[W. Deranged]

I just typed out a long reply for why I think this should be:

Check-call, check-call, check-fold (unimproved).

Then something unfortunate happened and I lost my explanation: [img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

Anyway, that's my preferred line. No reason to get aggressive here. We're just costing ourselves bets against better hands, encouraging JJ to fold, and so on. Juicing the pot early makes particularly little sense considering we have so many outs and may have to pay off turn bets/raises because of our chance to improve.

River is tough. I think check-fold is good because villain is going to bet a lot on the flop and turn but likely only bet very good hands (AK and better) on the river, since you've represented a hand that you probably want to showdown. Sometimes JJ will bet and we'll get bluffed out, but I don't think this'll happen often enough to make betting better. The vast majority of the time we're called when we bet, it's by a better hand. This is sort of like the hand where Shant had QQ against MaxPower. The river played similarly there.

The best way to think of this is as a drawing hand where we're drawing to the combination of us hitting a Q or J + the chance that we both have the best hand and villain will let us showdown the river for free. The combination of those makes this hand easily worth playing on.

It is important to realize, though, that we're behind a significant majority of the time in this hand and so should really not be putting that much money into this pot.