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I open in the SB with A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]8[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]. The BB calls. I don’t have much on him at all; he seems a bit aggressive but my reads are fairly limited.

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If I took this route (checking the turn and river because I think he bets it very often), I would check-raise-call the river. Given the 666 on the board, he's likely to be betting with a lot of hands as bluffs, but he will pay off with a lot of hands that he thought he was value betting (any PP, river flush -- and maybe he'll look you up with K-high, but you don't need these extra calls to get value).

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You think a river flush/K-high really calls here? (FWIW I doubt K-high bets the river).

Rob

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It depends a bit on the stakes, but yes for the flush at the low-mid micros and sometimes even at the high-micros. I think there are lots of players aren't good enough to walk away from hands that are obviously beat. For example, I don't expect players to fold the low boat on a double paired board even though two other players are betting/raising. I think players will have a hard time folding a flush because it's a flush, especially if a call completes the action.

K-high is admittedly a bit of a stretch, but I think getting K-high to call is just icing on the cake.

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Hmm. How often do you think a flush bet-calls the river after playing it this way on the flop? I'm trying to put a realistic range on how often he'll have a hand that I can beat that won't fold to a raise here for some of my EV calcs, but it's kinda tough. I feel like stubborn/aggressive players often raise the flop with a flush draw, especially in blind vs blind situations, and I also feel that's also the case with most pocket pairs preflop. I've tried to do the EV calcs in my head but it's a very close spot re: the river play. I'm trying to do the river calcs on a bet/call vs an unknown who seems mostly sane (based on the fact that I hadn't observed anything yet in ~15 hands, which is usually often enough to detect maniacal or loosepassive behavior), but it's very difficult without either feeling to pessimistic or too optimistic (K-high falls way into the optimistic category).

Off the top of my head I felt like we'd be losing 10% of the time, winning vs a bluff about 30%, chopping about 30% of the time, with the rest of the 30% of the time mixed between hands that could bet-call and hands that would bet-fold. These are all admittedly off the cuff and I feel like they actually may be a bit too optimistic, but it's hard to determine as the line I took is passive and strange enough that I encourage more bluffs and more bad value bets (it's why I took the line, of course), to the point that the bluff and "valuebet" lines become quite blurry and are actually significantly higher when combined than the % of chopping hands and % of better hands.

I went ahead and spelled out all of my thoughts in my blog, but I think between Shill's post and my posts here I've spelled out most of it again. Basically the whole hand comes down to the application of "having a better hand 66% of the time you are called," but it feels counterintuitive because I expect to have the best hand or a chop ~90% of the time at least when I get the opportunity to checkraise.

Rob