nl200 kk

QQ and KK are best blockers so it cant be mistake to call vs agro guy who is able to turn hands into bluff.
Also I think it makes sense to cc here AJ hands if you have any, since you dont have so much value in bet, but if reg is going to turn enough hands into bluff then it is max ev to check.

Firstly we can protect our river checking range with a few more hands as gingerkid mentions.

As for sets as bluffcatchers, these are fine from a balance point of view, but exploitatively not always necessary. I would probably just call sets some percentage vs an unknown but not all sets with 100% frequency.

KK should be outside our bluff-catching range and is a fold. It's true that if villain bets a polarized range KK is equivalent to top set (excluding any blocker effect), but in practice this is not always true. What if villain decides to turn bottom 2 into a bluff or top 2 into a value-bet etc.

KK should be outside our bluff-catching range and is a fold. It's true that if villain bets a polarized range KK is equivalent to top set (excluding any blocker effect), but in practice this is not always true. What if villain decides to turn bottom 2 into a bluff or top 2 into a value-bet etc.

I posted in advanced section question regarding blocker effect when we defend on river. Non of the coaches answered it, and since you mention similar thing I ask you. My question was, since on river value bet range of villian is very obvious, it is not hard to see what value hands he can bet, but bluff range is more or less pure assumption. As in this example, we are sure villian will value bet Jx (with very high probability), we are not sure if he value bets top 2 pairs, but for the bluffs we have no clue what he can bluff here.

so when we decide to defend unexploitable, we usually sort bluff catchers by call EV, so blocker effect plays most important role. So if we put villian on bluffing A high hands, then KK has very good call EV, but if we put buttom pairs into his bluff range, KK is trash. Maybe this river is not perfect example for it, but often changing assumption about which combos villian bluffs on river is changing the call EV of the hand a lot, and totally changing what combos we call on river. So as solition to this problem, I thought it would make sense to sort
our bluff catchers according to how many value hands they block, and call top 1-a %?

Imo the best approach would be to assign probabilty for each combo in villians range, like 100% he will bet Jx hands, 30% he will bet top 2 pairs, 5% he will value bet middle 2 pairs, 20% he will bluff buttom 2 pairs, 80% he will bluff top pair. So basically all hands are candidates in both bluff and value range, and then we calculate EV of a call, where for calculating equity of each hand e.g. KK vs TJ, we need to factor the probability of TJ occuring in the range, and then calculate this way average equity for KK vs his range and thus EV of a call. Still
setting the probability of each hand in value and bluff range is again assumption, but I think more accurate. Also likely not possible to do it in practice, but possible using software and then getting a feeling for it hopefully?

anyway I think all of the approaches are not even close to correct, all are based on very inaccurate assumptions, and producing big errors in EV calculation. So what I wanted to say nash equilibrium and blocker effect is good as abstract theory to understand concepts but in practice it is trash.

Assuming villain is perfectly polarized and all of our bluff-catchers beat his bluffs and lose to his value-range. then the #1 most important factor is obviously blocker effect. We want to block his value-range and ideally not block his bluff range.

In reality though, unless we are reading a text-book, villain is probably not as perfectly polarized as we'd like. And we can't assign a non-zero possibility to the possibility that villain is merging his range either by turning a very strong hand into a bluff or value-betting weak hoping to appear polarized and cause bluffcatchers to lose money.

In other words if we had a perfect formula for this it would also add some weight to our bluffcatchers based on their absolute strength while still adding the relevant weight to blocker effect.