AK tptk, go for 3?

Originally Posted by daven

< 200 hands on villain so i'm asking for people's thoughts on turn and river = implicit in that is their thoughts on villain's range. Basically want people's thoughts on what he can have left once we get to the river and what % of that range i beat.

The reason this bothers me (and I'm not claiming to be right) is that "they" have 0 info about Villain other than what's in OP. So by omitting that information and encouraging speculation, you get terse advice, based on unnamed assumptions about what "they" have guessed.

E.g. caddie444 and BorisTheSpider gave you an answer, but no rationale. At best you can learn to mimic their play in this spot, but you can't learn what motivated their line and evaluate its merits against other lines. (OK, maybe you can, but I can't.)

To me, this kind of reply is about as helpful as a pat on the back. It buoys my confidence, but doesn't prepare me for the future. I can't fault them for an unjustified answer, as your question just begs unjustified answers.


Even a vague comment about Villain's assumed strengths/leaks is good info. After 168 hands, you must've seen Villain do 1 or 2 things OTT or OTR that caught your attention. Those bits of information are hugely important to how I play my game, and what lines I will take. It's not like there's any reason to assume the villains I'm facing on Bovada are playing the same as the villains you're playing. Even if they were, there is enough variation in post flop play styles and leaks, that I don't think a broad generalization helps too much.

In lieu of the relevant info, I feel like I'd need to leave a wall of text to cover the possibilities and why should I bother to put in that effort if the OP didn't? (I mean look at the length of my posts, as it is... if I tried to cover multiple contingencies, they'd be much longer)

Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey

E.g. caddie444 and BorisTheSpider gave you an answer, but no rationale. At best you can learn to mimic their play in this spot, but you can't learn what motivated their line and evaluate its merits against other lines. (OK, maybe you can, but I can't.)

I'll try and post a bit more ITT tomorrow, but it's late and I'm tired so I just wanted to reply briefly and say that I think you have a point here. I guess it's not so helpful to post without a rationale.

In short, sometimes it's not as complicated as putting them on a range, and sometimes we don't need to do much (or any) maths - sometimes it's more about a player type, and the overwhelming commonalities that occur within a group of players - I think this applies here.

Villain is loose and passive. A 3:1 VPIP:PFR ratio, never 3bets without a monster, calls too many cbets. About 2/3 of the time, 2 unpaired hole cards are going to miss the flop, so a 30% or so fold to cbet is someone who's continuing a lot with very weak holdings - we can immediately stick them in a bucket called "fish" and assign fish-like behaviours to them, and a surprising majority of the time we'll be right although of course there will be outliers where our initial read was wrong. Over 168 hands that becomes even less likely - VPIP and PFR converge pretty fast.

Against a fish, I think we had best assume, in the absence of other evidence, that all the time they are calling, we should be value betting anything that has good relative strength - OPs hand is good here against a fish most of the time.

If the fish raises, things change dramatically. Passive players are just that - passive, so when they wake up, something is up.

Unless and until they do wake up, I try to value bet them relentlessly so I think we b/f river about half to 2/3 pot, probably nearer half since OP said this fish has a fold button, so we want to get calls from hands that might not call a bigger bet. I also wouldn't want to feel priced in to call a shove, and there's not so much behind.

If you're not going to bet 3 streets on this board when holding TPTK against this kind of player, I think unless there's a very specific reason for that, which won't apply to the vast majority of fish, you'd be missing out on value from all the worse hands most fish will call with.