3/6 Ultimate fight: Two Pair versus 4-straight

[StellarWind]

You bet the turn because you are a big favorite to have the best hand and he will call with many, many worse hands. It's that simple. If you are even thinking about how to respond to a raise before it happens you are wasting your energy and confusing yourself.

This issue comes up over and over again. Getting raised is sufficiently uncommon that betting is obviously +EV regardless of how you answer the occasional raise.

Of course you should call the raise. You are getting 6-1 pot odds on your full house draw plus another bet on the river and maybe more if you fill. You also have three outs to a chop. Overall you are getting about 7-1 implied odds to draw to 5.5 outs. It's close but probably you are a tad short.

Now we could discuss whether you should call the river unimproved but then I would have to send you back to reread the first paragraph. You don't need to decide whether you have odds to call the river until the problem arises.

What you need to know is that Villain does not expect you to necessarily have a straight and will often raise the turn with hands that you beat. A major leak of this type of player is not betting the river enough. If you call the turn you will win a ton of pots unimproved via free showdowns. You don't need to snag many 6 BB pots this way to generously compensate for losing a small fraction of a BB by calling the turn with slightly inadequate implied odds.

This is a very important effect and it ensures that calling the turn and folding the river unimproved is far superior to folding the turn. As I said, if it actually comes down to the river, you'll have to decide whether calling at 8-1 is an even better play.