In this post, we review some play by plays from one of the best grinders out there Bencb, HighRoller end boss and Poker coach to the Pros we pick up some seriously valuable info on what lines to take with our holdings here…
Playing Ace-King Out of position in 3-bet pots
Playing AKo out of position in 3bet pot can be a tough task, Ben opts to just flat call a majority of the time, but he would also 4-Bet sometimes too.
4-Betting can make some sense to get value if you feel an opponent is 3-betting us wider than usual, but in general, out of position it doesn’t serve us that many favours to bloat the pot any more than it is.
We’ve all seen this board a million times before, so how do the best players play there Ace-King when it misses these boards.
Well on this board we can easily call at least one bet, we have the nut flush backdoor draw with our hand having the Ace of clubs and our overcards can likely give us the best hand too. So a check-call line here is fine.
On the turn though, our hand isn’t going anywhere and our hand even blocks bluffs like AQ and KQ that could be in our opponent’s hand, so just giving up here is fine.
Folding borderline hands
Poker is all about position, against a cut-off raise in position on the Button this is an easy 3-Bet, however, we can never be too bad to play super tight versus UTG especially with players left behind that can squeeze or that can flat call behind with pairs and make sets against our top pair type hands giving us poor reverse implied odds with this type of holding in multiway pots.
Block bets
This type of move isn’t going to come up too often, but choosing block bets that can get called by worse hands that would often just check back is a good play.
It allows us to get thin value from hands that would check back but may even call a small bet with their bluff catchers.
Smooth Calling 3-Bets even with our big hands
Smooth calling 3-bets even with hands like QQ when out of position will help us to not only run into Aces and Kings when we 4-bet but not only this we are keeping worse hands in the pot and letting hands like 99-JJ blast off on low boards against us.
When the River card comes BenCB states that he wants to go for a large sizing here, this is because if he got to this point with say T9s or JTs, for example, he would want to put maximum pressure when he is bluffing, so rather than going for a smaller sizing, he will always go large here because he can either apply max pressure or get max value.
I wouldn’t mind having seen a check-raise here either, because I feel our opponent is always trying to get to showdown with an overpair like TT or JJ in this spot when they check back the turn, I think KK or AA always goes for three streets of value, but leading large is nice too.
How to get max value in pots with top pair
Ben manages to extract huge value in this hand, he starts with a slight overbet on the flop when checked to and proceeds to bet over the pot on the turn when he checked too again.
This is a spot where he gets value that most players would just not pick up… his thought process is on the River that it’s pretty tough to get called by a worse hand, stating he would value bet with KJ or AJ but QJ might just be the line because even strong hands on this board will not raise against his sizing. So he does check back and win the pot against J9.
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