[Harv72b]

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- worse hands. No pair no draw. These will either fold right now or call the c/r and fold turn. Sometimes they will 3-bet but thats a rare occasion. Seems to me that you FR live guys expect this to be 3-bet quite a lot with worse hands. That rarely happens to me when I play SH online.

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I never play live, and I've logged a fair number of hands in 6max & shorter online over the years. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] For the exact reasons you mentioned, I love a call/call/call line here, when we have position. Out of position, you're making a pretty significant mistake when you allow him the option of drawing to a 1 pair hand cheaply (or for free).

I think that a lot of the value you're attaching to just check/calling comes from the assumption that the majority of opponents will fire 3 barrels in this scenario, which simply isn't true. It especially isn't true when he has a decent hand which he believes may be good at showdown UI, such as a weaker ace or K high, or when he's holding a weak draw (such as a gutshot) and decides to take his free card on the turn. You also assume that these hands will not look us up after we check/raise the flop, which is equally untrue.

When I say that we might get him to fold better hands, I don't mean a pair (unless maybe the board gets mega-ugly & we keep firing). I'm talking about something like AT or AJ when the turn bricks as well. Now that's a very small part of his range & he won't always fold them at any point (agree completely that AK is looking us up almost always), but we're primarily check/raising both for value and to protect our hand--if he folds a perfectly good 6-outer immediately or to our turn follow-up, I'm okay with that. Particularly given that I don't believe he's 3-barrelling nearly as often as you appear to be suggesting.

In a heads up match, I can see just check/calling down from time to time here (and check/raising from time to time, and donking the flop from time to time). This isn't a heads up match--it's a heads up hand played on a full ring table that's gone 4-handed. Given those circumstances, it's bad poker to assume that our opponent is comfortable playing the kind of hyperaggressive style that HU or short-handed online play requires.

You are also absolutely failing to recognize the metagame advantages which fastplaying a hand like ace high can have here. If you come into a heads up match against me check/calling down every time you have a marginal hand, well...I'm gonna crush you, at least given anything close to neutral luck with the cards. It becomes so much easier for your opponents to play perfect poker against you when you so obviously declare your hands like that; or would you be playing 98 the same way here? In that case, you're leaving money on the table by not extracting value from your made hands.

Anyway....worse hands. Worse aces are calling the check/raise (or 3betting) every single time. Two overcards, which makes up a pretty significant portion of his range, are also calling (or 3betting) every single time. Any other draw, such as a gutshot or even runner runner draw, is going to at least call the flop check/raise pretty much always. Hell, even a total crap hand which completely missed the flop will call our check/raise fairly often just for form's sake. Really, the only hands we run the risk of losing immediately by doing this are absolute junk hands which will more often than not give up on the turn UI anyway; I don't think you're going to see 52o 3barrel this too often, or at the least, I think you're going to see hands which might peel to the river against an aggressive line (like JT, KQ, A4, etc) check through the turn and/or river more often than you'll see a total junk hand fire at the pot 3 times.

Also tl;dr, but most of my posts are. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]