KK becomes a bluff in a check-raise turn
Hi freddydr87, thanks for posting this amazing question: why is so hard to leave AA?
Cash Games can be really boring sometimes. Sometimes we stay more than one hour without getting any good hand, and then comes a AA. We are eager to build up a pot with this hand, because we are a very long time just watching the game, that our emotions grow up upon our reason and we forget pot
odds, range, villain, etc.
The magic happens when we have AA and get called! Wonderful! But wait a second...
A) We know for sure that AA is destroying 80% , so there's nothing to worry about right?
Yes, the 20% times that is certain as the day and the night that we are going to lose and miss with Pocket A's, we have to lose as minimum as possible. Minimize our losses with AA is essential to balance our range.
We should not play AA, KK, and AKs, we should have an ideia of how do we play our range, AA it is just a pair, it is the best one but it is just a pair. How many times do we lose value playing AA in a bad run and on the other hand make a massive EV profit with marginal hands such as 76s, 22, K4s, etc? Is it really AA who makes most money at the Cash Tables? 1 out of 221 times we will be dealt AA.
If our image is a little bit Tight at the table, we are going to have a lot of preflop folds. When we are Tight and we 3bet AA we have a lot of folds. So, when do we call with AA, when do we 3bet, and postflop specially, when do we C-bet with AA, when do we not C-bet.
As I said before, congratulations for your nice work against recreational players at the micros.
Villain's
tells that it is a recreational:
A) It has a broken stack (95.5 blinds).
B) Cold Calls in Position versus a Regular from MP (you) in the top of his range, maybe trying to trap preflop, maybe trying to find -EV ways to play KK, QQ and JJ in a spot like that.
C) Villain in the CO calls your C-bet Flop because it really believes it has the best hand by far. Villain CO it is not even looking at the board when your C-bet happens. The price you gave is hard to pay with KK there. (You bet a little more than 1/2 Pot).
D) In the Turn, we in the MP do a gigantic C-bet Turn and wow! A gigantic check-raise! Again, Villain the CO is making a very value hand becomes a
bluff, because I don't see any reasons for sets, straights and flush draws for so doing.
For the size bet we made Flop and Turn we are already telling our opponent that this check-raise it is an easy call. A call with this KK here, in CO's shoes would be much more profitable. But the player in the CO is playing "hands" not "ranges" and now he believes that this check-raise Turn could be really be paid by worse hands!
hands that logically could be calling a check-raise turn:
AA, 77, 66, 44, 99, 97s, 76s, perhaps Ad7d, (some crazy will snap call here TT, JJ, QQ and KK...)
Lol, why did Villain in CO shoved the River? Because villain thought that she/he could be paid by worse hands! And we don't see any worse hand calling here. It sucks, many times we are going to fold in a spot like that and many times a recreational will show up some 97s or 33, but we must remember who we are playing with.
Your call here is very easy freddydr87 because you have information about the recreational players you are dealing with, and so it makes your lines much more easy.
Against a better player I would easily be folding a river like that. Against a better player, I would not even C-bet this Flop, to begin with, because it hits more the player in position than the player out of position's range. Make the pot grow too much in circumstances like it, versus good regulars, make we lose too much.
Put up a note in the CO player: it never leaves KK IP in a low board. It plays the absolute value of its hands not ranges. Can be easily exploited.
Regards;
Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa