3bet semi bluff - bloated pot and tricky river

I semibluff pre and he calls. Standard reg. Not crazy, lots of blind stealing etc
I figure lots of PPs and high connectors and some Ax hands.
Please pick this apart. I wasn’t thrilled on the turn but bet again bc checking seemed weak. On the river I can’t see what I beat that calls

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $0.05 BB (6 handed) - PokerStars Converter Tool from http://www.flopturnriver.com


UTG ($5.71)
MP ($7.88)
CO ($5)
Button ($6.38)
Hero (SB) ($5)
BB ($5.54)


Preflop: Hero is SB with A, 5
3 folds, Button raises to $0.12, Hero raises to $0.44, 1 fold, Button calls $0.32


Flop: ($0.93) 7, 8, A (2 players)
Hero bets $0.45, Button calls $0.45


Turn: ($1.83) 9 (2 players)
Hero bets $0.78, Button calls $0.78


River: ($3.39) A (2 players)
Hero?

3bet pre is fine.

Flop is fine. Sizing is good.

Turn we can c/c or b/f, I prefer to b/f. Sizing is good.

River is really tough. We're losing to most Ax, chopping with the rest, we lose to a flush, he probably doesn't have a boat or he'd have raised earlier, in terms of hands we beat I guess he can have something like TT 89s T9s but given it's a big 3bet pot I can't see him having any offsuit 9x. Also he's probably not calling them and is checking back these hands. JJ might call. QQ if he only calls it pre, too.

I think we check river. Hopefully he checks, if so we're very probably good. If he bets, we're in a horrible spot. idk if he has anything he can call two streets with and then bet river that isn't beating us.

With that said, if he bets river, we can turn our hand into a bluff. He doesn't have boats. We do, and flushes. We have AA and maybe 99 88 and 77 in our range, maybe we can have A9s A8s A7s too, at least from villain's pov. When we c/r the river, we're not doing this with AK because that beats all non-boat Ax, we're just going to call this. SO a river c/r looks exclusively like a boat, nut flush, or bluff. And the only bluffs we have are our weak top pairs and TT-KK, and those last hands we probably check turn with.

So a river c/r jam looks super strong and is possibly getting folds out of non-nut flushes or AK. It's a massive risk though and not something I advise unless we think villain is good enough to make big hero folds.

He's probably going to check back AQ on the river if he has it. He knows we're check/calling AK and it's what we look like when we 3bet pre, bet this flop and turn, then check this river. So I only think he bets river when he has the flush, or AK himself.

It seems crazy that he can just call flop and turn with two pair or a set. He doesn't have the Ah, so from his pov we can have top pair + nfd until the Ah lands on the river. He's raising his two pair and sets on turn.

Is he bet/folding a flush on the river? Or is he bet/calling his stack? If it's the latter then the river is probably a c/f, which seems outrageous. I guess this is why I want to turn my hand into a bluff. Because I really do not want to fold, and calling a river bet is probably setting money on fire.

My thinking was similar to yours - what does he call that I beat, but I never considered c/r the river bc I’m probably not brave enough.
I didn’t want to c/f either so I bet $1 and he flat called and won with 9hTh. So your thought of c/r is interesting bc he just called so wasn’t very happy to see the Ah on the river bc it gives me boat possibilities

issue is I didn’t have the kind of info needed to know he would fold to a c/r and it’s not something I ever do I must admit.

The thing is, there's no guarantee he's folding a weak flush to a c/r jam. He has probably the worst flush he's going to have, and it's a surprise he didn't raise the flop to get rid of your 99-KK while he's behind but has a shit ton of equity.

I might pull the trigger on the river against someone who I think it's making hero folds because I'm extremely confident he doesn't have a boat, but I need that confidence AQ+ and a flush can fold. Stacks are awkward, he can bet this river with a flush big enough to make it impossible for him to fold to a jam. A bet of $2+ and we don't have any fold equity. But maybe we can get away from the river against a bet of this size. It's very unlikely he's going to have just a pair or missed draw, given the action.

Forgot about stack sizes. True. There isn’t much left behind after a 1/2psb.
I told myself I could b/f $1 bc I had a half stack left.
mid he bets $2, there isn’t much left.

frustrating hand, but I guess I’m happy with everything leading up to the river. I didn’t give the opponent the type of range I usually do (it’s the “I’m crushed range”) and I was correct to assume draws were there.
I just was clueless on the river.
I bet $1 but don’t really know why

Originally Posted by Vinland

I bet $1 but don’t really know why

I'm gonna hazard a guess that may make me look either dumb or that I'm judging you, but only the former is possible to be true.

My guess is that your hand improved, and you bet it.
Your gut was kinda tingling that you weren't sure what to do in that spot, and you settled on a general rule that is often helpful in these spots.
It's not the best reasoning, but it's not flawed reasoning for a small-stakes player, either. You can't know everything, and sometimes you just have to make a quick decision in an unfamiliar spot. It's not a huge mistake in theory, even if it's a huge mistake in this example... you dig?

You already said the thing that put you there. You weren't really tuning in to the opponents' ranges and what their play might mean for them. In retrospect, it all makes sense. They were being extremely passive with a hand that totally crushed this flop. You were holding exactly what they wanted you to have in that spot to clean you out, but they weren't pushing it the way you or I would be pushing it.

Their passive play with an incredibly strong draw - so strong it has the equity lead OTF for sure - made it weird to unravel what they were doing. But in the end... your reads weren't all that bad. Something about their play was off, and you sensed that. Good.
Your response was a bit erratic, but you then reflected on that and asked for advice. Good.

This hand was mostly played perfectly. The final bet OTR is the only really questionable spot. Now that others have shown you why that was a weird spot, you're prepared for the next time it comes up. Good.

Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey

I'm gonna hazard a guess that may make me look either dumb or that I'm judging you, but only the former is possible to be true.

My guess is that your hand improved, and you bet it.
Your gut was kinda tingling that you weren't sure what to do in that spot, and you settled on a general rule that is often helpful in these spots.
It's not the best reasoning, but it's not flawed reasoning for a small-stakes player, either. You can't know everything, and sometimes you just have to make a quick decision in an unfamiliar spot. It's not a huge mistake in theory, even if it's a huge mistake in this example... you dig?

Lol - Not bad Mojo
I do remember thinking "I dont know what I beat that will call, BUT I now have trip A's, how can I give up the hand"

Maybe it was the passivity of it. Even I would shove that flop. 56% equity according to Pokerstove.

I was somewhat on, I wasnt happy with my hand strength but reacted wrong.

It's worth noting that fold equity is weird... when you practically minraise jam the river, villain will think there's no way you can be bluffing since you don't have any fold equity. And then he has to question how on earth a ten high flush can be good. Surely you just call his bet with an ace. So he can level himself into actually giving you fold equity when you really shouldn't have any.

This board isn't great for a 3better to be repping a boat though. We want at least one king or queen on the board. We're obviously not trying to rep the one combo of AA, we need at least some of A7s-A9s 77-99 in our range. And KQs and KJs for a couple more combos of nutty hands. That should give us enough that at the very least if he calls his T9s flush we're actually winning the pot sometimes.

Are you 3betting KQs KJs 77-99 and/or A7s-A9s in this spot? If so a river c/r jam looks a lot more appealing when we consider that if he calls he's paying off our boats and nut flushes, and if he folds we're bluffing him off weak flushes and AQ+. If our range is balanced, that's a very good outcome in the long run.

Pre and flop are good, though flop is a bit large (see my other posts on this).

Turn is too thin. 3 bet pots are all about that ace, bout that ace, and how good your kicker is determines how many streets of value you go for. No kicker, no bet (past the cbet). Having the ace does obviously make for a very good (and invulnerable) bluff catcher though.

River is a check/decide.

To throw my hat into the psychoanalysis ring for a second, based on all the hands you've posted I think you just feel very uncomfortable with the idea of playing bluff catchers out of position. So much so that you'd rather just bet for no reason, which will make your redline shoot up but your blue line plummet (because you're winning without showdown in spots you would have won at showdown anyway). Even the 2nd set hand that you posted where betting 35% pot happened to not be a bad idea, I sense you didn't do it for the right reasons (ie: you did it as a blocking bet because your particular hand didn't want to check and face a large bet, and not as a depolarization strat for your whole range.)

My best advice is to say that it's okay to put yourself in a spot where you're going to make the wrong decision some of the time. Whether to check/call or check/fold here is going to leave you handing them the pot when you had the best hand or making them win more when they had the best hand sometimes, and that's okay. That's poker. The fact that you're identifying the appropriate borderline spots is a sign that your intuition is spot on; if you can just improve your fundamentals, you'll be cruising. Which could be as simple as just flipping a coin and x/f'ing half the time you're in a spot that feels gross and x/c'ing the rest.