phrikshin

I wouldn't be calling 3BB opens with AKo on the button. Especially not at 2NL rake.. Postflop is well played

To echo the other guy and a major recurring theme in your posts, your preflop game is poor. You are going to hit a wall at the micros (perhaps you have hit it already, I am not sure if you are winning or not), where you simply cannot win based on your preflop game alone. If you are a losing player currently, fixing your preflop game may be enough in and of itself to make you a winner at 2NL.

He's IP. 10BB 3b is excessively large.

The cbet isn't necessarily bad but you are betting kind of square in the middle of your range. If you get called, all pairs villain calls with are going to be Kx and mostly better Tx. He really shouldn't have a ton of 5x that is calling 50 into 80 with 2 players to act. You will get called by some FDs and straight draws.

When villain raises they have a pretty narrow value range of KT and 55, alongside plenty of FDs. Villain dependent they may raise KQ/KJ but I wouldn't say that's a common play multiway at 1/3. Jamming may fold out a FD that is worse than yours, but you are probably never getting a better FD to fold and you are never folding out his value. And again, I think this is square in the middle of your range, and is probably not a combo to raise tho it can't be terrible given how much equity you have.

I don't have a ripping range vs this sizing. If you did have a ripping range it would focused around AKo and TT. As for why, I think it has to do with those hands being some of our lowest equity value hands (in reality I think I just saw it in a solver somewhere a few times over).

4B range is going to be very standard but I think a bit wider given that the 3Ber has 30BB. I am think JJ+, AQs, AK. I wouldnt bother with too many holdings like A5s simply because I think your fold equity is rather limited. AQo I think would be the extent of my 4B "bluffs".

Calling any pocket pairs or suited ace I opened alongside a lot of suited broadways. Calling all my suited connectors.

Folding most of my off suit holdings including the AQo I don't 4b and worse. Folding any suited Kx worse than K9.

The presence of the full stack caller is what causes me to open up pretty wide with my calls.

Preflop: This hand is a pretty marginal ISO. I generally prefer to limp behind or do a smaller ISO of like 3 BB as an exploit when I have a weak absolute holding with good implied odds.

Flop: what does the bigger size accomplish here? Your hand is pretty weak in terms of absolute strength. I'd rather bet the smaller size to try and just get total air to fold.

Turn: this is a very standard check. Betting here is effectively betting the middle of our range, and while solvers may do that some time, I feel you are just isolating yourself against a higher pair or better flush draw. What fold equity do you actually have here? This card changes nothing really. So you only get a 2 to fold and maybe a better 6, but given this is a rec that may be reluctant to let go of a 6. Basically, you get value from next to nothing and don't fold out any of villains better hands than yours.

River: I'd rather just give up here. You have fired 2 big bets and villain hasn't folded. They probably aren't folding a Q here and they have a fair amount of strong hands. You also beat their missed flush draws.

Great video! I appreciate it when people do videos of pools I play in. For some reason it just feels more applicable to me as opposed to the videos played on Stars. May just be a psychological thing but it feels like I have more confidence in those pools after seeing a RIO video played in there.

Plz give Henry better cards.

Marle future RIO coach confirmed?

Not concerned about balance given that villain is a recreational. The goal is to stack a J here. Flop 3bet is fine, especially since we are OOP. I think you could even do it with 33 and 66 unblocking top pair. Since you say villain is not very aggro, we don't want to risk not building a pot and have villain check behind the turn with QJ or something that would have called our 3bet.

Turn is an interesting spot. We filtered villains range sufficiently on the flop to where the majority of it should be Jx, that being said a rec may get sticky with 99 or something. Given the size of the pot, I think we can actually size down to something like 35-40. A J will never fold to for this price, and may even try to GII. It still leaves an SPR of <1 for the river jam as well.

Never apologize for the hair, some of us aren't so lucky to have such great flow :D

Nice analysis on the TT hand.

Please fix the hair, literally unwatchable. Jkjk good video Henry.

its 90BB more

I would not be 4betting this hand that deep being OOP. When stacks are deep like this we want to keep the pot small with our non-nutted hands, especially OOP.

Honestly it's super nitty but I would fold the flop given that we have next to no equity and we have so many more suitable hands to defend this with. River is a completely standard fold.

My turn strategy would be to split my range with a 50-65% bet size and an overbet of 150% or so.

Fwiw this combo would not slide into the overbet range. I would prefer bluffs that have higher equity and nut potential, or block villains best bluff catchers

Not a fan of completing these kinds of hands at the micros, tho admittedly I have not studied it much. A min raise from a 71/2 who has a 48 WTSD is probably the scariest thing I have ever seen and I would fold.

Flop: why do you think cbetting is good here? I am not saying it is bad to cbet here, but just saying 'I think X is the right play' will not help you. I will say if you are going to cbet here, I would not cbet this large in general as the 5NL population struggles to defend properly against small cbets.

Turn: this is a bad turn to barrel w/ this hand. Villain is likely a fish and will probably call w/ the same amount of 3x that we have preflop, but they got to filter their range on the flop. We are betting at a rather high frequency on this flop, so we get here with a lot of air. Villains check is procedural and should not be looked at as some sort of range capping move that gives us a license to bet weak SDV hands with poor equity like this one.

River: don't rule out calling here, but if I were to do so I probably wouldn't do it with 77. 55 I think is a call here because villain likely isn't doing this with a J, so blocking the straights is probably important

Preflop: open is fine

Flop: prefer check to betting by a wide margin. Villain is 70/10 and probably is going to play this face up. Let him bet if he has a hand. Range advantage doesn't mean anything with these types of players as they just play there hand and have no concept of ranges. They think things like 'i have a 9 so I call'.

Turn: leading is bad here. We have no hand and poor prospects to improve. Villain called which indicates he probably has something. When he min raises we absolutely must jettison this hand. A min raise from a 70/10 is basically screaming 'i have the nuts or close to it'. This play is motivated by greed, they aren't trying to get you to fold.

River: villain just min raised us indicating that he has a hand. He probably didn't do it with worse than a T.

Overall: the way we beat weak passive whales is value betting them to death. They are going to pay us off when we have a hand and we cannot count on fold equity against these players. Play your hand face up in these spots, they are not aware enough to exploit you.

ATs-AKs and 25% frequency of A2s-A5s would all be in my squeeze range here. Your sizing is larger than I would go. 4x is plenty IP.

On the flop I think we can bet at a rather high frequency here given we have all the AA, AK, and some combos of A4, A3. I would argue villain does not have that many AK combos here as he probably 4Bs a good chunk of them, though he may have some. I would assume villain would either 4B or fold all his low wheel aces, and so he never has A4/A3 here. Betting 25% pot w/ range is probably defensible here.

Turn call is fine.

River we need to call something like 44% of our range to make villain indifferent to bluffing. Given that you probably bet all of your AK and AQ combos earlier, you get here with very few good Ax to call with. I think folding a hand as strong as AJ here is probably overfolding our range and so we likely need to call.

Agree with Hawks on this being a mix preferring to bet the Ac and Kc. Disagree with the last part about betting this at a high frequency though. If villain is a reg they are likely flatting a very concentrated range that is heavy in suited broadway's and pocket pairs. While we do have way more Qx than villain, villains Qx combos make up a much more relevant portion of their range. Ours is heavily diluted by Ax and Kx combos and so this board does equalize quite a bit. Add that to hero being OOP and it makes me want to be much more selective.

H1: pretty standard tho AJs can be squeezed here some of the time. Flop is a X/F. We need to be tighter in multiway pots, so this hand is just a give up when we are drawing to 1 pair.

H2: BB is the one I am concerned about when deciding to call. If they are squeeze happy I probably just avoid it. If they are a nit or a passive fish I am happy to get involved. If they are a reg I am not happy to call but with an aggro fish and a passive fish it is probably still profitable. The presence of the aggro fish is going to discourage the reg from squeezing.

H3: I think you played it fine. If the fish is going to frequently bet the turn after calling flop, I am happy to let them hang themselves. If he ever has a 9 you are stacking him, they just happened to have nothing this time.

Pre: it's a decent hand to 3B at some frequency, so that is ok

Flop: your sizing is far too large and you let villain filter his range so well with it. He can basically fold out all of his range except for Kx, 6x (tho he probably has very few 6x), and flush draws. This is a flop that we can bet 1/3rd pot w/ our entire range. The GTO solution likely has some larger bets too, but this would not be a combo that falls into the larger bets category, and implementing multiple sizings on flops like this at 2NL adds complexity to our game we do not need. Additionally it being a 3B pot, we don't need to size up so much to get all the money in.

Turn: we actually pick up equity here so this hand actually makes a good candidate to barrel. I would much prefer bluffing the turn than the line you took.

River: No, just no. You filtered his range to Kx, flush draws, and 6x. The flush draws just made a nutted hand, and Kx and 6x are very unlikely to fold. This was a give up on the river.

I would say 3B or fold is preferable to 3B or call in this spot. 88 is about the absolute bottom of that too, and I would rarely 3B it (<25%). I would only call here with a known passive rec in the BB.

Fold vs the 4B would be my preferred option. You almost have enough behind to set mine profitably, but you are OOP against a range of something like QQ+, AK, and A2-A5s at best. Even the bluffs have good equity against you and honestly they may be even tighter than that.

Not sure what site you play on but 4B ranges in the pools I play in are extremely nutted which scares me off this hand.

Missed bet on the turn is what caused the river issue. You can still get value from weaker Ax and spade draws. This is 5NL, people don't like folding the turn and will call you lighter than you would think.

And yes you probably leveled yourself into folding. If you aren't calling this you aren't calling any other hand. We need to overfold our range at 5NL in these spots, but this is folding our entire range as you do not get here with straights, full houses, Tx, or AQ.

Agree with Samu. Additionally your 3B sizing is quite small OOP. Easy range check on flop.

I'm recommending a range check, i.e. checking your entire range. It's easier to balance in this spot than having a small betting range

Need to know what position hero is.

If in the blinds I think a strong case can be made for range checking as you are probably not 3 betting a good number of combos that hit this flop. Villain should have 77-99 more frequently than hero here as we would not 3B them at 100% frequency but villain is likely to open and call them in this spot. Same with JTs if we are in the BB, I think we are probably not 3betting that hand 100%. Our range also has to protect a lot of AK that we get here with that villain doesn't have since they would probably 4B it at least some frequency. We need to check our big hands to protect our air. From there we would split our range between X/C, X/F, and X/R.

With a known weaker player in the SB entering the pot, we have good implied odds the times that we make a strong hand (say a flush or trips). When the potential to win a big pot increases since a weaker player has entered into the pot, we should be more liberal with our BB defends.

Calling due to him likely having some kind of Ax at that point.