Should you check back an overpair on the river when board pairs?
Another SuperNova hand review with the Chip Race guys and Barry Carter gets confused about how blockers affect his betting strategy.
Last month I had a sweat session with the guys from The Chip Race from when I played the SuperNova PKOs on Unibet. I wanted to pick out a few of the more interesting hands for an abridged series of hand reviews. If you missed the first one, here it is.
This hand is early in the €100 SuperNova, I have almost 500BBs and min raise under the gun with JJ - it is folded around to the Big Blind who flats.
The flop is 79T , Villain checks to me. I bet 3/4 pot. I like this board, I block a potential straight and I think there are a lot of draws and Tx he will call me with. Do we like that so far?
David Lappin: Yes and no. You block the draws so it would worry me if you get a lot of action. It would be nice if you get called you'll be ahead most of the time, but if you get raised I'd start getting worried.
Dara O'Kearney: Also when you say this is a good board, that's true for your specific hand (you also have a gutshot and backdoor diamonds) but for your range this is a bad board because he is supposed to have these types of cards more often. We definitely have to go ahead and bet, but as David says if we get raised we are not going to love it. We have a hand that figures to be best most of the time and benefits strongly from protection. A lot of his hands have one or two overcards and backdoor equity, so we should bet.
I knew I'd get in trouble claiming I understand the impact of the blockers here.
The turn is a 5 and that does not change much, he checks again so I bet again 3/4 pot.
David Lappin: The nuts has not changed and being in the Big Blind he can connect with any card that comes, but I still like your decision to bet.
The river is a T he checks again which makes me assume he has very little, so I bet quite small (14 big blinds into a 35 big blind pot) to try and get a one pair hand to call.
Dara O'Kearney: He has somewhat capped his range on such a draw heavy flop, if he had a very strong hand he would have check raised on the flop. When he check/calls flop he is mostly capped to a single pair, so tha 5 on the turn didn't really improve his hands. This river does improve a lot of his hands. All of his Tx plays like this and he doesn't really call many smaller pairs.
David Lappin: We are basically targetting Q9 here that was skeptical of your triple barrel.
Dara O'Kearney: I would be making a thin value bet here, if I thought he was really capable of check/raise bluffing I would probably check behind. There are a lot of missed draws on this board so he can probably talk himself into calling with a small pair because you might be bluffing with a missed draw.
He calls and shows me AA.
David Lappin: Wow, didn't see that coming. He has played his hand badly from the point of view of a PKO.
I was under the gun, so I could have given him a lot of action if he reraised me preflop.
Dara O'Kearney: You don't have too many raise/folds under the gun and his hand is almost always good on the flop so he could have just kept betting.
You can see the full session below:
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Could you find a fold three way in this spot? Let us know in the comments:
