AwildJandaAppears

What can you be bluffing with on this river? I would not usually value bet thin against good players if you can't even list bluffs you have in your range (and I'm guessing you have none). 

I think him calling AQ would be nuts.

I think it's kind of hard to justify re-opening up the betting in position for such little money, but I'm curiously to hear what others think.

I feel like I would rather bet the turn (and possibly flop) bigger and force him to either A) make bigger mistakes by calling with worse hands or B) give up his equity. River cards can also kill your action and a bigger bet will let you get more value now. 

Don't play HU much unless a 6-max table breaks, but I would think the turn is a pretty easy call and don't see how raise/folding the turn is really even an option (unless you min-raise the turn, which I don't like anyways). 

If a turn blanks and my opponent ships I would call and justify it by thinking I can beat AJ and AT sometimes and that I'm pretty high up on my range. 

EDIT: I would for sure just call his 3-bet PF too. 

Great post, thanks.

Wait, what hands am I folding that are a mystery?

Good points. Fwiw I think I am even more in the cr turn camp now (but far from positive that's best', but I think this fits my overall game better and is the strat im most comfortable with.

I usually 3b 75s and 86s. I usually try to do what I think is gto so if you have an opinion to what that is I'm all ears (though perhaps it's mixed).

Good post. I did think my river bluff would be profitable after he called the turn (on blank rivers), but I agree with the above posts where turn is just a check now. 

It looks like I'm trying to implement a new concept ("don't always save your weakest bluffs for the river.... sometimes you should bluff pure air on the turn") and doing it incorrectly, as is usually the case when I make an effort to try to incorporate something new into my game. 

I dislike check-calling the turn because I think villain can bluff with JT/K7/K4 etc and just give up on the river when we both miss then I lose. That doesn't mean check-calling isn't best though, it's just why I dislike it.

TY for that post.

I don't think I have enough 7x to balance out my value hands on the turn though, but perhaps I'm wrong. Either way good to hear your thoughts written out and I appreciate it.  

People don't usually have the testicular fortitude to bluff into a player who potentially has the nuts or close to the nuts often enough that calling is profitable. 

My go to line here is to get pissed and fold. 

Thanks for responding. I'm pretty lost all around, so let's talk turn first then.

I think on the flop I would have bet most of my naked QX hands and a good chunk of my hands with two hearts. So what bluffs should I be using on the turn? Don't you think I need some "pure air" on the turn or do you think I'm off base?

I realize I have 4 high on the river. I'm just not sure if I run into A) a good hand and B) a suspicious villian who decides to call me lightly often enough to make the river bluff bad. There's a lot of spots where a bluff is probably +EV in theory but -EV in practice so I was hoping to get insight on if people think this is one of them. 

EDIT: Excellent point on donking as well. But even if this is a good spot for villain to donk, I would also expect a lot of players to not be capable of doing it which means his checking range is weighted more towards good hands than it should be.

Hence I'm lost :( 

I would bet the flop bigger, especially with your hands. I really want to make two overcards fold and I think that flop favors our range.

Turn check looks good.

River you checked with a bluff catcher and as is usually the case in spots like this I think it's hard to have a really strong opinion. I would probably expect villain to put you on JJ-KK a lot and expect you not to fold them, so that'd make me fold. 

I think betting the flop is quite a bit better here than check-raising. 

As played I probably start with checking the river but I'd be really lost and not happy with how I played the flop. It's kind of rare to *not* get a turn or river spade/6/8/9 and anytime you do get one of these cards I'm guessing you're going to be pretty lost. 

I call and don't think it's all that close (I also tend to think this line is pretty weighted towards 33 from villain... I also think you can sometimes see TT).

You have 15 outs to the straight or flush and another 3 "outs" to the ace, so calling should be pretty profitable. Maybe I've run bad lifetime in this spot but I feel like regs are quite weighted towards sets when they take a line like this and both TT and 33 can make sense to me here. 

It depends on how likely potentially dominated flushes are to come along.

In general I usually always put the "better" hand in the range that makes the pot bigger, though, provided the equity is reasonably robust. So if I had to bet some Q8o in your shoes and check others, I'd most like to bet the Qs8x even though I realize I can pretty easily get pushed off my equity (or make a potentially dominated flush like Ax9s fold)

I don't have a set range here either.

But the problem is the 3-betting range here I wouldn't really consider "polarized" or "linear," and it looks like you're trying to make a really polarized 3-betting range here (based on what you've posted, I could easily be wrong).

One thing I'll stress though is I think the  multiway pot odds argument is usually awful. It's probably my second biggest pet peeve in poker. Yeah you're getting odds here, but you're out of position and multiway, so everyone is "getting odds" here. It's kind of like buying a lotto ticket and yelling "pot odds!" IMO. Yeah, you're risking $1 to win $10,000,000, but so is everyone else. The dead money you've posted in the big blind is nice and does give you a significantly better price, but it doesn't make up for having an awful hand and being OOP I don't think which is why I'd snap fold T5s and 65o even if I thought I was quite a bit better than my opponents. 

It sounds oversimplified but I would just really emphasize 3-betting hands with robust equity here. So I'd probably 3-bet some AXs and suited connectors/gappers as my "bluffs" (even though they make profitable calls) as well as get aggressive with my strong hands. I think even your 3-bet "bluffs" should all make +EV calls too though, they just have so much robust equity they play better in big pots than small pots. 

Hope that helps.

I think calling as wide as you want to call is a big leak. T5s and 65o aren't going to play well OOP multiway and they just need to be folded.

Probably easier to help if you post your ranges here and then we comment. 

Since villain bet twice and we called twice up until the river, it doesn't really make sense for us to have any hands in our range on the river strong enough to check-raise. The board is too wet for us to realistically justify slowplaying the nuts twice. 

I also think villain's bet-sizing was probably too small on the river for these reasons.

That's not really a "good read." It was only a single hand and the question wasn't "Do you think I'm good here if I call?" (the answer is obviously no). The question is "Do you think I'm good here ~28% of the time when I call?" which is a lot closer, but I still think you're not. 

It's really important you don't get in the mind set of thinking you need to think you likely have the best to call on the river. I imagine I call river bets expecting to lose more often than I call expecting to win. 

AQ doesn't really play that well multiway either and anytime you take it down pre-flop you were almost certainly making high equity hands fold.

The term value squeeze might be misleading here (especially if you think value raise = wanting action) though but my guess is that's just Chael's way of saying his 3-betting range is mostly polarized and this is on the strong side of his polarized range. 

I'd bet the flop and as played figure he's more likely to be weighted towards value than bluffs and fold.

I think bluffing river is gonna be a lot more profitable than checking. It's way easier to miss a river bluff than river value bet in OP's shoes, so if I have a bluff catcher I'm going to use that as justification for folding. 

It's probably easier to see this is a bluff by asking yourself "What worse hand(s) can hero have on the river?" 

Clearly hero wants to value bet some hands on the river so he needs some bluffs, and this looks like just about as good of candidate as any. 

Yeah that's me. I like this community a lot (same with CardRunners, of course) so I've been browsing it a lot more lately.

This hand just looks like you're more or less clicking buttons. Your pre-flop 3-bet sizing is likely too big and you are using a poor hand to 3-bet. 

Flop also looks like a clear check-fold. It's hard for the opponent to not have a pair or gutshot+.

So now we're getting to the river with very weird (and likely bad) ranges so it's really hard to even begin to analyze the spot. 

It's more of you bet the turn and that forces him to bluff now on the turn rather than the river if he wants to bluff.

So basically, if you check the turn, he can bluff you on the river. If you bet the turn, then you re-open up the betting and he can bluff you on the turn.