25z: Line Check

How would you play this? I think this is pretty standard, with villain polarised on the river. What else do you think we should check call turn and river with against this guy, or with balance?

Villain was something like 30/20 over 30 hands at this point. My provisional note was: suspect sticky post flop, possibly fancy play syndrome.

Poker Stars, $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em Cash, 6 Players
Poker Tools Powered By Holdem Manager - The Ultimate Poker Software Suite.

SB: $26.07 (104.3 bb)
BB: $44.99 (180 bb)
UTG: $14.78 (59.1 bb)
Hero (MP): $75.87 (303.5 bb)
CO: $51.99 (208 bb)
BTN: $21.08 (84.3 bb)

Preflop: Hero is MP with 8:spade: 8:heart:
UTG folds, Hero raises to $0.75, CO calls $0.75, 3 folds

Flop: ($1.85) 9:club: 4:heart: 9:diamond: (2 players)
Hero bets $0.62, CO calls $0.62

Turn: ($3.09) 3:diamond: (2 players)
Hero checks, CO bets $1.50, Hero calls $1.50

River: ($6.09) 7:spade: (2 players)
Hero checks, CO bets $4, Hero calls $4

This is a tough river spot.

Your flop bet should probably be bigger, seeing as he possibly peels as bad as 22/Ax at $1, but I guess you're certainly getting those calls at this size. As played, I guess based on reads that he might be fps we can c/c this runout at these sizes, but I'm not surprised if he's good.

why do you bet so small flop? is that your standard value bet? if so then ok, otherwise you are just letting them know that they can own you on turn/river.
b/f turn, b/r turn are both in my play. if i check then i c/f , not c/c

I'm assuming FPS means things like floating flops light, betting when we check etc. I feel like any value our hand has is coming from this kind of play.

I don't understand a turn b/r. He has very little better in his range that folds, like TT exactly, and he doesn't get there with anything worse except the occasional bluff, which obviously folds. Turn b/r tells us if he has 9x or a boat at a very expensive price.

b/f seems reasonable, though for reasons stated above, I'm happy to station this runout vs this guy in this spot.

I mean *maybe* we can get 98s/9Ts to fold to a b/r. Maybe. Depends on our image, and how solid (or soft) villain is, and I still don't expect A9 to fold. I'm down with putting pressure on tptk in the right spots, but trips... not folding often enough imo. I want really solid reads.

Third pot is standard for me on this texture. I don't think betting bigger achieves much.

How much is everybody else betting and why?

Half pot for me. I don't hate this small bet as much as your small bets on wet flops, because this can be AA, especially if it's standard for you. But because I rarely bet less than half pot, then that's how much I bet here. Default minimum.

I'm not so sure we should have a "one size fits all" bet size on each flop texture. I think the flop bet is ok but you could probably bet slightly larger.

I think the turn is a b/f. I definitely c/c as played. I think 9x/full house make up so little of his total betting range.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OngBonga

Your flop bet should probably be bigger, seeing as he possibly peels as bad as 22/Ax at $1.

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It's the rest of his range that is elastic. If he's folding everything short of A-high to 1/3p, then this is a fantastic spot for our range to bet 1/3p.

This is a classic flop where it helped a very small portion of the preflop caller's range, but the part it did help, it helped out big time (9x being a heavier card for the caller than the aggressor). So we have the range advantage as a whole, but the more we isolate them toward the top of their range, the advantage flips. Because of this, we want to force them into a strategy where they have to defend with as much of their range as possible, and where we are making it difficult for him to bloat the pot on us IP.

All that being said, 88 is THE hand that benefits most from a larger size, since it gets fat value, gains a ton from protection (we don't really love enticing broadways with backdoor bullshit to peel when we're OOP), and it has the best blockers to 9x. So if we're range splitting, this would be the first hand in the bigger bet size bucket. Maybe I'll blow dust off the old solver and see if it thinks range splitting is worth much here.

But that's all the theory side of the discussion. A lot of small-stakes TAG bots don't realize that 99xr is a good board to raise some highly speculative hands with because TAG bots often only bluff flops with 8+ front-door outs. These same TAGbots might take an unusually sized bet as an invitation to raise it (even though theory says they should do just the opposite). In other words, in practice, it could be worth it to not rock the boat and just keep printing the easy EVs you can expect to print here with more standard looking bets.

And all THAT being said, my population reads for online SSNL are extremely dated, so I wouldn't be surprised if reactions to <1/2p bets have changed.