This one makes more sense, I promise!
Context: these are 1M MTT regs. I play with these guys A LOT, a few hundred hands at least between us. As reflected by the blinds, it is early-mid stages of the tournament. HeyBrown is a solid reg who skews a bit tight/passive.
I might be missing something, but this one seems even harder. I’m never folding on the river, so I’m raising any half decent hand plus every bluff. There’s also not a lot of hands I’m folding on the turn. So the only thing I really have to go on is what hands raise pre, check that flop, and don’t raise on the turn.
So what hands least want to raise that flop? Under pairs to the Q with no spade, AX without a backdoor draw, a Queen with a bad kicker. The EV for betting or checking any hand on that board is going to be extremely close though, so you can really do whatever you want
Hands that don’t have a decent amount of outs to beat top pair fold that turn, so AJ, AT, 22 and maybe A9, A3 and 44, depending on suits. Everything else pretty much has to continue against such a small size. Hands that do pick up equity get to do a fair bit of raising though, so we can start to heavily discount 88’s, 99’s, A8 and A4.
I’m going to discount TT, JJ and weak Qx on the river because even if you can make a case for value betting them, they are also fine to just call.
I guess that leaves us with AK, 33’s and 44’s as the most likely hands. I’m going to go with 33’s I think, just because of the opening raise size.
I enjoy your replies as they often make me think of more hands in my range that should take certain lines. Anyway, I had none of the above! My hand is either stronger or weaker than you seem to expect. I guess I’m not as polarized here as perhaps I should be in theory.
I’ve only made it seem polar by trying to narrow things down, I think in theory you can have almost your entire range here at some frequency.
In practice, I guess the hands I expect to check the most on this flop are the pocket pairs and the 7x and 5x hands. I was discounting 5x and 7x because most of those combos either have a straight draw, or an over-card to the Q. There’s definitely some incentive to c-bet these hands, but they certainly are allowed to check as well.
If I add those back in, I would think A7 of hearts makes the most sense.
You were right – this one is really hard. It’s funny how clear things seem from my perspective but in retrospect, from the outside looking in, it’s actually pretty opaque.
SPOILER ALERT
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not sure if there’s a better way to do this on this platform lol
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I had As6s
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Your hand makes a lot of sense of course, there’s just a lot of hands that do too
Right, realize that now haha. Really no way to put me on a specific one. I guess that’s good 