KJs raise cbet on Ahigh board

This play is too advanced for me. LOL

In my donk opinion, maybe the raise on the flop is not bad since you have some backdoor equity and will probably buy the river card with that raise.

If you had an A you wouldn't be raising that board - right? With that in mind, if you are going to raise then I think you would be better off flatting and evaluating the turn. K high is often ahead, you have backdoors and villain at NL5 will play fairly openly on the Turn and you may be able to take it down on the turn. As you suggest, I don't think that raising reps much or gets paid by much if you do have a value hand.

Folding flop seems pretty weak as this type of board is likely to get Cbet a huge % of the time but vs agro opponents that may put you to harder decisions later I don't think it criminal to let it go. There are better spots at NL5 for sure.

Just my thoughts. Interested to hear what the judge has to say.

It's not as if we have zero value-range in this spot. If we are raising sets, 89s then it's technically ok for us to have some semi-bluffs in our raising range. That's going to be a pretty narrow range of bluffs generally, although keep in mind we can get away with having significantly more bluffs than value-hands since we can apply pressure on later streets with our bluffs.

In other words, this play is fine, so long as we are not doing it too frequently. Most of our defending range (for value) on this texture will be flat-calls, so we should also play the majority of our bluffs this way (by floating).