Sonny goes over a $10 NL hand posted by Leggo member "whorunthis" in the microstakes forum and discusses the benefits of varying your play with some unorthodox flop lines on Ace high rainbow flops.
Good vid! Never hurts to think through your options, even in spots which people lable as totally std to play one way! I dont know about check calling flop here though, it sucks a little bit if hes wider pre and making poor 3 street calls with TP. In NL10 people are not that likely to bluff with their small pairs here. Many wont bluff even 1 street let alone 2 or 3.
Maybe thats a good line for bit higher limits without much reads on villain. But if you have that kinda favorable read for this spot and start check calling this hand down, then youre really looking to exploit him to the max and he should see it and adjust! Since you should c-c 3 with AK, AT, KQ and even worse hands prolly with good read like that. And vs a good villain you obv wanna c-bet as bluff with 22 or smth (assuming he has tight preflop range), which you then maybe cant, if youre not even c-betting AQ.
I kinda realized sometime after posting that river is never a fold. I agree on what you say about villains betsizing. Also thought at start of the video that I shouldnt be asking if its call or fold but call or shove.
Good vid! Never hurts to think through your options, even in spots which people lable as totally std to play one way! I dont know about check calling flop here though, it sucks a little bit if hes wider pre and making poor 3 street calls with TP.
Yeah where I've been thinking about taking a line like this is the specific situation where you open from under the gun. I find there are alot of regulars (myself included) who have a really tight cold calling range vs. a UTG open. So in that specific case, I think this line is worth a try as a variation play. But if the guy is calling all suited aces and even hands like AJo vs. the UTG open then you definitely want to bet this flop with top two. Even though it's pretty spewy to try to chase down a UTG raiser with garbage like that IMO, I think there's a decent number of regs who try to do it so it's important to know your player here.
Maybe thats a good line for bit higher limits without much reads on villain. But if you have that kinda favorable read for this spot and start check calling this hand down, then youre really looking to exploit him to the max and he should see it and adjust! Since you should c-c 3 with AK, AT, KQ and even worse hands prolly with good read like that. And vs a good villain you obv wanna c-bet as bluff with 22 or smth (assuming he has tight preflop range), which you then maybe cant, if youre not even c-betting AQ.
I kinda realized sometime after posting that river is never a fold. I agree on what you say about villains betsizing. Also thought at start of the video that I shouldnt be asking if its call or fold but call or shove.
I personally don't think there's that many regs who you need to be thinking about having a good overall game plan against, as very few regs at 10 and 25 NL know how to exploit subtly inbalanced lines that you may have in your repertoire. But since it is an interesting topic, let's discuss it anyways. You are definitely right that there are certain hands where you have a mandatory bluff on this flop-in particular 22-44 that have the running draw to the wheel and all your gutshots have to be bet as bluffs in this spot, since the EV for bluffing with them is so much higher than the EV for check/calling or check/folding. But those are the only hands you really have to bluff in this spot. Your other hands like 66-JJ are just fine to check down especially since you say that you strongly feel that your opponents would be mostly inclined to check down their pocket pairs with you.
So overall you need to be bluffing 18 combos of 22-44 and 12 combos of gutshots (KJs, KTs, and JTs). Let's say you also choose to bet all your KQ, QJs, and QTs hands (18 more combos), a few combos of random pocket pairs like KK or 66 (let's say 6 more combos). Now let's say you decide to bet 25 of the 30 combos of the top portion of your range (AK, AQ, AA, QQ, and 33). So overall on the flop you are cbetting 79 combos and of those 79 combos , you could call a raise with 40-let's say any gutshot (these hands would give you a nice shot at stacking a set-they're even better when they have a backdoord flush draw, any top pair or better, and 3 combos of KK as bluff catchers). Now if our opponent follows up his flop raise with a turn bet we can call with our 25 strong combos plus probably about 3 of the other 15 combos that turned a straight, a flush draw, or a set. On the river we will have 28 combos remaining in our range and if he shoves we can call with our 9 flopped sets, our turned straights, our turned sets, as well our runner runner flushes. We wouldn't have to even call all our combos of AQ on the river (just a few of them), and we would be completely unexploitable.
So you can see that even if you check 4 of your 9 combos of AQ on this flop and your opponent knows that you are using this play once in awhile there is no way he can exploit you. Ace high rainbow flops just favor the UTG raiser vs. the CO cold caller too strongly-it's just the way the ranges interact. The only way you would be exploitable is if you do what most people do and auto cbet an ace high flop 90% of the time in this spot. If you did that and you checked AQ as well then your opponent might decide that it was a good spot to test you out (although I kind of doubt he would in practice). So if you are planning on cbetting 90-100% of your range on this flop then checking AQ would definitely leave you pretty imbalanced and your opponent could exploit you by raising the flop, betting the turn, and shoving the river. But do you really think anyone is going to come along and try doing that to you with air? I seriously doubt it. And if you just check some of your hands on the flop like some AJ and AT combos to use to induce bluffs it solves the problem completely.
