But I love to shove !! 50/100 6max spot
Kind of an interesting spot I played yesterday. I think I can be too loose in spots like this 6handed, not with my reads of their range, but more with my psychological profiles of my opponents. Tell me what you guys think. I also think if we get some good insight into this specific situation it has some broader implications for similar spots I may be misplaying, and maybe some of you are misplaying.
50/100 with an ante, 6 handed, 14.5k stacks.
Preflop: folds to me otb and I minraise JThh. reg X in the sb 3bets me to 700 I call.
Preflop reads: Reg X probably thinks I'm opening nearly ATC and he is right. In my sample I have him 3betting 11% from the sb, but in this situation I'd expect him to be closer to 20% if not higher. My reads on his 3betting range are that he is significantly more linear than most regs at this level, I expect him to have 'value' hands down to at least KJo, maybe even KTo, A8s, ATs, stuff like that. He will expect me to mostly 4bet my premium hands as well as bluffs and he will likely continue with the majority of his preflop range vs a 4bet.
Flop: (1650) J82h. X bets $950, I call.
Flop reads: He's cbetting roughly 50-65% in 3bet pots total. On this action + board I expect something like 60% cbet. I think there is some principle he uses to figure out which bits of his range to cbet but I haven't figured it out yet. I've definitely seen him check hands as strong as TPTK on boards like this with a reasonable frequency, I have also seen him c/f boards like this. So I don't think we can very well narrow his range when he bets flop, given incompleteness of my reads, maybe discount pure air like 75cc moderately and weight his range a bit to overs. I think raising flop is reasonable here, but again, I'm unsure of how he will play overs in this spot and I'm very unsure of how to respond to a 3bet from this player + my hand has pretty strong equity and moderate implied odds in position. Also, if I raise and he calls I'm certainly not going 3streets of value on babys against this player, which means I have to pick a street to check which is kind of bad.
Turn: (3550) Tc. He bets 1950. I call.
Turn reads: Given his linear preflop range and his (moderately high) semibluffing frequencies on the turn, I expect him to have a ton of AQ KQ AK type combos as well as value hands. So I'm way way ahead. The problem with small raise or shove is that stacks are pretty bad to have a balanced range- a jam is a bit over pot sized raise. I think he will rarely but occasionally barrel a blank river as well as improve and value cut himself. So I call, but I think small raise makes a ton of sense as well and I would usually raise if stacks were deeper.
River: (7450) Ao. He bets 3700 I ... ? call or jam ?
Argument for jam: I'm Sauce, and I'm smart enough to know my range falls way behind his on this river, and I'm smart enough to know my range contains a ton of 1pr combos. I'm also smart enough to read his range such that he has quite a few better one pair combos which may fold to a jam. He probably thinks I'm likely to make a fancy play here and turn 1p into a bluff, therefore I should value shove JT to get a call from his entire vbetting range on the end, which I am ahead of.
Argument for flat: I can't be sure of my reads on the river, especially about which combinations he vbets. He might check hands like AK AQ KK QQ on the end and only vbet AJ+ planning to trap me (since he may think I bluff too much). Paradoxically though, if he is very polarized on this river, that leaves him almost never betting, and checking probably 75% of his range which seems really odd considering my HUD which has him betting river with a decent frequency. Stacks are very odd here though, which may lead him to not vbet thin. Also, he may bet/fold all of his AK AQ KK QQ combos and I may be good like 10% when my jam is called, which is a pretty big disaster.
Argument from GTO: I have near the top of my range and I may want to be bluffing in this spot and he may call with worse so I should jam. Or at least jam AJo always. If he does in fact bet super polarized this strategy loses relative to a strategy of calling/folding/jamming KQ + Q9 + bluffs, but if he is in fact polarized the unfavorable situation of me holding JTo and him holding the nuts will occur very very infrequently, so I should just go ahead and assume his range is more balanced and design a balanced range of my own to counter it as best I can.
