Who would like to play for $20K today?
This week, Trueteller, OtB_RedBaron and LLinusLLove are battling. They're all amongst the best regs on the nosebleeds. Can you make the right call?
This time, we won't be having a rather curious side story about high stakes players blazing it up like in our last review. Still, a true legend and myth of the nosebleeds, found his way to our table.
The Russian highroller originally established himself as a successful player in cap games and short stack formats of Texas Hold'em. However, due to these games progressively dying out, he had to acquire a taste for big stack strategies, as many other players did, and continued crushing these games just as well.
The special thing about is that he's playing the regular games these days with bet sizes that he transferred and slightly adapted from cap games. Surprisingly, this works out pretty well for him and a lot of other high stakes regs pay close attention to his game to get a grip on his playstyle.
Of course, this unique and in parts quite unusual approach is making it way harder for opponents to perform well against him. Add that to the fact that he is successfully playing a lot of other poker variants, for instance PLO, mixed games, fixed limit and others, and you got yourself quite an intimidating allrounder.
In today's games, there are almost no players around anymore who are crushing the highest limits without specialising on a single format. That's not true for though and consequently he's regarded by many simply as the Russian genius.
He's not only popular amongst his fellow countrymen, he is also very well-known in the Asian poker community, leading to rumours the Russian wonderboy is regularly invited to big and profitable private games in Macau where he's a much sought after opponent by the playing business elite.
Diving into the action
Today's action won't be focused on , though. Instead OtB_RedBaron and LLinusLLove are going to be battling out, with the former taking the role of Hero.
As before, there's not much happening preflop and we only get to see a Small Blind complete and a check by the Big Blind. The only thing noteworthy here is that 
is a hand that players include in both their raising and completing range to balance them out.
The flop is also quite similar to the one we had a look at in our last review. This time, we're playing without antes though, leading to a pot of only 2BB and the smallest possible betting amount being a half potsize bet of 1BB.
Certainly, due to a wide betting range, the Small Blind would usually choose a smaller betsize if that was possible here. Despite Hero not hitting anything, he can still bet any-two after the preflop check of the Big Blind since Villain's range is so weak that he will rarely hit anything useful.
Risk or read on the turn?
The 
on the turn pairs the board, making our ace-high hands a bit stronger than before. Still, Hero's check/call would be a bit too loose without at least some background information on his opponent's tendencies. Usually, check/folding should be the go-to solution against an unknown in such a spot.
However, since OtB_RedBaron and LLinusLLove certainly have quite an amount of history, it's very likely that Hero had a read on Villain here and therefore chose to play check/call.
Back into the lane
In contrast to the turn, the check first-in on the river is exactly the line Pokersolver would suggest here as well. Generally, you don't want to have a donking range in a spot like this and always check to your opponent instead in order to react to a possible bet. LLinusLLove does exactly that and fires a bet of roughly 2/3 the pot and now it's up to you to finish the hand.
Especially when having a read on Villain, check/calling as a bluff catcher could make sense to ensure you're not folding too often against the opponent's bluffs. Another option would be to force Villain to fold possible bluffs and weak value hands by check/raising to 3x or 4x. Lastly, check/folding is an option as well, however, in that case you'd have to ask yourself why you would play check/call on the turn in the first place?
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Last high stakes review's result
Straight to the point: Only few voters were tricked into picking the wrong line. Instead, more than 60% chose the optimal answer and wanted to fold their bottom pair with 
.
Disclaimer: Despite check/fold being the right play in almost any case, you can reasonably argue for a check/call on the turn in order to check/raise the river when you have an appropriate read on the opponent to make this a profitable move.
