(too) fancy play?

Replay Poker Poker Strategy
1

just curious:
i was trying too make a very fancy play but am curious if i made the right decision or i should just have gave up on the bluff?

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/440231654

first of all, my own image here probably is fairly straightforward, i have made a few small bluffs, and tried to pick on weak plays, but i’ve done nothing out of the ordinary yet. certainly no big bluffs. i did have made a few 3bets as well, but teh only one i seen by the others was with KK thus winning the hand. so no light 3bets caught yet.

the person i’m facing is a strong opponent, he is ranked 32th and have seen him make fancy plays as well. most likely because blackwidow (another player on the table) is a very good player too. the fancy plays does include light 3bets of his own. i haven’t actually caught him light 3 betting at the moment but i certainly expected it because of his frequency. later this was confirmed by shoving into his 3bet with AQs holding just 1M. he was forced to call my 4bet shove cuz of the pot odds with 89s

ok to the actual hand now:

preflop: i have 84s, clearly a fold usually. but the raiser have raised 3 hands in a row now and plays fairly aggressively. but still it’s controlled agrression, meaning i can get him fold a wide part of his raise range. the caller clearly speaks for itself. if teh hand was good enough, he could have raised himself. so imo by squeezing i can get decent fold equity out of it.
of course i’m well aware 84s isn’t teh best canidate for a light 3bet squeeze, but it’s not bad either.

flop: clearly with teh A high flop the bet speaks for itself. i’m repping an ace. but considering the call, i’m fairly sure he’s holding teh ace himself.

turn: clearly i’m far behind. but still, considering my actions, especcialy the 3bet preflop i’m repping an big ace here AQ or AK to be exact. my opponent however didn’t 4bet me, so i deemed it quite unlikely he had AK, maybe AQ but there is a blocker on the flop to that combination. and the same blocker means AQ is less likely for him to hold. his loose plays mean he could have AJ or AT in his hand as well (maybe even A9).

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I think you have to wave the white flag when he calls the flop. He clearly wasn’t going anywhere.

I think it’s harder to credit you with a big ace from the BB. Yeah, it happens, but one doesn’t usually expect the BB to have that strong a hand.

Who would shove AQ on that turn? If you had AQ, wouldn’t you bet smaller to entice a flush draw or naked ace to continue? I suspect he read your shove as a semibluff flush draw or a weak ace.

Since he has over a billion chips, the money didn’t mean a lot to him.

I don’t think it was a great spot to shove the turn.

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Preflop: 84s is too weak of a hand to raise with. In the sb, you have to complete 5/6 of a blind and are out of position. You should 3-bet your stronger hands, so you are at a range disadvantage when calling. These factors make calling very unprofitable. Realistically, you can only profitably call maybe suited connectors or pairs. Thus, your 3 betting should be merged. A possible sb range could roughly consist of 3 betting suited broadway, suited aces, strong broadways, high-mid pocket pairs and some suited connectors. We see that 84s is no where near that range. You have so many better hands to choose from – 86s, 97s, 85s, 75s, etc – that are still way too loose to 3 betting with a high frequency but play better on flops. With an hand like 84s, you won’t flop 8 out straights either and have less bluffing equity.

Also, your 3-bet is too small. It should be at least 4x OOP. The flatter is capped so CO can expect see a flop if he/she calls and is getting very good pot odds to call with random suited cards.

Flop: Your range smashes this flop. A cbet is fine here.

Turn: With this bet, you’re trying to fold a queen or a flush. You assume he 4-bets AK, you should be betting with hands have block his AT, AJ, A2-A5s combos, but don’t block his KQ, QJs, QTs combos; that means you should be betting with hands that have a 2-5, T or J but don’t have a K. Assuming his range consists of AT-AQ, A2-A5s, QT-QJs, KQ, he has 32 combos of calls and 15 combos of folds if he calls with aces and queen + fd, meaning 31% fold equity. You should be betting less than 1/2 pot if you want to have profitable bluffs (unless you think your big bets will get A2-A5s to fold). Some good bluff candidates include JTs, T9s, 67s-98s of spades, KTs of spades, KJs of spades, which is 13 combos. Your value range is AJ-AK which is 22 combos. That bluffing range is about enough to balance your value range…

Since 84s has no blockers or no spades, you should not be betting.

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I’m guessing you mean clubs, not spades?

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I like the general idea of a light 3bet squeeze given how aggressive the original raiser is preflop. If you are going to do it with a hand as weak as 84s you pretty much have to be picking up the pot right now often enough to be outright profitable. If you get called you are going to have a hand with low equity against his range, bad playability and are out of position against an aggressive player.

Given that you raised to 445k on a pot of 300k, you need to pick the pot up 60% of the time for the 3bet to be immediately profitable. Whether this is likely is going to depend on how wide you think he is opening to begin with and how likely the flatter is to come along. If you think the original raiser is opening as wide as a 50% range then you can probably 3bet successfully with any 2 cards because he is going to have to defend with a bunch of relatively weak hands and that’s presumably unlikely. If you think he’s only opening a 25% range to begin with then he can still defend against light 3bets and have a decent range.

I agree with @aoeu that your 3bet size needs to be bigger given that you’re out of position and there’s already a caller. There’s also a small chance the big blind wakes up with a hand. You need to go for a size that will push your fold equity up. I would go for 650-700k with my whole 3betting range.

Overall, I think 84s is likely too weak for the 3bet. It would work better if you were the big blind vs an overaggressive button raiser.

Once you do get called, as played I don’t think you can necessarily say that you have a big range advantage on this flop because if you are 3betting 84s you are presumably going to have a ton of other junk in your range too. He is capped though and you are not because you can have AA/QQ and he almost certainly does not. I think he likely has some AK/AQ in his range - they’re reasonable hands to flat a 3b with some of the time.

Given that you have one of your weakest possible hands right now, a backdoor flush draw and don’t block any of the 2nd pair type hands that you could get him to fold, I think the cbet is fine. If you were going to 3bet this light as an ongoing strategy you would need to be careful not to have too many bluffs - for example you probably don’t need to cbet all of your backdoor flush draws because you have a LOT of them in your range as well as some club draws and gutshots that you’re going to want to bet too.

Once the turn comes a non-heart, I think it’s fine to check-fold. You would want to keep firing with most of your club flush draws and some gutshots, and you’re going to have value hands to bet with most of your aces and all your boats.

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I don’t think you are. We rep a hand by playing the way we would play if we had that hand. If you want to rep AQ there, bet something like 1/4 the pot… something that screams “value bet.” Strong means weak, weak means strong.

Anyway, bluffing isn’t about that pot really. You showed the table you are willing to bluff, willing to defend your blinds, and willing to play back with any 2 cards. All of these can earn you more over the long term than you lost in that 1 pot.

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IMO, you chose the wrong hand from the start and picked the absolutely worst position to try this from. I love attacking from the SB but with a much different range of hands. 8/4s is not a good candidate to run this type of bluff from your position. You are far better off choosing hands with blockers such as A3s to reduce the chances your opponents have Ax themselves. Hands too weak to call with but too strong to fold also make great 3-bet candidates from the SB. Drawing hands do not.

Lots of other considerations but I don’t think this was a case of too fancy play as much as it was a case of the wrong play with the wrong cards. There are far better spots to run bluffs and punting off nearly 100BB here was unnecessary. The betting line you took also didn’t make sense for AK or AQ. Maybe A5 or JKs?

The defend with ATo is a bit weird but that’s another story. In general, I wouldn’t be bluffing too many A-high boards over multiple streets. People here are not folding Ax when they make top pair. So, even if you wanted to run that bluff at this time, after you were called on the flop, there aren’t many turns where you should have continued. The As was about as bad a card for you as there was and you should have shut it down at that point.

BTW - nice job on rebuilding your bankroll. If you can keep yourself from setting chips on fire, you should be in good shape to make a run at the top 100 here soon. GL to you.

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thanks every1 for all the information.

agreed.
it was mostly meant to rep AK, but assumed i could have AQ as well. my thought process was that AK could be a good hand to shove the turn, if i actually did have AK i would assume many players love to call with any ace, making it the right value bet. of course i usually valuebet much smaller, but if i put my opponent on a hand that would call a (much) bigger bet i’ll just go for it. in this case however i thought because of his aggression i could put him of weaker aces since i tried to rep mostly AK. but i see i was wrong now.

good points.
only just wondering, if i would bet 650k-700k on my 3bet squeeze range, wouldn’t i deny myself too much value from my value range? not sure though but it feels kinda large, even for playing OOP?

actually i have done that and it paid off handsomely.
also have to say i got an insane luck streak afterwards, in just about 90 minutes i got 5 or 6 times pocket aces! one of them even directly after each other :grin:
one got cracked and one didn’t got any action, however the other ones gave very nice pots, one however granted a massive pot of 20M! it got a fairly scary flop but i was good after all.
the 4M table i played on ended in 27M!
long story short: tightening up and abusing my image (with a lot of luck) paid off greatly :wink:

my theory was because he seemed like a good LAG he would be capable of laying down a weaker ace, and i kept on because a flop bet could mean a lot since Cbets are quite common (common with me as well :stuck_out_tongue:) and by fireing again he shpuld give me credit for a big ace. clearly i was wrong, but that was my thought process behind my aggressive double barrel.

don’t worry about me setting chips on fire again :grin:. it was really a situational thing where i felt like i could do it.
thanks, gl 2u as well :slight_smile:

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In general from the small blind I am usually 3betting to 3.5-4x the original bet amount + 1x for each caller. Otherwise you are laying some sweet odds for him to call quite wide, and he is going to over-realize his equity due to being in position. You need to charge him extra for the privilege of having position on you the rest of the hand.

In position I am generally 3betting to more like 2.5-3x the original bet amount + 1x per caller.

I would also argue that in this situation where you are trying to make an exploitative play (exploiting his tendency to raise too wide preflop) then you want to go a bit larger in order to apply more pressure to his range because you think he has far too much junk in there that is going to have to fold. Once (if) you see him tighten up his preflop raises then you can tighten up too and revert to a more balanced size.

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To finish the math - 4x120k + 120k = 600k as a default 3bet amount, but go a bit bigger because we’re trying to exploit what we think is a weak range.

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ok thx 4 the information. makes sense :+1: