[mythrilfox]

well on the one hand you probably only lose to 4 combos of hands (aa/kk), you're getting 2.5-1, and he's a bad player, which are all usually compelling reasons to call... but otoh wouldn't he have to be [censored] crazy to bluff here?

when i think of a bad player at these limits i usually think of someone who is too straightforward and too loose-passive and not a spewmonkey. i think a large part of your edge against these players comes in realizing that even though they can put you with 90% certainty on the hand you're representing (or a bluff), they won't realize you'll fold said hand getting great odds.

also, in this situation nearly all of the hands in his range have showdown value, so even if you're bluffing from his perspective he'd be better off calling such hands instead of raising as a bluff.

now, what about ak? i just don't think i could bring myself to fold ak without a better read, even though in our a2 analysis we are putting him exactly on aa/kk. now there are half as many combos of hands that beat you, and he needs to bluff only about half as often as before to put you in a tough spot, which is probably significant enough to make this a call. there's also some possibility he checks the flop with ak, which would also be affected by your having ak.

i'm bored so here's some fun math:

say his range is tt-aa. 4/22 combos beat you. you're getting almost exactly 2.5-1 on a call. 18% of the time he's got you beat, so he'd have to be bluffing just over 7%, or 1 time in 13.75, to make this a call.

now say you have ak. 2/20 combos beat you. 10% of the time he's got you beat, so he'd have to be bluffing 4% of the time, or about 1 time in 25, to make this a call.

of course this isnt precise as he could have ak some of the time on the river, or tt might not be in his preflop range, but its probably fairly close.

i dunno, the former case still seems like a pretty compelling case for a call, but i just did that mainly to show that there should be enough of a difference between a2 and ak to justify folding one and calling the other. a difference of a little over 3% doesn't seem like a lot but when you consider that he only has to bluff about half as often in one case relative to another it becomes more significant.

as you can tell i'm kind of rambling mostly because i'm not 100% sure of my stance. since we are talking about such low bluffing frequencies here in both cases, its certainly hard to peg a semi-unknown (as in you don't seem to have a great handle on his capabilities in situations like this) bad player as bluffing that infrequently.