Mid/High Stakes Limit Hold'em Poker Forums

Pretty standard situation.

Villain is a decent aggressive player. How would you play river and why? Do you check/call, bet/fold or do as I did here bet/call? What´s your assumptions?

$10/$20 Limit Holdem
5 Players

Pre-Flop: (1.5 SB, 5 players) Hero is BB 4 4
UTG raises, 3 folds, Hero calls

Flop: 3 9 A (4.5 SB, 2 players)
Hero checks, UTG bets, Hero calls

Turn: K (3.2 BB, 2 players)
Hero checks, UTG bets, Hero calls

River: 10 (5.2 BB, 2 players)
Hero bets, UTG raises, Hero calls

pretty yuk spot altogther.

w/out history i lean towards b/c. Im not folding a flush HU when i donk the river vs someone i have no history with. Id rather not advertise the fact im prepared to b/fold a flush, 2 pair, set, nut straight etc to a good player for 1 bet on the riv.

You can prob exploitively b/f in similar spots in the future.

I assume that villain usually has a hand he can call a riv bet with here a huge % of the time given he raised from HJ but may not be good enough to vbet with.

The only prob with b/c is that given the fact that he will usually have a pair or better its unlikely he will turn it into a bluff.

I think I fold turn...

I think I fold turn...

It´s 5-handed and he´s LAG/TAGish so I´m gonnna guess he has at least top 25% pre flop. But perhaps you still think it´s a fold. I think the issue whether to donk the river or not is more critical.

I fold the turn. The K means that you are most likely not ahead and are drawing. I'm assuming you will fold if you don't make a flush on the river. Assuming he has a pair in his hand means that he has a diamond in his hand that is better than yours about 1/4 of the time. There are only 4 bets in the pot.

Also I fold the river to his raise.

About the turn: we need 32% equity to make it better to call down blind then to fold the turn. I think we have so close that we can call the turn.

(Let e be our turn equity and assume a river bet only goes in when we lose. Our EV on the turn call is then: 4.2*e - 2*(1-e) = 0 => e~=32% )

On the river: Isn't this the bottom of our v-bet range? Then we could BF the river? I also think that players bluff less than optimal here, in my experience.

Ok, I agree, the turn is a fold.

As played do you think there is any merit to check/calling the river?

(Let e be our turn equity and assume a river bet only goes in when we lose. Our EV on the turn call is then: 4.2*e - 2*(1-e) = 0 => e~=32% )

I have several issues with this.

First of all the equation assumes we c/c all rivers. c/c another J-Q non diamond is pretty bad so thats 9 cards we c/f.

Second of all villain wont vbet all his better hands on bricks. So on say a 7s river we assume he vbets 98s, KTo, JJ?

Fourth of all. If our strategy is to either donk/call or donk/fold diamond or 4 rivers we do win bets on the river and dont just lose if we can not win a bet on the river why would we donk? And if villain never bluffs why would we even stick in a bet thus changing the equation to 4.2*e - (1-e) = 0 => e= 1/5.2 = 19%


The truth is somewhere in between those extremes and to really figure it out you need to sit down and take the time to make thorough mathmatical analysis (Or use one of those magic programs, they might be able to help)

I think I fold turn...

Even peeling the flop is thin. We have 32% eq against

44+,A2s+,K8s+,Q9s+,J9s+,T9s,98s,A8o+,KTo+,QJo.

and if we fold Kd we fold any brodway which is 16 turns right there. But in addition we arent exactly thrilled when the 9h or 8c turns either (we will have less than 30% on both).

As a rule of thumb: If a seemingly good turn means we have to fold we prolly made a mistake on the flop in the first place

There´s a lot of loose threads I´d like to pick up on:

Oink: Wasn´t sushis equation a worse case scenario by design? That being close would warrent a call? I guess your math is the best case scenario (unless villain was so bad and we had such a great read on our opponent that we could outplay him on the river being OOP.. not likely). I agree with everything you say though regarding the turn peel!

On the flop I had given my opponent a wider range (closer to mine) with him being a LAG/TAG:

Board: Ad 9d 3h
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 64.132% 63.95% 00.18% 172208 487.50 { 44+, A2s+, K7s+, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s, 98s, 87s, A7o+, KTo+, QTo+, JTo }
Hand 1: 35.868% 35.69% 00.18% 96097 487.50 { 4d4h }

Perhaps this would make you call the flop too?

Sushi: You wondered if this is the bottom of our valuebet range. I´m not sure what my range looks like at rivers where I sometimes donk... that´s why I´m thinking I need to study this or perhaps not donk at all against good thinking opponents. Any input would be valueable. 44 could definately be at the bottom... At the time I thought 33, 22 and perhaps even stuff like TT, KT would be there too (not realising I need to fold more on the turn). Yes, maybe players bluff less then optimal on this river (don´t know) but at the same time I don´t like to fold too much when villain is only representing one card Qd (since one added bluff would suddenly make it a must call).

Both: I punched in the range I thought he´d bet the turn with and got 26.5% equity on the turn which lead me to agree with turn fold being the best option.

Maybe we can use sushi´s "worst case" math and skip the process of discarding the hands that villain would check. And end up with a good fly-by-night approximation? Post-session-gerilla-math.

@Oink: u are mising the point of my math. Like DH says it's a worst case scenaro. It assumes villain plays perfect like u said (and we play river poorly). What it shows is that if we have >32% equity calling dominates folding on the turn. In some cases this simplifies analysis a lot. With the range I assigned villain we had about 31% equity so I felt the math I presented was enough to show we needed to call.

With ur range our turn equity is ~25% and then it is impossible to draw any conclusions at all from my math.

Sorry if I was unclear about this.

As long as we agree. I just missed the point as you guys said.

@ Darkhorse.

35% eq on the flop makes it a whole lot closer to a peel.

Even though we have some equity on the flop against his range, whats really wrong with folding the flop? We have a bad hand, and calling down 2/3 streets is pretty hard if he barrels, and if we backdoor like we did in this hand, its pretty hard to know what do to. The best option too me at first thought seems to c/c, allowing him to bet all his bluffs and prolly all his marginal valuebethands that he might have folded if we lead out? Having a fair amount of equity doesnt mean we HAVE to put in bets on shitty boards for us imo.

Having a fair amount of equity doesnt mean we HAVE to put in bets on shitty boards for us imo.

Actually I think it does.