3bet A9s, turning into bluff

some people argue for making large 3bets in microstakes games, because you don't want to see a flop and get raked. i haven't personally checked if larger 3bets are indeed more profitable... whatever line and sizing you take with this hand should be fine, i usually 3bet to 8 bigs given this action.

postflop: i don't like it, just give up. i'm not a fan of multibarreling no equity A high in a spot where you "don't rep anything"... A high is "too good", so barreling off your A highs here probably means you're bluffing too much.
how many flushes do you have that are checking behind flop? or 5x? you say the turn gives straights, are you really 3betting 54s? betting the turn with all 3 combos of A5s with a bare gutshot with tainted outs? don't think so.

i'm not saying that you never have them, but i don't think that you have enough. i'm also not saying that you should never bluff with this line, but the hand selection should definitely be more careful.

on villain's call: i'm not sure if i'd do it (his hand blocks your bluffing hands like 89, etc), but i understand where he's coming from. i think it's probably a good call and he played well (it's definitely good if one has a showdown read like this).

but what about hero's value range? i believe you can bet turn and river with any Qx+ that you have checked back the flop with. the 5 doesn't really hit either player's range, and villain can't just start check/raise bluffing randomly on the 5 anyway because you should have some flop check-back flushes to defend with (at the very least, some Q:cx♣ come to mind).

PRF you can 3b this hand!
OTF we should CBet 100%! So we b/b/f or x/x/x we don't x/b/b:) You induced him to call you light, because you capped yourself to bluff heavy!

thanks for your replies, I'll keep the x/b/b as bluff out of my play for now - but I think we can still use it for example if we have QQ on a Q 3 8 board, don't you think?

And on higher stakes shall we implement the x/b/b line again?

i think x/b/b is a good line in general, specially as in micros check flop and turn = capped range most of the time (they never have top pair beat). but then we go back to all that hand-reading, range-building, theoretical discussion.

the problem here is that most NL5 players are massively unbalanced.
let's say that you have a strategy that looks like this: cbet all top pairs and overpairs, all flush draws and some backdoor draws randomly. also check behind QQ for "trapping" and "balance" etc. implied is that all your total air also goes into your checking behind range.

what is the problem here? the problem is that having only QQ as your "strong check behind" range is not nearly enough, your turn range is massively unbalanced towards air. on a card like the 7:c, QQ is literally the only good hand you can have, and it's not even a flush.
thus, if other players are assuming that you are using such a strategy, turn and river becomes a game of chicken. they know that you almost never have anything, so it just comes down to having the balls to call with any reasonable bluffcatcher.

that's one of the important things about "balance" - it allows you to show up with strong hands when opponents don't expect it. if you can show up with a decent proportion of top pair hands in this line (which you should), then villain is the one getting owned here.
of course, you should still play the "standard lines" most of the time, still bet most of your top pairs on the flop... building your ranges in a reasonable manner is challenging.

thanks for these explanations, very interesting to me. appreciate that

I usually do 3x which is .45 even 2.5x is ok but id rather go smaller than larger ip so i do think .50 is a tiny bit on the large side. As played it's a board im check giving up on although i certainly wouldn't argue with a one and done cbet on Qxx . But the reason im just check giving up is because we have no backdoor equity with draws and only really drawing to an ace on a bad board for us.

Change the Qs for the Qh and then im all for cbetting and barreling hearts. And i dont see the turn as being a great bet either because we would cbet our value and we would cbet those backdoor draws draws. So what are we really betting as a delayed cbet here ? I think the line of betting turn and river is good though once we do decide to cbet the turn . Our equity is likely marginal and we can get underpairs and better Ax to fold.

Lastly i do think A high has some decent showdown value when villain checks the turn and we could even think about turning A high in to a bluff catcher on some rivers. But as a general rule of thumb im just looking for backdoor equity to cbet and barreling turned equity. You can really keep cbetting as simple as that in the micros for the most part imo.

Ill learn to spell one day so i dont have to correct my self 10 times per post