T9s calldown

Hi!

Why do you calculate equity on turn with this hand. You clearly have 0 SD value so playing on equity doesnt work since you will never go to SD unimproved. This is standard odds and outs situation where you picked up a double gutter which makes it an easy call obviously with your 8+ outs.

This river is blessing and a curse but you should definatelly call here again.Despite that he may be bluffing with something like KJ he can be valuebetting worse hands...mostly we are looking at A8s,77 or even something like AK

I raised the picked up double gutter on the turn, we're towards the bottom of our range and it will balance out the time's we've improved to a queen and is also a less obvious draw than what's out there making it a perfect candidate

You would c/r there?
hmmm... for balancing reasons its true but from practical standapoint...what is he gonna fold? AK/maybe AJ if river is heart but even that is ...!? huge amount of time you will also get 3bet here.

but yes... c/r also see point behind c/r...all seem very meta-game oriented... like if he knows that you know he is very strong,you are not gonna bluff him... but on these stakes?!?

I think c/r turn on this board against 3 bet range of villian is not that easy to get away with as dawn said we could easily get 3 on turn + there are many hands he is not folding & will go for SD

I guess having very less fold equity c/c is better than c/r

If he never folds here then you exploit him with your value range which is going to be the vast majority of your range when you raise the turn but I'm not going to just make that assumption (i.e. he never folds).

If you don't x/r here I would hazard a guess your turn x/r range is over-weighted towards value hands and therefore opponent could very easily fold hands that he shouldn't be doing and get away with it and all you end up doing there is starting a levelling war.

He's going to have the bottom of his 3-betting range which he's going to have to fold certainly by the river (A-highs and JT style hands and also K-high since on this board K-high is now the bottom of his range) and additionally our draw, being a double gutshot, is naturally hidden.

If you don't expect him to fold, why ever waste 2BB on bluffing?

Like it says in many places: "2BB/100 hands". It takes a lot of work in FL to make up for a 2BB donation.

Edit: Twenty minutes after I wrote the above, I played T9s, picked up a draw on turn vs a guy who NEVER folded. I bet turn and river. Naturally, he called down with Jack High. This was at the $0.10/$0.20 stakes. I felt like biting my hand off.

/Johan =

If you bluff here you dont waste 2BB or any ammount of bets that go in since:

-you still have a decent chunk of equity even when he has JJ so you will win some part of that 2BB and when you hit you obv have very good implied odds since he cant really put you on this hand very often

-even if you loose he will see your bluff and next time when you do have a strong hand here will extract more since fold will be out of the question for him

-and even if you are very pesimistic(like me:) ) about him ever folding it will still happen sometimes,hands like AJ,KJ are not impossible there

...so yes I certainly think c/r is a fine option but I guess I just have a different approach to these spot.

I will indeed be very value hand oriented,mostly because people dont fold strong hands,especially unknown players and especially on microstakes. I also think that on microstakes these preflop raises are stronger than on higher stakes becuase people genereally play very passive. But if I ever see him folding to my turn raise then I will change and start bluffing in spots

Totally agree with all your points.

Perhaps what I'm really objecting against in many evaluations is that a strategy that is optimal against the worlds best is applied in penny poker evaluations where it barely beats the high rake. It just isn't optimal to balance, because they aren't going to notice what you do anyway, not enough anyway. I still argue it's bad play to bluff an unbluffable player.

/Johan =

But what are you basing "he's unbluffable" on other than the stakes?

How are you doing anything other than guessing in that point?

Balancing your range is never a bad thing and by default will exploit most strategies. Yes it will not be perfect exploitation to begin with but adapting your play based on nothing other than "It's microstakes" is not how you develop your game beyond anything except micros and that should not be the goal of your poker career

Our goal as hand Judges is not to simply tell you how to play a hand correctly, to be frank anyone remotely competent can tell you that, our job is to help the posters to think around the subject and why we take the lines we do with the hands we do

I am talking in general. The thought came up earlier in the thread (by others) that the villain from the OP isn't folding much. Sometimes guessing based on incomplete information (in this case, it's the micro's, and he 3-bet from the HJ) is the best we can do.

What is good and bad in poker is a relative thing in my opinion, not an absolute. If you set out to play GTO without a HUD at the micros stakes, then you will win (before rake at least), but, surely, you could easily do much better by using the information available too you?

My thesis is that trying to improve on Polaris should be the subject in a second or third course at the graduate level. This here is junior high, don't you see that? I bet that most students enrolled here haven't even read all the articles in the strategy section up to silver. (Iv'e read up to gold only myself). GTO is something entirely different. It is quite removed from bluffing 101 too.

I suggest focus is shifted a little bit in this forum and that GTO/balancing is not the primary concern. It could well be the primary concern in the $0.50/$1 and higher section where it would be actually useful. Observing opponents (and yourself) is still closer to the fundamentals in FL than GTO, and more easily implemented, and I dare say, more profitable at the micros.

So, I don't say you suck. I say you are too god damned good for us ♠_biggrin:!

/Johan =

i dont see the reason for not raising this hand, a raise here looks really strong actually. I assume youde raise your value range on the flop along with the fds and what not being oop. Not sure if thats balanced or not, but it seems fair as a strategy i think (haha, please correct me if im wrong ). But T9 is pretty much the only semi-bluff you have in your range on this turn, the rest is Qx, of the hands you would raise. And thats really unbalanced, so unbalanced that he prolly should fold all his A high and all his non-set non-over pair pp and definitly K-high hands...

Since we dont have the info on ranges of the players I'm sorta assuming that you would have a range something like 55+,A6s+,KTs+,QTs+,JTs,T9s,A9o+,KTo+,QJo as UTG OPR, so T9s is the bottom of your range. Thought that is a fairly tight range perhaps, but not silly tight.

Say you raise all your value hands 8x pp 77+ and your fds and calls the rest on the flop and then raises tp+ and oesd/gsd on the turn then your range is

T9s,AdQd,AhQh,AcQc,KdQd,KhQh,KcQc,QdJd,QhJh,QcJc,QdTd,QhTh,QcTc,AdQh,AdQc,AhQd,AhQc,
AsQd,AsQh,AsQc,AcQd,AcQh,KdQh,KdQc,KhQd,KhQc,KsQd,KsQh,KsQc,KcQd,KcQh,QdJh,QdJs,QdJc,QhJd,QhJs,QhJc,QcJd,QcJh,QcJs

AKo has 15,57% eq against you there and JJ has 12%

do correct me if im wrong, doing this in a hurry while doing the dishes!

Observing your opponents and acting upon their weaknesses is always more profitable than a 100% balanced line however often you do not have that luxury. Often you will be against new players, player you won't have reads on, good regulars or sometimes, just people who are better than you.

For example in this hand we are given no information about the player other than it's a 10c/20c hand so I am assuming we are acting in the absence of indormation, in that case the best line is to make youself as unexploitable as possible rather than guessing and potentially taking a suboptimal line.

If we had been told "This player is a super-nitty TAG and has never folded a single hand he's 3-bt preflop no matter what the action" then obviously buff-raising here makes no sense because you can take a more +EV line however assuming that just because it's a microstakes hand is beginning to be a little ropey and to my eyes just a shortcut around actually having to think about ranges

The last thing I want to do is teach a way of playing at microstakes and then, when you hit 0.5/1+ say "Ok that's not actually how I want you to play, forget all that, this is the truth" becasue that's wasting everyone's time

You're kind of right there floaty but I would have a couple more bluffs on the turn, don't forget that K-High is the bottom of your range here so potnetially delaying K-High FDs is an option as well, (probably a JTs (no fd) or 2 as well) remember that you have to look at all 3 streets, even you range is still slightly unbalanced if he's able to fold JJ to a turn raise.

That was sorta the point i was trying to make if its correct to fold JJ against you on this board then the strategy must have been wrong to start with, but not raising T9s in this spot would leave you with an even more unbalanced range than it was... Didnt know how to balance it though