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1) https://www.weaktight.com/h/556eea3ea525113d66909da7

We have 81 hands on the villain; his 33/20 image tends to open widely. He opens 67 (9) in steal positions, 40 (5) in CO, and the samples of fold to 3-bet and c-bet are not representative. In this hand, I would like to show how important it is to get away from the hand that became worthless on a dangerous river.

First, I consider this hand a good choice for 3-bet since it has a decent playability on many textures, so it is much more important to 3-bet a hand like Q8s than A9o here. Even though the latter surpasses our hand in absolute strength, it will less often win pots out of position against a range, which is evenly spread among the textures.

I think the villain would defend 15-20% of his 40% open-raising range.

This range is not ideal. I think the villain would 4-bet/fold a portion of his offsuit aces and kings, but Hero’s sizing of 3-bet makes him call with those hands more often. I also think we can slightly increase our 3-bet sizing (between 2.5X and 3X) against a wide range so that the villain does not get a good price to realize the equity of the hands from his range.

On this flop, we should value bet and I think we would not get a raise too often from an average regular, even though the flop is draw-heavy. I think we would see a raise from sets in half of cases; TxTd would be more inclined to call and a set without a blocker for a flush draw would raise more often. A top two-pair combo would not raise often because it blocks our hands, which we could stack off with here.

I will exclude the strongest combo draws from the villain’s range since he wants to balance his raising range with strong draws apart from raising sets and some rare buffs. He would do that to avoid being exploitable so that he has enough hands for a call in case we elected to push.

Thus, here is the villain’s range:

As you can see, we are not way ahead of the villain’s calling range. If I included his raising range, I guess our equities would catch up or we would be slightly ahead. We have 55% equity, which is sufficient to continue; besides, we do not want to let the villain realize the equity of his weakest hands for free. In addition, considering our equity we would like to use this exact sizing of c-bet, as Hero choses, in order to make our flop value thinner.

I decided that the villain would fold his weakest pairs and draws to a turn bet. I kept hands like KJ and AJ since they can improve to a top pair, besides, obviously, a straight. Second and third pairs + straight draws remain, as well as flush draws.

The river is a quite an unpleasant one for us, and, unfortunately, we have little info on the villain’s post-flop tendencies. We do not know his approximate bluffing frequency and whether he is capable of turning hands into a bluff. Of course, we cannot even think of value betting a card like that because it strengthened a lot of villain’s hands.

Therefore, I would first consider the portion of strong hands in the villain’s range. We need ~20,5% for a break-even call. Let us see if we have enough equity.

It turns out we can make a slightly profitable call if the villain bluffs with hands that did not get there in 25% of the cases. His AJ would not probably reach every river and we can call if he would bluff with KJ in 50% of cases. I also think the villain would never bet a top pair on this river, which means he has too few hands for a bluff (about 7.5) and only 27.5 value combos.

Conclusion: I would take a risk and call only with proper timing-tells. I guess if the villain bets in 10-12 seconds or less, we can fold our hand easily since the worst hand he bets here is a trips, which is a quick decision. I guess he would think more about a bluff bet. The villain showed Ad9d.

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2) https://www.weaktight.com/h/55d1e02dd3904334248b45ca

The big blind has 19/15 over 737 hands, he has 26 (39) cold call on the BB, and I think we would call wider to get into a multi-way pot. Generally, he is not aggressive on the river. The villain in the CO is unknown. This hand illustrates situations where you should sometimes make a thin river fold.

Since we definitely have enough equity for a value bet on the flop against two villains, I am going to only define the big blind’s range:

The villain is going to fold a lot of hands from this range to a flop c-bet. I will only leave third pairs, which have a backdoor flush draw. After betting into two villains, our range looks stronger that in a heads-up spot; thus, I don’t think the villain would often float with the bottom of his semi-bluffing range. That is why I only add gutshots with a backdoor flush draw to third pairs + backdoor flush draws.

I believe the villain would call with all of his second pairs since he beats the possible low pocket pairs turned into a bluff by Hero and some bluffs. I removed medium pocket pairs since they only have two outs to improve. Of course, they would resist more often on a flop without a queen, like with a low card.

If we take into account that the villain is not going to pay us with all of his Ax hands on the turn, but only with those that have a flush draw and the rest from A9+, then we have a borderline equity for a value bet. Thus, I think checking is an ideal option. The second option is to use a tiny sizing like one-quarter of the pot, but it would look like an obvious value bet. In addition, if the villain checks the river, these hands would pay us off easier.

The villain checks the turn, thus his range stays the same on the river. I believe that most Ax out of his top pairs would check since Hero has nothing to pay with and we would not bet a second pair on this flop against two villains, as well as against one, in most cases.

The villain would not bet second pairs and I think he would not turn third pairs into a bluff since in the worst case hands like Ax and 77-JJ beat them if Hero had bet those on the flop. We need about 25% equity for a break-even call. Even if we leave all busted hands, which did not even hit a pair, we still do not have even a break-even call.

Conclusion: Hero played this hand very well. We should also note that the villain would be doing well by turning most of his third pairs into a bluff, if the Hero were ready to fold his weak and medium top pairs.

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