$Freeroll NLHE MTT: CC $100 Daily Platinum

[mariussica88]

SB has 41 hands played: VPIP 24 PFR 18 Limp 4 Post Flop AGG 1.50 and 3-bet 8.33 Flop Cbet 100 Turn Cbet100

The bet on the river from me is a bluff bet. It is a good bluff here?


pokerstars - 50/100 Ante 10 NL - Holdem - 9 players


SB: 1,545 (15.5 bb)
BB: 1,179 (11.8 bb)
UTG: 1,955 (19.6 bb)
UTG+1: 2,399 (24 bb)
MP: 5,924 (59.2 bb)
Hero (MP+1): 3,996 (40 bb)
MP+2: 4,697 (47 bb)
CO: 3,385 (33.9 bb)
BTN: 1,931 (19.3 bb)

9 players post ante of 10, SB posts 50, BB posts 100

Pre Flop: (pot: 240) Hero has
3 folds, Hero raises to 250, fold, CO calls 250, 3 folds

Flop: (740, 2 players)
Hero bets 400, CO calls 400

Turn: (1,540, 2 players)
Hero bets 539, CO calls 539

River: (2,618, 2 players)
Hero bets 712, fold

Results: 2,618 pot (0 rake)
Final Board:

Hero wins 2,618

 

[300HPGOD]

Pre flop is fine so I will go straight to flop where a bet should be made here as you did but it does not have to be as large. 300-325 is enough to make them draw against the odds and we are only up against one player which makes a large difference in these situations.

The turn is not a good card for us since other Qxs that we are ahead of are less likely to call since the board is wetter (unless then have a spade). I think checking or betting is fine here. I lean towards to betting here as I want to keep control of the hand but I go slightly bigger than you make it if I am betting. Something still small but more like 625-650. It does make a difference as if we are going against a one spade hand that gets here since your bet sizing is almost making it 4 to 1 for them to call which is the odds they need to draw.

River is another card that is not good. There is no hand here that we beat that will call 3 bets as played imo and we will never make a better hand fold outside of KQ or AQ without a spade if villain played that hand this way. You are betting here not as a bluff since as I mentioned nothing better outside a very narrow range is folding so you are betting as a blocker bet trying to prevent villain from bluffing. That can be effective or it can blow up in your face depending on villain and if they recognize that if you had a real value hand here you probably would be betting the river more than what you did. I think in game I would have checked here and then decided whether I wanted to bluff catch based on sizing or not. Not sure how many hands would be bluffing here, that would depend on how trappy or not trappy villain thinks I am (If I would even know that after a few hands). I will say if I bet here I think I make it bigger like in the 40% range to make it look valuey but again I am not sure what hand I could get to fold that I beat outside KQ, AQ and all hands worse than ours should be folding to a triple barrel there on that board.

 

[mariussica88]

River is another card that is not good. There is no hand here that we beat that will call 3 bets as played imo and we will never make a better hand fold outside of KQ or AQ without a spade if villain played that hand this way. You are betting here not as a bluff since as I mentioned nothing better outside a very narrow range is folding so you are betting as a blocker bet trying to prevent villain from bluffing. That can be effective or it can blow up in your face depending on villain and if they recognize that if you had a real value hand here you probably would be betting the river more than what you did. I think in game I would have checked here and then decided whether I wanted to bluff catch based on sizing or not. Not sure how many hands would be bluffing here, that would depend on how trappy or not trappy villain thinks I am (If I would even know that after a few hands). I will say if I bet here I think I make it bigger like in the 40% range to make it look valuey but again I am not sure what hand I could get to fold that I beat outside KQ, AQ and all hands worse than ours should be folding to a triple barrel there on that board.

Thank you so much for your reply, this is the kind of thinking that I need to work on having.

 

[fundiver199]

Preflop
Standard open but its important to note, we are at the bottom of our range here.

Flop
Standard C-bet for value, sizing is a bit large for a tournament but not completely unreasonable.

Turn
This is the first real decision in the hand. This was a bad card for us, especially when we dont have a spade in our hand. The opponent could now have a made flush, in which case we are drawing dead. He could also have picked up a flushdraw, and it was a connecting card to second and third pair making hands like 76s and 65s two pair.

With all these bad things happening, I dont think, our hand is good for 3 streets of value, and I also dont want to face a raise. So I much prefer checking here and use the hand as a bluff catcher. We can easily call a turn bet, and depending on the runout and his sizing maybe even a river bet.

I feel, its very common, that people continue betting when out of position, because they dont feel comfortable calling the opponents bet. But if we are in a situation, where we are betting for value, and at this point top pair is certainly not a bluff, then we need to fell good about it when called.

And if we bet here and get called, are we really happy about it? I dont think so, and then we should not bet "for value". This is something, Bart Hansson from Crushlivepoker talk about a lot. And even though he is coaching live poker and mostly cash games, a concept like this apply across formats. I recommend watching his free content on Youtube, if you dont do it already.

River
At this point you are clearly turning your hand into a bluff, which you recognice. No worse hands are still calling, but some better hands might fold. The question is, are there enough better hands in his range, that he might now fold to a small bet of 1/3 pot? And I am not entirely sure about that.

He probably dont have AA or KK, because he just called preflop. 76 and 75 is now a boat, so those hands are definitely not folding, and 65 got counterfeited, so you beat that hand now. He is also not folding a low flush like TT with T of spades especially not to your sizing. So you are specifically targeting AQ and KQ without A/K of spades, which is a pretty narrow range to target.

I dont love this, so my prefered line here is to check-fold. And to install another Bart Hansson quite, just because we are check-folding the river does not mean, we are giving up. Sometimes the opponent will check back, and then we are sometimes going to be good against a hand like the mentioned counterfeited 65 or QT/Q9 with no spade, which the opponent decided to not turn into a bluff. So the EV of check-folding a hand with some showdown value, like the one we have here, is more than zero, which is an important concept to understand.