lowjack pressurized by hijack

$2-$5 full table NLH. Hero open raises $15 with called by hijacker. Flop is . Hero bets $20 and villain raises to $110. Without redraws is this hand worth much to continue? If I call and don't improve on 4th street, can I legitimately call a half pot bet? At this point stacks are 200 BBs each and villain competent player.

Against this sizing I would fold. He is raising more than pot, and you are deep, so likely a very large turn bet is coming as well. And as you say, you dont even have a draw to go along with second pair other than a backdoor straightdraw, which is really not much.

Against a good and aggressive player with position on you I would also consider checking the flop. Your hand dont need that much protection, and its kind of tough to get a lot of value from worse hands by betting.

He might call with draws of course, but you are not really ahead of draws, and hands like 55-TT or a worse JX are not going to call multible bets. So you need to check at some point anyway, and checking the flop takes away his option to raise and effectively put your entire stack at risk.

I thought it best to bet in order to avoid allowing a free card to either a flush or straight. Maybe I should bet higher on the flop?:bike:
What if he has an underpair and is making a sneaky move?

Villain polarizes his raise to level your continuation bet, as it was a bit large considering the texture of this flop. We are not too deep to make this call, as if we do we will be committed to the boat. If the villain is very competent he could block the flop with a high club. At this point it is a disadvantage to be OOP because we are also blocking important bluffs like Kxs that villain could use now to get us out of the pot. I think it's a reasonable fold considering the whole context of this hand.
Greetings.

Gorblimey said:

$2-$5 full table NLH. Hero open raises $15 with called by hijacker. Flop is . Hero bets $20 and villain raises to $110. Without redraws is this hand worth much to continue? If I call and don't improve on 4th street, can I legitimately call a half pot bet? At this point stacks are 200 BBs each and villain competent player.

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I would fold as there are too many hands that he beats you with and chances are you would not improve to a better hand. He could have any spade/straight draws in his range he would raise your cbet with as well as AQ and pocket 4's.

Dhendrixon said:

I would fold as there are too many hands that he beats you with and chances are you would not improve to a better hand. He could have any spade/straight draws in his range he would raise your cbet with as well as AQ and pocket 4's.

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If V is competent he shouldn't have AQ here as that should be a 3 bet vs a 3 BB open from LJ at a live 2/5 game. Likewise with overpairs, KQs, QQ, JJ. I would expect Vs value range to be QJ, KQ, 44 here.

The bad part about this spot though is that when we are ahead we usually only have a 10% edge in a 55/45 type scenario when V has hands like Ks9s. We pretty much flipping a coin and technically behind some hands like AsTs or As4s, and we are crushed by hands as weak as QTo. So when we are ahead we are slightly ahead and when we are behind we are way behind. AND we are out of position, AND the raise size is putting stacks in play over 3 streets AND it is hard for our hand to improve as we have maybe 4 clean outs.

Sure V could be doing something sneaky but is it worth our stack with this board and this hand to find out? I would fold and wait for a better spot.

Gorblimey said:

I thought it best to bet in order to avoid allowing a free card to either a flush or straight.

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Betting the flop is not terrible, and its true, that you can get value from draws. You are not getting that much value though, because some draws like the nut flushdraw have extra outs, so they have near coinflip equity. Also if you check out of position, draws will often bet, and then you get your value anyway.

Gorblimey said:

Maybe I should bet higher on the flop?

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No. This is probably from a "protection" standpoint, but you can not make draws fold on the flop. So betting large just bloat the pot more, when you have a hand, that would generally prefer a cheap showdown.

Gorblimey said:

What if he has an underpair and is making a sneaky move?

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This is exactly the point of checking. If you check to him, he might take a stab with low equity hands like an underpair. But if you bet, he is either going to fold those hands or maybe now and then raise them as a bluff. If he fold, you only win a small pot, and if he raise, his bluff will usually end up working.