A 2CardsCollegestudent’s hand from the $320 Saturday Super Knockout on PokerStars. The student had a small sample of hands and played with his opponents. However, the villain is known to be a moderately aggressive, good regular.
The tight regular open-raises and the villain in the small blind calls him. Considering the specifics of the tournament, I think the villain would somewhat narrow his 3-betting range since the possible fold equity of his c-bets would be lower on average due to the potential bounty. It is also important that a villain in the small blind would get into the pot with a much wider range due to the better pot odds than he would have being in any other position. Thus, this is how I see his range:
Sometimes, we are going to encounter the bottom of this range. That is why I took those hands with a 50% probability and since the pre-flop aggressor is a tight regular, the villain in the small blind would rather just call with JJ and AQ and 3-bet with AK.
This is an interesting flop for us, which we should donk-bet because the pre-flop aggressor would only bet top pair or better and strong drawing hands on this board, i.e. he would check about 50% of the time, which is bad for us because the villains would see the turn for free and it could bring a card that is not really good for us (I’m talking about 6, 4, 9, middle and low diamond card). In this case, our range would strengthen and we would get value from a few hands.
At the same time, our donk-bet looks like two pairs and many draws from the regular’s perspective. In any case, by donk-betting, we would make our opponents continue with a wider range because they have two more streets ahead and, so far, a lot of hands have significant equity and might strengthen later.
This is what the villain’s calling range looks like:
Basically, it’s pretty usual except that I think the villain would check/raise hands like Jd9d, Td9d, 9d7d, and 7d6d 50% of the time. However, I cannot input those hands correctly due to the filter’s conflict with the straight draw hands, so we are just going to keep that in mind during the analysis.
The villain check/raises the turn, which makes us think how good our set is in this hand. The primary point is that if our opponent is competent, which he seems to be, he would balance his value range with hands that have most of the blockers for the Hero’s made hands and the hands I listed above are suited for that best.
Besides, there is no point in check/calling for him because of the action-killer cards and primarily because the Hero’s range is very strong and it makes no sense to hold off the check/shove until the river.
The villain’s range of check/raise on the turn:
We need 23.5% equity for a breakeven call. It is important to note that in order for his bluff to be successful, the villain should perform it with hands that block both sets and straights at the same time.
The villain’s 66 and 99 block the Hero’s straights best of all, although it is not as important as the fact that the villain’s hits plus straight draws block more hands.
Thus, the best blockers for the villain’s bluff would be 98, 76, and 89 that block more made hands. I think the Hero would rarely have 96o and 64o in his range, which makes pocket pairs with a double blocker (66 and 99) more important than the hands mentioned above. By the way, we should recall that he has 1.5 fewer combos due to the Flopzilla filters conflict.
Actually, the situation would most likely be somewhat different since the Hero is unknown to the opponent, which would make him more straightforward in this spot. I spend about an hour to think and make such an analysis while we have limited time at the tables. Moreover, all regulars are multi-tabling. So, I think his range does not exceed these hands:
I took away only 1.5 combos and our set became worthless. By the way, Hero made a very strong fold in this hand, strong because few people can ditch a “fancy one”.
Conclusion: the blockers for the value range have a huge influence on the success of the bluff. This hand illustrates it perfectly.