[Harv72b]

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I'm with you. I see all these posts about punishing draws and not giving the button a free card and I scratch my head.

Those are valid concerns when you're ahead, or have a reasonable expectation of being ahead more than half the time. On this board, with 3 opponents, I'd even agree with that if I thought we were ahead even 1/3 of the time. The K on the turn makes that highly unlikely. I seriously doubt we're ahead more than 20% of the time vs the range of hands our 3 opponents have played up to this point. I don't think there's 5-10% fold equity in betting (i'm happy if someone proves me wrong, though)

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If we check, it checks through, and we end up losing on the river, we've lost money from an FTOPS standpoint--however many bets our opponents would've called on the turn multiplied by our current pot equity. If we bet and are called by one or more better hands, we neither lose nor gain if we'd planned on check/calling. If we bet and fold to another raise, we've lost nothing--again, because we're planning to call a bet if we check. Okay, some tiny fraction of a bet for the times we would've rivered the A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] and it gave us a winner, but that's pretty inconsequential.

The only times betting really costs us more than check/calling are when we either bet/call (and lose) or we bet and one of the limpers check/raises, where we would have folded had we checked it, button bet, and then the raise occurred--basically MUBS. I do not think that the K[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] in any way affected how often we're ahead--putting Button on exactly KK seems pretty far-fetched given the description of the player.

This is why I'm so much in favor of bet/fold, again assuming that Button would not raise again on the turn with a hand that can't beat AA.