Stealing and range advantage. If you ever want to trap me, just open limp the button with a big hand when I’m in the blind. I raise 100% of all hands when that very rare situation happens. Open limping on the button is just silly to me. That is what happened on this particular hand. Outside of that, I got a huge flop for my range, but not a super great flop for my hand. This is when we get to play poker.
The video below shows the action and the text tells you what I was thinking on each street.
Preflop: As stated above, I am raising 100% of the hands I’m playing here. QcJc is definitely in that range. I think I should’ve sized up to $18, but $15 works just fine.
Flop: AhKc8h. We flop a gutter to the nuts and a backdoor flush draw. I absolute love this flop. A lot of you are wondering why. I have nothing. It doesn’t matter. This flop nails our range and makes it difficult for our opponents. We have superior nut advantage here. Neither of our opponents can have AA or KK. The big blind was a super nit so he could maybe sometimes have AK. The button can never have AK (or any other Ace really). We block AQ and AJ combos. All we are really worried about is 88 and A8, and it’ll be easy to find out with a one-third pot bet if either of them have that. We can make every other hand fold by the river if they do not improve.
Turn: 3c. A huge card for us. Both players called the flop. The 3c gives us 8 more outs to make a winner (if we need one). We bet again, close to one-third pot. We get one caller. The King on the board being a club and not a heart is rather big for us. We will see why on the river.
River: 2d. Beautiful. I know, we have nothing. Nut no pair, and we fire a half pot bet. I actually like betting more here, closer to full pot, but this player is a special variety. If he’s calling, he’s calling. So half pot does the same thing as full pot or even 1.5x pot in this situation. A $50 bet may even work, but I want to apply pressure to AT and A9. It’s hard to call three streets with those hands and I don’t want a crying call, obviously. The bet may be half pot, but in-game I was actually betting half his stack. If he calls and is wrong, he will have to reload, and he doesn’t want to do that.
Since the King on the board was the lone not-heart on the flop, he could easily have Kx of hearts which will now fold. If he had two pair or better we would’ve known by now, except for A2. With another player behind him on the turn, I feel that A2 is folding unless it is specifically A2 of clubs. If he has that, he wins. All other hands, we win. We do have some showdown value in the fact that we beat all flush draws that made nothing, but checking is terrible. We want to put Kx hearts in a tough spot and not get beaten by a random 3h4h or 2h4h or something silly like that.
Video results below. Hope you enjoy!