NL 10 - Turned low flush, easy fold?

[Pokey]

A few comments:

1. Preflop play looks fine to me. Hero has the best possible position, a well-padded pot, and at least one incredibly loose fishy. With a highly speculative hand he decides to splash around. This isn't the time to go for a steal, since it's VERY unlikely to work. Much better is to simply play for hand value. Given that you're unlikely to steal but likely to get paid off if you hit I'd say calling is better than raising or folding.

2. On the flop I like the check behind. Are we REALLY thinking we're going to fold the lot of 'em? Anybody who calls us is going to have us beaten right now. Worse yet, anybody could be waiting for a check-raise which would blow us off our draw, or at least cripple our implied odds. If we had raised preflop a bet on this flop would be mandatory -- that ace would give us some boogeyman power to frighten off scared children. As it stands we're not likely to get respect for our "ace" and we're not likely to steal the pot. We'll have to hit to win, so we might as well take a free shot at it.

3. On the turn we've got a tougher decision than most people are implying. If villain is ONLY raising with flushes, we need to fold: we're a 9-to-5 dog against another made flush, here. People who are saying "we're only beaten by three hands" are wrong. Take a look: we see five clubs, so there are eight left in the deck. That's the K, Q, T, 8, 6, 5, 4, and 3. *IF* villain has a flush, he'd beat us with seven king-high flushes (KQ, KT, K8, K6, K5, K4, K3), six Q-high flushes, and five T-high flushes. He'd lose with four 8-high flushes, three 6-high flushes, two 5-high flushes, and the one 4-high flush. That means we're behind 18 flushes and ahead of 10 others. The pot is offering us 2.2-to-1 odds and we'd need nearly 3-to-1 for that to be a good call. *IF* villain has a flush. However, villain could have a number of other hands that we do very well against: straights, sets, two pair, nut flush draws, TPWK, or even pocket pairs that have decided to bluff (or semi-bluff) the flush. If villain has a weaker non-flush hand somewhere between 1/3rd and 1/2 of the time then the call is +EV. It's very hard to say if that's the case here, but given that he's raising 40% of his hands we can probably discount most of the suited kings -- that alone is enough to drop his winrate sufficiently to make this a +EV call. Yeah, I call this bet, but I'm not cheering -- I'm gritting my teeth as I do it. The good news is that if I lose the money will still be in play later, and I can get it back on another hand.