Quick question. vs a tough pro, will he ever call the river with worse?

Feels like raising has little downside here in what will be at best. That said, hard to believe he doesn't hold an Ace especially since he led into 3 people on flop.

Not sure it is worth it, but perhaps test him with raise to 300.

Some history with this pro V, about an hour earlier.

V opens $20 utg.
H TsTc $60 in CO. V calls.

($120) 4d 6h 8c
V checks.
H $45.
V calls.

($210) Td
V checks.
H $75.
V calls.

($360) 5d
V checks.
H checks.

V shows QTo

My first reaction was that him calling my 3-bet pre-flop with QTo is kind of disrespectful. And then also calling my flop bet seems the same. I’m imagining he’s thinking he can take this pot away from me at some point…? Is this just my ego talking?

As I alluded to in the original post, he’s gotten the better of me a couple times just last week, including a really lame river call I made paying off his thin value. My table image isn’t at its best with him.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Preflop is a fold?

River we are never raising imho. Villain can have 22/A5s and all the Ax. You'll be risking your whole stack if he has 22/A5.
What worse hands vbet this river and call a raise? 2x? What 2x is in his open range besides A2s and 22? Maybe 27 if you guys play that game.

I guess we can push him off a chop, and x/jam but is it worth it???

He opens QTo UTG and calls a 3bet OOP with it????? He's a tough Pro????

Perhaps it's a hecka exploitative strategy for your table, and he makes enough to be a Pro, but dang...

'Play as many pots with poorer players as possible...'

Yeah, yeah, OOP, but still funny considering some recent threads here.

I wouldn't be surprised if pre is a 3! or fold with A9s. Why on Earth did H donk the turn for b25?? (Or b33 on the turned set hand? Are we allergic to value? That afraid of 97?) Anyway, H almost looks here like they're block-betting a diamond backdoor despite the double-paired board. Were you afraid V would check back, OP?

This is a chop like always. Though V may be betting what a rivered flush might call. If they have A5/22/or lol43dd, I guess it sucks to be you. There's 2 A5s possible, and 1 22, which you might have and V might not. Despite how deep you all are.

The way H played the prior hand, and if V actually disrespects H's play, maybe a Hero jam might get V to fold an Ace?

So much money can be saved if we just fold QTo pre!

some solid clicking throughout the thread.

solver likes turn but im unconvinced this is your best play, it wants to mix cc and xjam otr trying to make ax indifferent. sort of doubt this guy ever folds an ace but also doubt he take this line / size with 22 / a5

the 3b pot i think is problematic in multiple nodes

But what if we have a skill edge? Is it okay then?

I mean...we only lose to A5 and 22, and I don't think he's taking this line with 22.

Is there a world where we min-click it and he spaz-3B's with KK or something? Does he think we're capable of min-clicking as a bluff?

I think he's probably folding everything we beat. Hard to think he folds a chop for any size. If we raise and he jams (gulp), are we....calling? Folding? I don't even like typing it. I can't imagine not vomiting all over the table if I tried to do it.

I wonder if he ever finds a fold with AX, even A5, if we jam, repping 22. I can't imagine it happening, but 22 seems like it would be more in our range than his.

I know this is insane, and I don't think he's ever folding a boat here, but...Banana recently folded a boat because he thought his opponent had quads, and I'm pretty sure V having quads there was less credible than you having them here, so...

Goddam. I wanna jam. Not sure if it's genius or moronic. Might be it's a very fine line between 'em.

PS - if you jam and this guy snaps you off with 43dd I swear to f**king God I'm leaving this forum and never coming back.

By the way I'm tired and I've been drinking. It was a helluva day. I may deny remembering posting in this thread.

Your actions don’t look strong to villain. He certainly doesn’t expect a monster with the weird line: check flop, donk turn, check river

Turn donk looks like a blocking bet
You check when the flush comes in
Most people with a monster are shoving money in the pot - we count on that so we can get out of the way. There’s less money flying around than a 1/3 game. Maybe check-raise flop.

I don’t like your line, but I do think the donk capped villain and you’re not behind. If you were beat, villain would have raised your dinky donk turn bet, so I think you have nothing to lose by raising.

When I want a call, I just double villain’s bet. I don’t know why, but it seems to work often

Make it 260 and chop it up
If he’s not quite the pro you think he is - maybe he calls with KQ of diamonds.

Morning errbuddy. Sleep well?

Sober doc shall now take a look at this...

No idea what's going on with the turn donk for 1/4 pot. But, since you did it, if you were to now check raise the river, if I was V sitting there with AX, I'd be thinking back to the beginning of the hand to try to figure out if I might have fallen into a trap.

The beauty of being in the BB and getting odds to defend super wide pre is that we can literally rep almost anything that wouldn't 3B pre. We could certainly rep A5, suited or unsuited, 22, and 43dd.

Not sure if 43dd ever donks turn as sort of a stop bet. If V has AX he may not bet huge on the turn if we check, for fear of losing us, so there's a reasonable chance we get to realize.

It's not insane to think A5 or 22 might donk small to make sure some money goes in on the turn, then opts to go for the cheeky check raise on the river.

I dunno man. We lose to 4 combos. We can credibly rep all of them. He probably maybe realistically only has the weaker 2 of those combos, and probably only 1 of those, A5s, plus a lot of plain old AX that can only beat a bluff to chop.

Sober doc agrees with drunk doc. Let's ship it.

PS - if we raise here, and we think it's for value to get called by worse, I'd think that's really unlikely, but we should probably go very small.

My suggestion to jam is to get him to fold a chop, and maybe, juuuuuuussssssttttt maybe, make him fold better, because of our ridiculous line, the massive x/r size, and the configuration.

If we're considering a raise-fold, it's super puntastic, and we should just call.

Before the parade of people calling me a crazy idiot...V bet $130. Our jam would be for 10x that.

When was the last time you saw someone go for a 10x check--jam on the river and get called by someone holding the 3rd nuts or worse, mostly just hoping to chop?

Yeah, yeah, I know, "nOBody foLdS bOaTs!"

C'mon, admit it. We've all done it, at least once, when it seemed obvious we were beat.

The short answer is that he almost certainly won't call with worse, but you should give it a shot anyway because the chances that this Villain turns over A5 or 22 in this spot are remote. If the river was a K or Q, I definitely would not raise.

Feel like if I took a shot every time someone is described as a pro. but in the same thread has a HH were said pro. does a great cosplay as a fish ... I'd be dead by March.
Maybe I survive if I never look at a banana thread again.

TT hand on turn seems like 300 is a lot better than the 45 size, as it's not like you double barrel this card a lot ... but maybe not if V thinks you'll never bet that size with AA/AdKd or whatever (should still be bigger than 45 though, IMO).

River is obv. very annoying, wouldn't be shocked if solver still bets but I'm not.

After seeing V's cards obv. call the floor immediately, and then ask them to rope off the table.

A9s hand ... meh, I'm fine with overcall preflop as you can check to V and see what both recs do ... plus some value in flush over flush vs. recs. Think A5s is close in value to A9s here, so fine with calling that too. Probably still fold A2s though.

V doing some weird stuff in the hand, and it's difficult to range ... at a guess it's a bigger A that randomly clicked bet on the flop into recs, decided you aren't ever folding a chop on the turn (and has 3 outs to hit a higher boat), and then went for value against your whatever on the river. Maybe V has 22, although turn seems terrible if true.

If you raise I think the only size is all of it, mostly to fold out chops. If you think he folds chops about as often as he has 22, then I'd just call.

Results:

As for the TT vs QTo hand, I bet small on the turn because I wanted to keep his weak hands in, and I also was hoping the small bet might induce him to raise. He'd raise all his sets anyway, but he might read weakness and raise with pair+draw hands. Maybe 89s, 9Ts, A5s?

idk this forum have very odd perceptions of good players lol

but should be fairly obvious when u are describing a hand vs a pro / respected pro without much in the way of other reads that they arent expected to open a co range from ep and defend qto vs 3b oop. this looks much more similar to the way we expect fish and whales to play lol

i think its mostly poor hand reading by both of you lol. what bluff catchers do you want villain to cbet 4 ways with? what bluffs do you want him to have otr? if u think he calls the turn with bluff catchers why would he be more likely to bet them otr than call block? i would expect anyone reasonably certainly someone described as a pro to only vb Ax otr and honestly probably only get to the river w Ax given line lol. your rationale for leading makes very little sense to me vs described villain who doesn't seem to understand the basics and makes even less sense if you're going to get 1/4 psb ott and check the river

i think you may also want to spend some time looking at the tt hand and in particular how to adjust deep / vs a villain thats too loose and likely doesnt have a flop leading range. also think its kind of clear river bet

seems like inconsistent logic throughout the hands tbh

I think he can c-bet pocket pairs on the flop, and call the small turn bet with them. When I check the river, he might think his larger pocket pairs are thin value bets. If he called the turn with rags just planning to bluff the river, he might follow through with a bluff on the river now when I check. Apparently my line had him thinking I was very unlikely to hold an Ace, and so in that case if he doesn't think I have an Ace or a 2, he might think he can take the pot down with any 2 cards in his hand with the proper river bet sizing.

He for sure is a tough, winning player, and I'm not arrogant to say that I know this with near 100% certainty. That said, he lives in my head as a bit of a nemesis. Sometimes I just avoid his tables, or avoid playing hands against him. But sometimes I get into these leveling wars (perhaps one-sided), and it does cause my play to deviate from how I would usually play a hand.

Not that this debate is worth having but surely you understand the skepticism? If this is a stake he plays regularly and he's not just ****ing around at 5/5 till a higher table opens it's really hard to take the ''pro'' description seriously having seen the QTo hand.

Well, that's why I posted it. I couldn't believe he did that. Maybe he thinks he owns me and can just play anything against me, even OOP?

I've seen him open wide at certain times, he certainly opens wider and more often when tables get passive and players are weak. But yeah, the QTo was a wtf.

I'm not going back through OG hand history to find evidence to support this. My vague recollection is that OG is solid.

OG, if you say V is a winning player, I take you at your word. That said, the plays you've seen him make force us to ask WTF he's doing. If you and he have some meta, then maybe it is about you.

If that's our working hypothesis, I have to think there's a way to exploit the $hlt outta him. Like, in this hand here, I like a 10X check-jam even more, not because the reveal shows we had the best hand, but because I can't confidently rule out him leveling himself into hero-calling with the nut flush.

Don't ask me to explain the logic that leads to you having a worse flush or any hand he can beat in this line. I'm not sure I could do it, and at the end of another long day, I don't have the energy. The only constant here is that he likes calling you VERY light, which leads me to wonder if he thinks you're an over-bluffer.

I think we can probably dial our bluffing frequency way back when we're playing him. We can probably go thinner and bigger with value, and work in some traps.

Something I think is worth taking away from this hand is his river bet sizing, IP, with the 17th nuts (I'm guessing it's 17th). To me, it suggests he struggles to find spots where he should be checking back, or sizing up or down.

Like, if he thought he was targeting a lower flush, I'd think he'd want to size down a bit. I can't make my brain figure out what better hands he thinks he's folding out if he thought he was bluffing, but if he thinks you're folding 2x, I'd think he'd be able to figure out he should size up.

This 1/2 pot sizing seems like indecisive mergey BS sizing trying to target a weaker range to make a crying call, but I can't figure out what that range looks like here.

Feels like there's a lot of money to be won against this V, at least until he figures out how to adjust.