[GuyOnTilt]

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Although I've played a lot of padooki, I find it hard to comment on your line. These type of questions are impossible to answer just from a hand history. It's like asking what do you do at Hold'em when you flop TPTK on a raggedy board and get check raised. Sometimes you're calling, sometimes you're passing, sometimes you're re-raising. It's the same here. You can only make this decision based on what you know of the opponent.

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While this is totally true if I had outlined a general scenario and asked for opinions, it doesn't hold very much if I spell out every action and general opponent description. At least not any more than if I had done the same thing with an online LHE hand. I understand that a lot of decisions that come up in hands that are close are going to be read-dependant, but often times - and especially online - you don't have the luxury of super specific reads and are forced to make a decision based on less than stellar information. It sucks, but it's a reality in the online world.

I think the aspect of this game that's making it hard for me in certain spots is the overlap of +EV situations with regard to standing or breaking. I'm not positive this is the best way to go about estimating outs, but the way I've been doing it is based on the median of what I perceive my opponent's full range to be. Let's say in this situation he can raise here with anywhere from a 5-J. I'm discounting him having a 4 'cause I think he would've 3bet PF with a 3card hand that good, but then again he could've improved his draw on 2nd so let's put that back in there. So 4-J. I don't see him always raising a J or T here, so let's discount those very slightly. Let's also discount his 4's and 5's very slightly since there's a higher chance he would've 3bet PD with them. So we'll call it a wash. His median hand is now between a 7 and 8. How many outs do I have against that hand if I break? Depends on how often my 8632 is good vs his 8 and my 7632 vs his 7's. If I have to put a concrete number on it (which is the whole point in making reads and estimating outs), I'd go with slightly less than half the time versus his 8's considering his CC PD - we'll go with .4 - and .1 versus his 7's. That gives me 3.5 outs. I'm getting an immediate 10:1 with a virtual lock on 11:1 with no chance of being reraised. That alone gives me just enough room to draw given I have close to +1 BB implied on avg, which I think I do. But I have to consider the fact that I need to discount a couple fractions of my outs since it is very likely there are 1-2 Aces gone. If we set the average at 1.4 (reasonable I think) and each Ace has a .25 chance of being the suit I need, that's another .35 outs gone, which is enough to push drawing in -EV territory. And that's without discounting further for the times I hit and CO hits better.

All of this is just me thinking out loud here and this is the first time I've even attempted to run any real numbers on this specific scenario, but after doing a little estimation in my head the other day after the hand I had a feeling it was going to end up being -EV. So I don't think I can profitably draw here, but what if the pot were 3 BB bigger and I could? Then breaking would be profitable. So should I? I still don't know.

Let's take the same hand-range of J-4. Now in this specific hand I do not think I should call a river bet, even if I choose to call and stand. With me calling and standing and the other player drawing live, I do not think the Button (who I described as good) can possible continue betting with a worse hand than mine. Ever. Or at least not with a large enough frequency to give it any mathematical significance. So, I'm getting 14:1 to "call down" (we're still speaking hypothetically in our pot of +3 BB, although it would still be profitable in the actual hand as well). Will my hand be better than his 1 in 15? From the hand-range we're giving him and from a Bayesian perspective, it will. Even if we discount for the times CO hits (if we're giving him 7 outs against us) we can still profitably "call down" here. So both "calling down" and breaking are both profitable. And it's so close and so complex to even come to that conclusion in the first place that I'm having trouble making a decision when placed in these spots in the middle of a hand. I guess it all probably comes down to doing the math work off the table to get a better feel for how things turn out in difference situations and pot sizes and against different hand ranges. That's basically how I approached LHE and just did a ton of weighted EV calcs off the tables and have gotten quite good at making what turn out to accurate estimations in hands or if someone asks me about a hand etc. So I guess that's what it's going to come down to here for me as well. Eh. Okay.

As for the actual hand, I think calling and standing was my best play here. As I stated paranthetically, I can make a profit by calling, standing, and folding to a river bet, and I already decided breaking was -EV. I definitely disagree with calling a river bet though and I think if that was my plan it might push calling and standing on 3rd to -EV, thus making folding a better option than that. So with the little math work I've done, I'd rank my options as:

1) Calling, standing, and folding to a river bet.
2) Folding.
3) Calling and breaking.
4) Calling, standing, and calling a river bet.

3 and 4 would depend on which is more -EV, calling and calling again or calling and breaking, though my gut feel tells me call/call'ing is the worse of the two choices.

Anyway, this is all very rough and was done as I was writing, so let me know if I made an errors anywhere. I probably did somewhere, so yeah. This is good being able to talk all this out though.

GoT