12 combos of JJ/QQ and 12 combos of J7/Q7 (1 combo of 77). Flush draws that just hit are considerably wider (about 50 possible combos, some less likely than others. Based on our read he is certainly cable of calling gappers though). And finally you have the trips / pocketpairs / overs that are less likely to continue. Without time to do the napkin math (or having pokerstove on hand), I'm going to guess there's at least 300 in this range. So we're something in the area of 90% good against his range. So let's look at our options.

Fold - Don't like it. Certainly --EV.

Check - With our equity, the best argument for checking here would be to induce a bluff. We have the near-nuts, and if he's re-drawing to a full house with trip 7s, he's about 6% to hit. He's shown some weakness this hand, folded to turn bets in the past, and taken some pots without going to show down. I'd say this is 0 EV on this street, with a possible EV edge on the river against the lower part of his range if we can convince him we're scared of the flush or have a weaker hand than we do.

Bet - We're certainly ahead of a large portion of his range. We can bet for value here, and are likely to get a call with 20-30% of his range (only about 5% of which beats us) and then again on the river. We don't want to overbet and push out all the hands we beat. Betting half pot looks good because it also builds the pot enough to give him good odds to call the rest of his stack on the river. Half pot bet here is optimal EV if he's in the higher portion of his range.

All that said, I still like a check against this villain. He hasn't shown us any strength in this hand to make us believe he's on a flush draw or better, there aren't many hands he's going to make on the river that beat us, and we've seen him fold to turn bets after floating the flop. If I think he's folding to a bet 70% of the time, but betting the river with worse half the time after a check... Again, if my logic was flawed, I'd be interested to hear other opinions.