Set of Jacks on the river against possible flush

Preflop: Villain 3bets for the first time out of 48 hands and is pretty much unknown with 78BB. In this case, you may consider folding as you have enough information that you are not against a maniac and such passive guys tend to 3bet at Nl2 premiums only. Alternatively, you may 4-bet but then you would need to call the push and would not feel happy about it. Generally i dont think we can play profitably JJ by flatting the 3-bet here mainly because villain is not full stacked. For me fold>4bet>Call.

As played, why do you bet the flop? 3-bettor misses c-bet here which narrows his range to something like KK, QQ, JJ, TT without a spade K♠:x Q♠:x or weird slowplays (AA, flopped flush which would be very rare considering A♠: is on the board). Is there a better hand to fold or a weaker hand to call your bet on the flop ? Only TT and K♠: x. You are turning a decent hand with showdown value into a bluff.

Pot control on the turn is fine when the king comes.

River is tricky. You would need to pay 22.5 BB to win a total pot of 82.5 - you need to win approximately 27% of the time to be plus EV. I dont have equilab installed and cant check what percentage you have with the range i gave him above but i think you have a bit more than that and call is fine.

I think we should check back the flop. A couple of things are very likely: 1) He probably doesn't have an Ace because he would bet, 2) If he has an ace, he won't fold, 3) If he has KK or QQ, he probably wont fold either, at least not to one bet, 4) He probably doesn't have a spade because he would bet, 5) If he has a spade, it's likelly that he won't call with T♠: or lower. So, I don't see worse hands calling nor better hands folding.

I think we can check back the flop and maybe make a small block bet on the turn to check back the river. As played, we should call the river when it's very likelly that we have the best hand. Raising would be an overplay on this board, because we won't get value from worse hands.

I agree with x/b flop.

As played I think we should call. People too often lead R as bluff after we bet flop and x/b T.

Yeah, xb looks fine. As played just call river and take a note on villain.

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the replies and the excellent analysis.

Sunrise:
- Good point on Villain's stats. I must say I didn't pay attention to this and was not sure what to do with his 3bet.
- I bet the flop because I am trying to represent a pair of aces and try to get him to fold KK or QQ.

In Equilab when you select a range can you choose to exclude a particular color (Like Ax without a spade as you said?) or can you choose to select only one color (Kx of only spades etc.) ? I don't know if that makes sense but if someone does understand what I mean please let me know how to do it.

Anyway, with the range stated by Sunrise it shows that we are a large favorite here.

flop should be a check back - we don't want to start playing for stacks here and we have the redraw

that means the only flush he can have is like KQs and everything else is basically blocked

agree with calling riv, he could easily bet an ace or two pairs here the reason why it becomes thin is because he doesn't have air for check calling flop whereas if we check back we can keep his range a little wider