[10NL] 3bet AK river bluff

[Pelion]

Villain is 27/20 and fairly passive postflop, including with cbets. He has been stealing almost 50%. He doesn't seem crazy.

When he checks back such a coordinated turn I feel like he almost never has a set/AA/KK/QQ. I don't think he would call preflop with KQ and certainly not flop. He probably doesn't call flop with AQ very often.

I feel like he has TT/JJ very often after the flop call/turn check. Can I rep AQ/KQ here and get a fold?

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $0.10 BB (6 handed) - PokerStars Converter Tool from http://www.flopturnriver.com
saw flop | saw showdown
BB ($4)
UTG ($21.84)
MP ($13.16)
CO ($4.27)
Button ($10.35)
Hero (SB) ($10.05)
Preflop: Hero is SB with ,
3 folds, Button bets $0.30, Hero raises to $1.20, 1 fold, Button calls $0.90
Flop: ($2.50) , , (2 players)
Hero bets $1.40, Button calls $1.40
Turn: ($5.30) (2 players)
Hero checks, Button checks
River: ($5.30) (2 players)
Hero bets $3

[spoonitnow]

I'm of the opinion that your assessment of his range is alright except you might be underestimating the amount of times that he has QQ, though that chance is small enough as it is.

I think AK is a check here and that you should have worse hands in your range that you can bluff with. You should also have some Qx in your range like QTs-Q8s or so that you can value bet with. If you can bet with AK here as a bluff, then either A) you aren't bluffing enough pre-flop so you don't have enough worse hands in your range that you can bluff with, and/or B) you're bluffing all of the worse hands leading up to, and including, AK, which is probably bluffing too often here.

[spoonitnow]

I realized that my previous post might need some more explanation in an effort to be clear on what I'm talking about. I don't know your 3-betting range, and I don't know what your river range would look like based on that, so I can't really give detailed advice in terms of how to play your exact range.

With that being said, your opponent's river range is almost always something like JJ. For you to have hands that you can value bet, you have to either check the turn with KK+ some percentage of the time, or you have to have some Qx in your range. If QTs or Q9s isn't in your range, for example, then you might run into some problems because you just don't have value hands in your range here. You could also have some 8x in your range for a straight on this board.

If you do have, for example, QTs in your range, then KJs or KTs is also in your range, and you probably have a number of other worse hands in your range like A2s. The point is that you have to be bluffing all of those hands before you can bluff AK here, and that's a lot of hands.

A balanced strategy after the rake with a bet size of $3 into $5.30 in this spot will have you betting with a range that is about 25% bluffs. This means that you'd need to have three times as many value betting hands in your range as bluffing hands. You do not have many hands that you can value bet with here profitably, so you can't bluff very many hands without being way out of balance.

If you have a read that this guy will fold JJ-TT, then you should bluff more in proportion to how strong that read is. The further you go from bluffing 25% of the time, the more you are punished if you're wrong. In short, bluffing AK implies that you have an extremely strong read that he will fold JJ-TT here, and you're lacking that.

Your flop c-bet size kind of bothers me and screws up your bet sizing on the river. I would be looking to bet enough that there would only be one bet left behind. Having an SPR after that of like 1.5 is horrible for you when you're the aggressor.

[seven-deuce]

Your flop c-bet size kind of bothers me and screws up your bet sizing on the river. I would be looking to bet enough that there would only be one bet left behind. Having an SPR after that of like 1.5 is horrible for you when you're the aggressor.

Should you always be thinking of trying to have 1 bet left on the river, or is this only in 3bet pots? Also if you were bluffing i thought you should bet the least amount possible, so why would you increase your bet size on previous streets so that you could spew a whole stack off if called 3 times?

[spoonitnow]

Should you always be thinking of trying to have 1 bet left on the river, or is this only in 3bet pots?

My point was more about how having an SPR of around 1.5 is really crappy if you're the aggressor. Imagine if you have a pot of $10 with $15 left behind, almost any bet size you make is going to create an awkward situation when you're raised, and the idea is to avoid that. This situation could be easily avoided by a larger flop bet size, etc.

On a mostly unrelated note, the number of bets on the river basically dictates the depth of the strategy allowed. For example, if there's one bet left on the river, then the OOP player can only have four ranges: value bet, check/call, check/fold, and bluff. With two bets, the OOP player can also have a check/raise range. If the IP player faces a bet when there's only one bet left on the river, his options are to call or fold. When there are two bets available, he also gains a raising range.

Also if you were bluffing i thought you should bet the least amount possible, so why would you increase your bet size on previous streets so that you could spew a whole stack off if called 3 times?

In a vacuum as a very exploitative play, you can make your bluffs smaller to get a better EV assuming that your opponent will fold about the same percentage of the time. The downside is that it becomes blatantly obvious when you are value betting because you're betting more, so another way to play is to pick a single bet size that you think will perform well with your entire betting range.

[Icanhastreebet]

I think versus a passive villain we can happily c/f the flop since he'll check down a bunch of stuff we are beating some % of the time and we never get him to fold a better hand on this board or even some hands with decent equity that end up with a great flop call since we are almost never barreling the turn.

I don't really like the bluff unless you have seen him fold what you perceived to be 1pairs on the river for 2streets of bets in the past.

[seven-deuce]

*jaw hits floor*

How did you learn all this strategy?

So ideally we want to have one bet left on the river as it makes it easier to play? When we are IP we cannot be check raised so we're not faced with any difficult decisions, we can just adopt a strategy vs that particular villain, so if a crazy villain who calls too much our best strategy is to jam any hand with >50% equity vs his calling range.

Then against a villain who calls fairly tight and can be exploited by bluffs we want to balance our value bet jams with the worst hands in our range to gain the most value, and we could even take it a step further and estimate the number of combos he's going to fold to our bet size and if his estimated folding frequency is higher than the bet/(bet+pot) amount the we could actually bluff more than the balanced strategy, because it would be the maximally exploitative strategy as he is folding to bluffs too much?

Then you could just figure out similar strategies for OOP with an SPR of 1 or less.

It's still gonna be difficult to get that much money in pre, on the flop and turn to give us this easier way to play on the river.

[spoonitnow]

So ideally we want to have one bet left on the river as it makes it easier to play?

If you have a choice between an SPR of 1 and an SPR of 1.5 as the aggressor, the SPR of 1 is going to be better. Having two or more full bets on the river is fine. However, an SPR of 1.5 puts us in a weird spot when we get raised on unless we bet like 40-50% of the pot.

An SPR of 2-2.5, on the other hand, is fine. Imagine that you have a $10 pot with $20-$25 behind on the river. If you bet $7, then your opponent will have between $13 and $18 to shove. This doesn't put you in any awkward situations.

Don't misinterpret this particular hand as me saying that you should always try to get to the river with one bet left behind. The bet size on the flop in the OP set up an SPR of about 1.5, and that puts Hero in weird spots if we bet the turn or river and get shoved on because of the pot odds.

so if a crazy villain who calls too much our best strategy is to jam any hand with >50% equity vs his calling range.

It depends. I'm not sure what you mean by this? I think you just mean that you don't bluff against calling stations.

Then against a villain who calls fairly tight and can be exploited by bluffs we want to balance our value bet jams with the worst hands in our range to gain the most value, and we could even take it a step further and estimate the number of combos he's going to fold to our bet size and if his estimated folding frequency is higher than the bet/(bet+pot) amount the we could actually bluff more than the balanced strategy, because it would be the maximally exploitative strategy as he is folding to bluffs too much?

If you know what a balanced strategy looks like in this type of spot, then you can bluff more than the balanced amount if you think he folds too much, and you can bluff less than the balanced amount if you think he doesn't fold too much. The more likely the guy is to make a proper adjustment, the less you deviate from the balanced bluffing rate. Easy game.

For a simple example, this idea is why you don't bluff calling stations. Since he's folding too little, you bluff less than the balanced frequency.

It's still gonna be difficult to get that much money in pre, on the flop and turn to give us this easier way to play on the river.

Again, I'm not saying you should do this on every hand. All I'm saying is that as the aggressor, an SPR of 0.8-1 is much better than an SPR of 1.4-1.6.

[seven-deuce]

Ohrite i totally misunderstood what you meant, i understand now though, you want to avoid getting to the river with round about a 1.5 SPR because of the awkward spots you can get into as the aggressor.

Using bet sizing and avoiding these sticky situations is never something i consciously think about when playing, gonna try do that from now on.

So for example we are at the river with the betting lead, the pot is $10 we have $15 behind.

We bet $6 with the bottom or close to it of our bet for value range and villain shoves, we would typically bet fold this with higher SPR's. We then have 9/40 = 0.23 pot odds if i'm using the correct formula, so if we have 23% equity or more we should call the shove, i think this is leading to us calling too often because we have priced ourselves in sort of, so if villain shoves a moderately strong range he's gonna be making a lot of money with profitable shoves vs us?

I think it would be more problematic on the turn if villain could be shoving various draws as well. This was purely made up i never stoved any ranges etc, but am i thinking along the right lines?

[spoonitnow]

Ohrite i totally misunderstood what you meant, i understand now though, you want to avoid getting to the river with round about a 1.5 SPR because of the awkward spots you can get into as the aggressor.

Using bet sizing and avoiding these sticky situations is never something i consciously think about when playing, gonna try do that from now on.

So for example we are at the river with the betting lead, the pot is $10 we have $15 behind.

We bet $6 with the bottom or close to it of our bet for value range and villain shoves, we would typically bet fold this with higher SPR's. We then have 9/40 = 0.23 pot odds if i'm using the correct formula, so if we have 23% equity or more we should call the shove, i think this is leading to us calling too often because we have priced ourselves in sort of, so if villain shoves a moderately strong range he's gonna be making a lot of money with profitable shoves vs us?

I think it would be more problematic on the turn if villain could be shoving various draws as well. This was purely made up i never stoved any ranges etc, but am i thinking along the right lines?

Yep. Just note that those SPRs are problematic not just on the river, but on the flop and turn as well.

[seven-deuce]

I'm feeling enlightened.