[elindauer]

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What about betting to narrow the field and take a free turn card?

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Narrowing the field to yourself and the best hand really doesn't help your situation. AK unimproved is a terrible "narrow the field" hand, because you will rarely be able to fold the kind of hand that would give you extra outs. Consider that the "extra outs" hand for AK unimproved are hands with pairs... weaker aces that you dominated preflop but that now have you in a bad spot. It would be pretty rare for a player to fold a pair on this board given this pot size.

If they do, it will surely take two bets cold, and if you end up paying 2 small bets to clean up two outs in a pot this size, you're pretty unhappy. The pot is big, but it's not THAT big.

Cleaning up outs is for, say, JT on a 97 high flop. Now you can fold hands like QT, KJ, AT, etc etc etc and make a turned top pair good. Plus, you have good equity anyways against a hand like A9 so you don't mind pay 2 bets to clean up your outs.

Hope that cleared things up a bit.

Eric