Quote Originally Posted by dsaxton
Quote Originally Posted by nutsinho
Quote Originally Posted by dsaxton
That is, what you mean by, "He might fold a better hand or call with something worse," is, "I have no idea why I'm making this play."
This is completely incorrect.
Your line of thinking is incorrect.

Lukie knows exactly why he made this play: he thought the EV of pushing, which may induce a mistake two ways, and the added value of metagame for future hands, was greater than 0 (checking and folding). If we held 34s here, your argument is that its better to bluff with this than with AJ because we know why we are making the play. Now, there's only one way the opponent can make a mistake, and the mistake has exactly the same value as before. Also, this does less for metagame because he likely already considered 34s/74s to be part of your range in some way. Thus, pushing with AJ is uniformly better than pushing with air.
Do you realize that the play is profitable as a bluff only insofar as opponent is capable of folding a better hand, which is only true when the bet is a negative expectation value bet and vice versa? There's a cancelling effect between these two possibilities, they don't compound each other into huge amounts of "EV."

The idea that his opponent can make a mistake "two ways instead of one" is a simplistic and specious way of rationalizing this play. We can just as easily say that we are potentially making a mistake two ways by either getting called by a better hand or inducing a fold from something worse that would've called a lesser bet.

Also, you need to explain the metagame benefit of playing top pair top kicker like a fish.
I think the whole "metagame" benefit of playing a hand like a fish is that you look like a fish. It's unlikely that Lukie is looking to make this his standard line with TPTK OOP. However, by playing it this way once or twice in big pots vs the same opponents, your range is no longer clear.

Also, I like your cartesian logic about justifying a play from two points of view when the reverse logic could seem equally relevant.

However, I think it's important to note that OOP in a big pot on the river, we're never "getting worse hands to fold" since there's no missed draw or medium strength hand that villain will ever bet here that we can call profitably (obv he's not gonna shove with 1010 here to make us fold) and it'd be crazy to say that villain calls 100% of the time with better hands (I know I lay down QQ/KK in this spot if I'm villain a certain % of the time).

Finally, the pot is big (even if it's unnecessarily bloated through our own donkishness) and it's very much worth fighting for, which is another argument for pushing.