[Shillx]

I'm sorry to hijack your thread Pedro, but the point was to show that it is sometimes better to just call in these spots even when the pot is large. This is a made up hand, but the only logical hand to give the BB is AA when he 3-bets the river.

The flop play is pretty interesting too. When you are up agiainst 2 PFR's, the chances are good then one of them holds A-big and the other a big pair. We bet the flop and hope that UTG+1 raises in order to force the BB's AK or AQ or whatever with 2 cold. Our A8 would really like to free up those 2 extra outs those times that UTG+1 has QQ or JJ or something. When the BB makes it 3-bets, it becomes apparent that he is on a big pair, and now we cap to see if UTG+1 will fold AK-AT if that he what he has. Obviously it won't always work, or you will run into two overpairs, but that is the idea. We have a good amount of equity with our straight draw, but we would really like an extra 2 outs in this huge pot.

Anyway, let's say that the BB is on AA-QQ when he cpas the flop. After we look at the A [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] on 4th street, he is now a 12:1 favorite to have a worse hand then we do. Only the case AA can beat us, so we have to put a raise in somewhere. If we are going to do it, it should be on the river.

If we raise now and have the worst hand, we have pay 3 BB just to see if we can make our straight. If he does have KK or QQ then we risk losing him where he will be more inclined to payoff a river raise. If we raise now, he knows that he is going to have to put in another 2 BB to showdown. If we call now and raise the river, it is just one more BB to see what we have. It would be tough to resist when the river doesn't appear to help anyone. The BB doesn't know that we have an ace by the way we played this hand (we might have 88 or 99 or 87s) so figure that he would bet all of his hands on this 4th street card that probably didn't help us.

Brad