POTD FT Friday #272 I Have a Huge Draw and River Top Pair

I was hoping to river the nuts, but rivered a bluff catcher. Should I call?

In POTD #177, I wrote about the concept of bluffing linearly on the river. As I wrote at the time:

… sometimes on the river you just bluff your hands with the least amount of showdown and sometimes you bluff with blockers and sometimes you bluff to mix kickers. So bluffing linearly in this hand would mean you always bluff [six high], then [a pair of fours], then 55, but you might never bluff 77.

It can be difficult to know when you should and should not bluff linearly; sometimes, as hard as it is to do, you just need to give up with total air. However, what can be even harder is figuring out on the fly if your opponent is bluffing linearly and what are the highest-EV bluff catchers vs. a linear range. If the board is Q42J7, calling with K8 high might seem appealing if you think your opponents most common bluffs are 53, 65 and T9. You unblock their bluffs and beat them all. If that same opponent starts bluffing A3 and A5, hero calling become expensive fast.

So what about when they’re not bluffing linearly? As I wrote above, you should almost never call with hands that lose to a bluff. The next step is determining their bluffing frequency, and there are two criteria that matter, how often they bluff with hands that might be the best hand right now and how often they bluff hands without showdown. Let’s say the UTG vs. BB board is KsQd2sAc4d. Perhaps Td2d is a better bluffing hand than 6s5s: It is occasionally ahead on the river, but it has no actual showdown value, because if UTG can’t beat a pair of twos they will bluff when checked to, and you can’t bluff-catch with a pair of twos. Td2d has much better blocker value, blocking two pair, JT and also bluff catchers like AT, KT, QT or even TT. However, if the BB always bluffs with 6s5s and 9d2d and Js9s and Tc9c, they are bluffing way too often, and UTG can easily pivot and call every bet with every reasonable bluff catcher.

However, let’s say you only have one data point. What if you see your opponent bluff 6s5s in the spot above when 6s5s is supposed to be a pure give-up? What if you see them bluff TT in that same spot? Well, it’s possible the player bluffing 6s5s always gives up with 2x because they think their pair has showdown value. It’s possible the player bluffing TT is only bluffing because they have such great blockers and would give up most of their missed flush draws. In today’s hand, I made a big fold in a hand where I believed my opponent should have been bluffing linearly. Then in writing about the hand, I learned that his hand was a pure bluff, but many worse hands, hands that I thought would be a pure bluff, gave up. I was and remain confused; did I get unlucky and run into a natural but unintuitive bluff combo, or was my opponent bluffing this hand and every hand worse than it, which made my fold a disaster? We’ll never know.

GGSF 2021 Event 41-H $25,000 Sunday Five Million
(35k/70k/8.5k) (SB/BB/ANTE) 7-Handed.
1st: 1.095M, 2nd: 821k, 3rd: 616k, 4th: 462k, 5th: 346k, 6th: 259k, 7th: 194k

Video from Hole Cards up FT Stream

Sami Kelopuro (2.6M/37BBs) folds, Shawn Daniels (1.8M/26bbs) folds, Niklas Astedt (5.3M/75bbs) folds, I (1.425M/20bbs) make it 161k with A♣️2♣️, Jason Koon (3.5M/50bbs) folds, Joao Vieira (3.4M/49bbs) folds, David Yan (1.93M/28bbs) calls in the BB.

Flop (416.5k) K♦️J♣️T♣️: David checks, I bet 140k, David calls.
Turn (696.5k) 6♠️: David checks, I check.
River (696.5k) A♦️: David bets 230k, I fold. I saw on stream that he had T♦️7♦️

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What I Was Thinking

Even if I wanted to tighten up at a FT as the short stack with two big stacks behind me, open folding a suited ace in the CO would be an overadjustment. Once I opened and got called by David, I figured this flop is so good for my range I would pure c-bet. Even my middle-of-range hands like AJ have a ton of equity, and pocket pairs that are underpairs to the board could get Tx to fold right away. I was not interested in betting too big a size, because I did not want to bet-call a shove with my hand. I figured a smaller size that might allow me to three-bet shove over a check-raise, but was still big enough to leverage my range advantage, was appropriate, and chose 1/3rd pot.

On the turn, I figured he’d have a bunch of weaker draws and I could not bet-call my hand, so checking behind to keep in his worse flush draws was the move. On the river, I have a pure bluff catcher, but I figured it would be pretty hard for him to be bluffing without a missed flush draw, and the 2c should be a common card in all his bluffs. So while I’d reluctantly call the river with Ah2h, I could fold Ac2c. I did fold Ac2c and was very mad 30 minutes later when I saw he bluffed with a pair.

What I Got Wrong

I did not run a size test preflop; it’s possible my size is too big, but A2s is a pure open either way. The flop is a pure c-bet, and when I gave the solver options of 20%, 33% and 50%, 33% is the preferred size. 50% is never used, and 20% is occasionally used, so maybe if we’re being really nitpicky, 130k would have been better. My flop size gets Tx without a backdoor flush draw to fold on the flop, even T9, but I never fold out a king, jack, or queen. The only other non-flush draw peels are 98 and 97 with a backdoor flush draw. The turn is a pure check from me; the only nut flush draws I ever bet are a little bit of Ac6c, which can call a shove, and AcKc. Even AcQc pure checks the turn as a trap with the super nuts. If I bet 60% pot, all those nut flush draws would fold to a shove, and I don’t want to waste such a strong draw when I can comfortably bluff with any of my suited aces that do not have a flush draw.

Once the turn goes check-check and I face a third-pot bet on the river, I have a roughly neutral-EV bluff catcher. My large preflop raise size is supposed to knock out a lot of suited 2x from the BB defense range, which means instead of having a sidecard that is in a lot of his bluffs, I have a sidecard that barely interacts with his range at all. Ac2c pure calls vs. a 15% block bet and mixes vs. a half-pot bet, where Ac5c folds to both, but a hand like Ah5h almost always calls. However, OOP also regularly gives up with no showdown hands such as 8c5c, so I am just not concerned about how my hand interacts with flush draws.

So the two questions that matter here are: Does David have a bunch of suited twos to bluff the river with, and should that make me want to fold with 2c? And does David bluff every no-showdown hand on the river? If the answer to the latter question is yes, I need to call; he’s overbluffing, even if I’m blocking 9c2c. In the actual hand he was bluffing with Td7d. I thought a pair was too strong to bluff with, since he should have showdown vs. my pocket pairs. It turns out I was wrong, and Td7d is a perfectly good hand to bluff with. It only has 7% equity, but it’s even worse than that 7% would indicate, because it never shows down a winner and can’t check-call the river. If he’s bluffing every missed flush draw and also bluffing some of the Tx, Jx hands that the solver bluffs, then I need to call, but I am not sure if that’s the case. Ultimately I think I was wrong about the composition of his river bluffing range, both what it should be and what it actually is— I never expected him to bluff with Jx or Kx, which the solver does, but he’s probably bluffing around the same frequency or even less than the solver, which makes me think my fold is, if not good, acceptable.

Types of Error
Did not consider that my opponent could be turning pairs into bluffs.

Grade

Everything up to the river is good; what I need to do is determine his exact river betting range, and while I’ve played a lot with David Yan, I do not have enough experience playing big FTs with him to confidently say things like “He’d never bluff a king here,” “He’d regularly fold 3c2c preflop,” or “He’d give up with a missed draw 62% of the time here.” Unfortunately, him having Td7d tells us very little; he has a pure preflop defend and a pure flop defend. If he had a hand like, say, Td7h, I could conclude David is defending too wide preflop and on the flop, which means he’ll reach the river with too many hands that have less than 10% equity and be regularly bluffing with them, and then I need to call. If he bluffed with Kc9c, I could conclude he’s bluffing too often on the river and call. Here he has a hand that is well played and tells me nothing about his range.

Five years later, I’m still torn on my decision, but I think ultimately David is more likely than not to be looser than the solver is both preflop and on the flop. That, coupled with the fact he showed he was capable of turning a pair into a bluff and I don’t know if he’ll give up 0 EV missed flush draws, means I have a neutral EV call if his river strategy is perfectly balanced, but no one’s strategy is ever perfectly balanced, and I think in a spot that’s close to a coinflip, I’ll lean toward him bluffing too often here. I’d normally give myself a B here, but I was so confident his river bluff was a mistake when he actually had pure decisions at every single point in the hand, that I’m turning a B into a

B-