[AMT]

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Thanks for the response AMT, I was just wondering if you could critique my thought process am I thinking through hands well especially the first one. What do you put villian on, we are getting decent odds on the river.

Hand 2: I think you are right, I am pissed about the way I played it, defintly should have shoved especially with the way villians were playing. I just thought that I might get more value this way since opponents are calling with such a large range and are going to miss the flop often.

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My reasoning behind checking was that I may be able to encourage a bet from a misguided bluff on the river, or a lesser pair, and also minimizing my losses by calling a smaller bet on river because his bets are generally small. Thoughts? Is my thinking process right?

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if you weight his range to draws (this board and your read would probably put a lot of draws in there), you need to decide if the protection factor combined with stacks at this point in the tournament outweighs the need to get to showdown. that said, if you do bet the turn you have to have made the decision to play a big pot with top pair vs a really bad player on a drawy board (or vice versa).

you can make a strong argument for checking the turn and calling blank rivers vs bad poorly-timed-bluffing villains, but when his most likely draws fill on dangerous board and you face a bet like this, the argument dwindles.

So really the points in your thought process are ok, but you need to make sure they fit with your read on the villain. if hes a calling station and will call flop with anything, it may not be appropriate to assume that he just tosses out river bluffs (it looks like this might be a closer to accurate read in this specific hand?). on the other hand, if hes just a stupid lag, maybe checking the turn is best because you cant stand a c/r and you cant really weight his range enough to draws and the need to play a big pot to conclude that betting is ok, but you may be able to say "well i can check the turn for the above reasons, and now i can call a river bet from this bad lag because of it", in that itll change the dynamic of the hand. so really we have a lot of different scenarios that will develop and lead you to draw appropriate conclusions, you just need to make sure you're assesing and weighting the appropriate factors.

as others have pointed out, this type of a hand could easily be a fold pf because youre either going to be way behind or slightly ahead when lots of money goes in the pot, and ace-rag just doesnt play too well in general, but the more comfortable you are post flop, the more the stack sizes allow, and the worse the opponent, the more you can justify opening ranges. post flop, you just need to assess the above to decide what thought processes seem appropriate.