Hand converted with online PokerStrategy.com hand converter:
$0.05/$0.1 No-Limit Hold'em (6 handed)
Known players:
[tg]BU$13.26:///////;SB (Hero)$10.17:///////;BB$11.57:///////;MP2$13.84:///////;MP3$9.85:///////;CO$21.96:///////;[/tg]
Preflop: Hero is SB with J:c, A:c.
MP2 folds, MP3 raises to $0.30, 2 folds, Hero calls $0.25, BB folds.
Flop: ($0.7) J:d, 9:c, 4:d (2 players)
Hero checks, MP3 bets $0.40, Hero calls $0.40.
Turn: ($1.5) 7:h (2 players)
Hero checks, MP3 bets $0.80, Hero calls $0.80.
River: ($3.1) 3:c (2 players)
Hero checks, MP3 bets $2.00, Hero folds, MP3 gets uncalled bet back.
Final Pot: $3.1.
This hand should help us to see how a basic understanding of GTO principles and bluff:value ratios should help us to make decent exploitative decisions even at the lower limits. Most of the focus will be on the river situation, although we we'll briefly walk through the earlier streets.
Preflop
Reasonable but somewhat loose preflop defend facing a 3x MP open from the SB at these limits. Both 3betting and folding can be considered here.
Flop
Pretty standard x/c here. It's the only line that makes sense unless we want to consider opening up a donk-betting range in this spot. X/f would be way too tight and x/r would likely be overplaying. (Even if we did have over 50% equity vs villain's flop calling range we still have two streets to play OOP where realising our full equity is going to be virtually impossible unless villain is extremely passive).
Turn
Standard practice here to call 2 streets. Folding can be considered against extremely tight opponents, especially when they are MP openers. In general folding TPTK to a 2nd barrel would be a mistake vs most players.
River
River is where it gets interesting. I imagine it's a spot where some of you would call, some of you would fold. There is actually a reasonable chance that it's one of the stronger hands in our range on a blank river, so shouldn't this be an easy call?
Let's think about it for a minute. Firstly, our opponents value range. What does the average player fire 3 streets after opening from MP? KJ, QJ? Probably not. Even if he did he would like only have the suited combos in these hands. The reality is that many players might not even fire this sizing on the river with AJ. On average our opponent's value-range here will be overpairs+ the vast majority of the time.
So assuming we don't beat any of our opponents value-range at this limit then we can refer to our holding as a "bluffcatcher". I.e, if our opponent is bluffing we win, if he's value-betting we lose. Therefore the only thing we really care about at these limits when deciding whether to call here is not the absolute strength of our hand but rather our opponents bluff:value ratio.
We are getting 28% pot-odds on a call. In GTO terms this means that a balanced opponent using this river sizing should be bluffing 28% of the time and value-betting 72% of the time. But what does your instinct tell you regarding the average 3barreling range at micro-stakes. Balanced? Weighted towards bluffs? Weighted towards value?
There are certain spots at micro-limits where it nearly always makes sense to assume that our opponent is weighted towards value. 3barreling is one of them. (We'll look at other situations in the next highlight thread). The way we exploit this is very simply to fold all of our hands which we have classed as bluffcatchers. In other words, to even contemplate a call in this river spot we at the very least need to beat the absolute weakest hand in our opponents value range. If his weakest hand is QQ here we should have at least KK before even contemplating a call.
Of course, it ultimately depends on our estimations of opponents value range. Since obviously if he'd 3barrel any Jx (extremely unlikely), then we'd consider a call with our river AJ here. As it stands we should be able to make routine folds in this spot. Not folding in spots like this a common cause of having a very low river-call-efficiency stat. Our river-call-efficiency stat should be around 1.4-1.6. If we have a river-call efficiency stat that is considerably lower than this then it might make sense for us to filter for spots where we face a 3barrel and see how many pure bluffcatchers we are calling on the river.
