AJo IP in 3bet pot against delayed cbet on dry board

IMO hand WP. Though AJo I would tend to either fold or 4bet PF depending on vilain (would call AJs but that might be just me being nitty...).

In position, I wouldn’t mind to call AJ against a SB 3bet. If you 4bet you are blowing up the pot and then you are isolating yourself against better. I think you played it well this way and off course you only beat a bluff or weaker A on the river. That depends on villain tendencies if you can profitable call here.

Cheers,
SDK1987

Steal the flop

I do not like the turn call readless. He might delayed cbet AK or AQ which beats you, he might have picked up a flush draw, he might have JJ-99 that he did not want to bet otf, he could even have any set here, he might even have an OP, so I prefer a fold OTT.

OTR, it is not even clear if you have a call, which is even more reason to fold turn. You probably have to call river especially vs this size, but I do not expect you to make tons of money with it.

I like the call preflop. I agree with SDK that 4betting AJo when IP isn't that great.

You said "SB seems to be a decent player, and if I were him I'd cbet 100% here.". I don't agree with that. If SB is a decent player he should not cbet 100% here.
That is why I don't agree with this either ->

Originally posted by Dadramel
Steal the flop

He should have a check call range here and our hand is very weak. We have an overcard with 3 outs and even that might be dominated if we hit. You have no backdoor draws.

OTT and OTR I agree with briccius.

Preflop call is ok. We can 4b if villain folds much vs 4b but the hand sample is small for such assumptions.
After the flop check we can fire a bullet.
As played, turn is a fold. What do you hope for there? It looks like AK and it beats you too. If you hit your Ace ( as you did) you can be dominated and lose a lot of money...as you did...

Originally posted by nitrol
After the flop check we can fire a bullet.

You know our hand is bad. That is why you would be folding OTT vs 1/2psb when flop was checked...
Here villain can have weak Qx, pocket pairs, overcards, backdoor draws. All of those hands could check call. Also he might have some check raising hands.
If our hand is crap and we assume villain is calling OTF often enough so we don't make autoprofit, is there any point in stabbing him?
We could bet vs his missed cbet if we had info he is folding too much but GTO wise I believe we should not bet this hand OTF.

Well actually I'd cbet 100% but not against a decent player.

OTR I now beat his pocket pairs and Qx that could have delayed a cbet so as played I think the call is good.

But I see, the call OTT is probably not good by itself. I still think he's weak most of the time so it might be a good idea to call turn raise river. Sometimes he will have 77 or AQ but I think most of the time he has a weak Q at best. I'll come back to this with a more detailed plan

I wouldn't mention it normally but I think it's worth noting that sometimes players who seem decent do very stupid stuff, he had

The flop hits your range better than his, on that type of board my cbet range is mostly made of top pairs+. I would probably check / call 99, TT, JJ and check fold the rest.
Here I think you should stab the flop too, but if you were to have any showdown value (like a 7) check behind is superior.

Originally posted by SuperChompa
The flop hits your range better than his

Imo not true. SB 3bets, hero flats. I constructed some kind of ranges based on the ones I use and Snowie ranges for both SB and BTN and on this flop SB seems to have equity advantage.

And about stabbing OTF. I'm not 100% sure but I would guess GTO wise it is not ok. It still might work often enough for us to get autoprofit. I still think that if we do not have that info and if we do not know how to play later streets properly, it is better to give up.

Originally posted by la55i

Originally posted by nitrol
After the flop check we can fire a bullet.

You know our hand is bad. That is why you would be folding OTT vs 1/2psb when flop was checked...
Here villain can have weak Qx, pocket pairs, overcards, backdoor draws. All of those hands could check call. Also he might have some check raising hands.
If our hand is crap and we assume villain is calling OTF often enough so we don't make autoprofit, is there any point in stabbing him?
We could bet vs his missed cbet if we had info he is folding too much but GTO wise I believe we should not bet this hand OTF.

This is a 3b pot. So if he does not fire on dry board we can shoot. I can agree if it was a single raised pot.

Originally posted by la55i

Originally posted by SuperChompa
The flop hits your range better than his

Imo not true. SB 3bets, hero flats. I constructed some kind of ranges based on the ones I use and Snowie ranges for both SB and BTN and on this flop SB seems to have equity advantage.

And about stabbing OTF. I'm not 100% sure but I would guess GTO wise it is not ok. It still might work often enough for us to get autoprofit. I still think that if we do not have that info and if we do not know how to play later streets properly, it is better to give up.

Flop is dry and should be attacked by the initial raiser like always.

That's an interesting hand because most of us have diferent opinions on it. Personally the main reason why I call 3 bet pots IP is because I will try to steal when checked to, be it on the flop or on the turn (when I have no SD value).
It looks good when it works, but it does not work all the time

Originally posted by nitrol
Flop is dry and should be attacked by the initial raiser like always.

I would agree if initial raiser was in position. OOP I think we should have bigger check calling range and I don't think cbetting pocket pairs or weak Qx or total air OOP is very good.
I might be wrong but lately I have tried to focus more on optimal play so here I try to think range vs range and consider our position too. So the argument "aggressor should cbet 100% on dry flops" isn't gonna fly with me.
If SB is a good player he will not cbet 100% vs another good player, he will have a check calling and check raising range. If he is going to defend correctly on the flop we will not make money by stabbing with air. If we want to stab, lets at least do it with hands that have some kind of backdoor draws, not with a A high that might be dominated even if we hit and we lose a lot of money because of that.

Originally posted by SuperChompa
Personally the main reason why I call 3 bet pots IP is because I will try to steal when checked to

I think the main reason should be to make sure villain doesn't make autoprofit and to minimize our losses. Ofc there will be spots where we can stab villain but calling a 3bet just with a plan to stab every time it is possible with total air doesn't sound a super good plan to me.

Again, I might be wrong. If I am, please tell me why

Yes sometimes I hit a hand too. I mean I dont float with air just to bluff the turn, usually I try to have some equity.
But I mean here what matters is what is his checking range given the board and what sb 3bet against btn.
As an exercise i did the range evaluation and I have:
Around 99 combos given that he might slowplay QQ (so I leave 2 combo) and 77 (leave 1 combos)
might not bluff AK (leave 6 combos).

From that I think he is going to call a 60% bet with only 44 combos from the previous.

If wr bet 60 into 95. (60/60+95= ) 38% fold equity needed.

(91-44/91 he folds 51%.
This is why I say that bet > check.

Qxx dry board is a board every initial raiser/3 bettor should attack, no matter IP or OOP. This will make a good chunk of opponent's range to fold. You can continue betting on turn if higher card appears.

@SuperChompa

This kind of exercises are very good. However I think there is a small problem.
We can take exploitative line if we know villain is folding too much or if we think that the population is folding too much, right?
If we don't know that, we can make an analysis of that spot and then take theoretically optimal approach.

Now you sort of put him on a range and figured out how much he might be folding. The problem is that if we want to take a theoretical approach you should construct his defending ranges optimally and see whether it is fine to stab with this hand or not.
No need to put him on a range and count combos and then guess he is folding too much

@nitrol

I don't think there really is any board where it would be mandatory to cbet with any holding. Hero's hand is more important. If I remember correctly, w34z3l has also said that saying "you should always cbet Kxx (or similar) boards" is something you saw many years ago and now that player tendencies have changed a bit (calling more cbets) it is nowadays considered as bad advice.

What range will you xc here with if you were the 3 bettor?

My 3betting range SBvsBTN is roughly JJ+,77-22,A2s+,K7s+,Q9s+,J9s+,T8s+,97s+,87s,76s,ATo+,KJo+
Some of the hands are in mixed category so I won't be 3betting them always but I will have that kind of hands

This flop doesn't hit our range very well. Neither does it hit our villain. The flop is pretty dry and we probably won't have 3 streets of value with many of our value hands. Also we are going to cbet around half pot if we do cbet. I think value to bluff ratio of 1:1 should be reasonable?
I would maybe cbet just KK+ and then some suited mid Ax as a bluff. On this dry board it might be more profitable to check call and delay our raise with very strong holdings like sets. Also imo it is not necessary to cbet AQ always because we might not get 3 streets anyway, we are not so afraid of overcards and it blocks villains dominated Qx hands that will call.

So as a 3bettor I would check a big part of my range on this particular board. I don't think cbetting very little would be a big problem. On a very dry board that hits neither of us hard we can't expect to get 3 streets very often and our value hands are not vulnerable. This also makes our checking range stronger and villain might end up making mistakes.

I would check call pretty much anything with a pair+ and decent backdoors. Vs 1/2psb stab we would have to defend 66% of our checking range and when I played with Equilab the hands that I would check call gives me pretty close to correct frequency.