[Isura]

This an old hand from the Greg vs Craig HU video on UB. I've been working on my HU game lately, and I'd like to flesh out some of my ideas and get some input on how to analyze the hand. It was the last hand of the video. So far the session had been fairly standard for HU. You may want to watch the video before analyzing this hand, but I'll try to summarize the dynamic up to this point.

OOP Craig has been either 3-betting or folding. He is 3-betting a lot OOP, something like 25% of the time if I had to guess a number. Greg is adjusting by seeing a lot of flops. He has 4-bet a couple of times, but mostly he is calling and playing flops. Craig is c-betting 2/3 pot with his whole range. IIRC he didn't once check after 3-betting. The 3-bet pots have been pretty standard so far. Greg is mixing up calling/folding/raising and there haven't been any crazy 3-bet pots yet. I won't say anything more since I think that it won't add much more to the analysis of this hand. This seems like the type of spot where past history won't matter TOO much since its such an odd spot and it really comes more down to frequencies, levels, and hand reading.

Anyways, onto the hand. Game is 2/4 and stacks are roughly 200bb. Greg pots, Craig repots and Greg calls. Flop is KJ2 rainbow and Craig makes standard bet 48 into 72. I'll analyze this from Greg's perspective. Greg has K9o and calls flop. Craig bets his whole range here, and a lot of it totally misses this flop. They are deep and so an argument can be made for raising a big hand. But I think that raising is not good for several reasons. For one, that flop is so dry that most of the time Craig is going to fold most worst hands and we don't beat the Kings that he is most likely to continue with. If he 3-bets we will be crushed or against a pure bluff. But we've been pretty controlled with raising flops so he won't play back too often. The only real value in raising is to protect against 2-4 out hands or get Craig to 3-bet bluff. Both seem like bad reasons and it would feel gross to have to play a 200bb pot here. Now given this current history it would be a decent spot to bluff raise. But I think polarizing our flop raising range in this spot is best. We have position and deep stacks, so we can float and have more options with hands that have more equity and some hidden elements (like backdoor draws). So with a majority of our range we should be calling (or folding), and just raise monsters (KJ+?) and pure bluffs. So flop call seems standard.

Turn brings the 3s for the board of K J 2s 3s. Greg bets 91 into 165. Again I think this bet is standard and not that interesting. He calls down with some worse K's, Jx, TT-44 sometimes and maybe AQ/AT (although he's more likely to bet those). Stacks make a c/r with a good (8+ out) draw pretty ackward since Craig can't put in the last bet without overbet shoving turn. He might c/r a weak gutshot (Q9/JT/A4o etc) but we'll consider that pure air. He also knows we're floating this flop often so a turn bet definitely has value.

Anyways, Craig now c/r the bet of 91 to 267, leaving himself roughly 500 behind. I think we have ~90% against his bluffs and 10% equity against his monsters. A 50/50 weighting then gives us 50% equity and enough pot odds to call. But of course there is 1 more street to play. This seems like a really tough spot. We can just fold (easy!). The other 3 options all feel ugly.

I'll finish by posing questions that we need to consider.

1) What's his ratio of air:nuts in this spot?
2) I assume he'll shove his whole nuts portion on any river. What portion of his air does he continue with? If we are going call/call then the math is that we're risking ~700 to win 1000 (treat turn + river as 1 street). I know that many good players will never check river in this spot (they choose their bluff ratio on the turn and fire again). Others give up on some rivers. This is kinda MDMA theory where he says that our turn call will reduce his bluffing frequency on the river.
3) Can we call some rivers and fold others? This will complicate EV calculations obviously. Or do we call all rivers?
4) If we don't know the answers to 1,2, or 3, is there a way we can play somewhat game theoretically optimally? How do we minimize bleeding huge amount of EV in these spots?