[W. Deranged]

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Bet the river

Given the likely hands of UTG, his most likely hands are AQ, AK, AJ, KQs and you might be able to fold him out of it.

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Betting the river is horrible. You'll never get a better hand to fold. Other A-high hands often won't fold either. You do not really represent any hand that hit this board, so villain will call pretty liberally here. Betting will just cause you to chop a lot and lose the rest of the time. You're also never getting called by a worse hand, obviously.

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Do you bet AK here?

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I don't see much reason to bet AK here once the 8 comes, because now we are chopping with all the other A highs and will get called fairly liberally. I can see more upside to betting AK unimproved on this river when the river doesn't make two pair, as I think another AK is more likely to fold (I think many people would rather call with A-high on the two pair board than on just a junk board) and because there are other A-high hands we are beating which we might get called by.

A major reason I don't like betting here is that the pot is under 7 BB at this point. Our bet is thus only looking to buy like 3.5 BB if we can buy our way out of a chop, and so we need to have this work almost 1 in 4 times to be valuable.