I open 9-8 of spades in the small blind. Big blind - an unknown - calls.

Flop comes Q-6-4, rainbow. I bet. Big blind calls.

Turn is the deuce of hearts, putting two hearts on the table. Given how loosely some peel the flop, my fold equity is huge and the pot is too big not to take another shot at. I bet. Big blind calls.

The river is another queen, not of hearts. No draws are completed and I’m at the river with 9-high in a 5BB pot and I have the initiative. I decide to bet. Big blind calls with J-high, two hearts, and takes the pot.

That’s one mother of a call to make at first glance, but I couldn’t shake the tingling feeling that maybe, just maybe, I was outplayed. So I decided to revisit the hand when I was done playing for the day. Now I’m done playing for the day, which featured an astounding  -20BB/100 crash costing me over 100 big bets in about 500 hands. It’s definitely not the most money I’ve lost in a session, thanks to the fact that I’ve moved down in limits, but it IS the most big bets I’ve lost in such a short span of hands. I probably made a few calldowns I shouldn’t have, but it’s hard to get away from an overpair when the guy who caps preflop with 76o hits trips on the river and checkraises. And straights, jesus christ the straights. I felt like no one could see a flop without finding a gutshot draw that they checkraised the turn with only to hit their straight on the river.

But I digress.

So back to the J-high hand. How awful was it? Let’s make a few things clear.

1) My stealing range from the BB is pretty big. Not any-two, but it’s decently big. J8s, which was his hand, is an easy call.
2) I think him peeling the flop is OK. There’s only one overcard to the board, sometimes he has the best hand, he has a backdoor flush draw and he’ll get a free card on the turn fairly often.
3) Folding the turn - where he had a flush draw - is out of the question. An argument could probably be made for raising in his case, but the only bad option is folding.

And then he’s at the river, with J-high and being offered 6:1 to call. Is his hand good 15% of the time? It’s such a crappy hand, how could it be!

But I bet the river. And I wouldn’t bet any hand on this river, only the made hands and the really weak hands that are bluffing. Stuff like ace-high would check for a cheap showdown. So that narrows my range from “lots” to “bluff or made hand.” In fact, you could probably remove small pocket pairs from my range as well, making it increasingly unlikely that I actually have something.

I’m still not sure that he played it well - the more I think about it, the better it seems for him to raise the turn as a semibluff - but if he made a mistake anywhere, it was only on the river and I’m starting to appreciate that he may have played even the river well. It certainly gave me some stuff to think about, especially given how narrow my hand range becomes when I bet the river in a pot like that. Perhaps I need to sometimes bet ace-high out of position as well.