Hello Mcclares thank you so much for sharing this awesome hand with the CardsChat community!
I see that you were sitting in the CO with less than 100 blinds ES. Try to automatically top up your chips, because you will sorry when it comes a huge pot and you lost 2 blinds.
It looks like preposterous what I am saying, but after playing millions of hands, passing through huge downswings, we finally learn how paramount is to preserve every single 1 blind.
If we lose 1 blind in a way that was not necessary (or we deprive ourselves of gaining 1 blind), for every 100 hands we lose 100 blinds, plain and simple.
The preflop gameplan
It comes in gap for us and we open raise to 3 blinds. Perfect. Here we can easily call any 3-bet from BTN, SB and BB, unless they are very NIT and 3-bet preflop are something like 3%, 5%, but even so we can be calling, specially versus the SB.
If the players who 3-bet upon us are exaggerating on the "leveling war", which means, the constant and cold war that happen on every hand of CO vs BTN vs SB vs BB, the wider and craziest ranges at the table.
When you open XYo from CO, BTN thinks that you have a pretty wide range and decides to 3-bet light in order to make you fold your trashes and sometimes hands that could be ahead. However, we know that BTN knows that our range is wide, and having so good removal preflop (blocking a lot of Kx and Qx, hands such as AK, KK and QQ are not too much of a concern now), we elect to also go for a 4-bet light, because calling 3-bet with KQo out of position it would be very nasty.
By 4-betting we keep the initiative and we keep our range uncapped by polarizing/bluffing.
Yes, KQo is a good bluff in position and out of position sometimes, and at the micros players overfold to 4-bet, so no problem.
At 5 NLHE and 10 NLHE, since the players are way too smarter than the players of 2 NLHE (if you enjoy it, I'll post here later, there is a real good thread here on the forum where fundiver199 and Nathan 'blackrain79' Willliams talk about the difference between 2 NLHE and 5 NLHE).
The Flop:
Having no information of Villain, I would go here 50% of times checking and 50% of times c-betting. If we only c-bet here 100% against recreational players is never a mistake, is the most correct line, because there is a great chance of recreational to pay with worse Kx, Tx,even 3x, Ace High, Queen High, all the flush draws and straight draws.
We also believe that when BTN calls preflop it cappes its range a little, but depending on how much this player Call Opens from BTN vs CO (VPIP) its range will be always uncapped and would contain a lot of hands.
It would be more logical for the player in the BTN, if it had
KK,
AK or even
TT to be
3-betting these hands, so we see that very rarely BTN will present such stuff.
There are the possible combos of Pocket 3's but they are just a small part of BTN's calling range. It rests now KT, but CO is already bloking this combination.
It rests QJ, J9, JT, AJ (?), QT, Q9, and the combos of spades with Flush Draws of Spades.
Lol, it takes a long time to put up all the BTN's range to realize that it is so vast, looking only to the top of the iceberg, the worse case ever, we are very good for c-betting here.
Our TP2K is way too strong here and needs protection for this calling range can hit in several manners and we don't want to give very cheap turns and rivers for our opponents.
We know that Villain's VPIP for 380 hands is 15, but we don't know specifically how much % does this Villain calls CO vs BTN, so we could have a better picture of its preflop calling range, when it seems, there aren't recreational players at the blinds. This Villain is way too passive and I hate it, but I would also c-bet against it, too.
The Turn
It seems that the dealer is mocking with our faces but this is how we play poker. You c-bet again and it comes a bomb into your lap: hero
POLARIZES too much its range by going for a raise of
3.7 times the size of the pot and
5.26 times the value of our c-bet turn!
To me this size simply doesn't make any sense for any reasonable player. A decent LAG will bluff, but it will never put this huge ammount on a turn without anything that isn't the nuts, the LAG bets everytime and likes to keep its sizings balanced. I mean a LAG, not an aggro donkey, which is not the case, given that BTN is Tight Passive for life.
So, a reasonable raise here could be 100% pot, or simply 3x the times of your c-bet but now the story that
BTN is trying to tell you is very simple:
"I want you to make a mistake".
This sizing is very provocative. Well, Hero played a couple of hands with it and I respect it.
Hero knows that this guy is way too passive and could be calling with strong hands from the BTN, such as AJ, which is the only possible hand that BTN is trying to represent, by going heavenly gigantic sizing on the turn, where we strongly believe that BTN will never be betting this ammount with its bluffs, so it seems that this passive player is a Nathan 'blackrain79' Williams student and it is trying to build the pot as soon as possible.
However, these kind of regulars make huge mistakes, and sometimes it is just trying to represent something it doesn't have, but even so BTN is too much passive to be bluffing so huge here, perhaps turning a value hand into a bluff, perhaps a SET, now it becomes so cloudy and mysterious to me that I rather fold than "pay to see, and cry: I knew it".
We observe that even the BTN's bluffs (the flush draws of spades) increased their odds, because even if we call or jam right now, it will hit this flush in a frequency that BTN believe it is profitable for it (considering that you will fold almost anything on a scary turn card like this and will only continue when you have sets or two pair, maybe).
I say right off the bat that if this is a bluff of this player, good for him, because I am easily folding my two pair here.
I simply feel I do not have enough odds to hit my full-house on the river for the times I am already dead, or for the times it hits its flush on the river, okay, even BTN's bluffs are way to strong.
However, you have a decent ammount of hands played with Villain and if you saw it doing weird moves like this on similar turn scenarios (shoving bluffs, dominated hands, semi-bluffs), it is close to jam, since the call is impossible here since we are never folding to any X River.
Regards;
Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa
