Set of Kings (FTP 3/6)

[jakbse]

I don't think you ever can lay down a top set improving to FH, no matter what actually.

[W. Deranged]

The basic point of this hand is hand-reading.

Knowing that villain is 20/8/1.7 or whatever is VERY powerful. This means that he plays about the right number of hands, raises a reasonable amount, and plays about neutrally post-flop. Those are the type of numbers you see from basically break-even types who know a fair amount about the game but don't play particularly well post-flop in the more challenging situations. These are opponents you are not going to make all that much money off because they don't give that much away, but aren't experts and shouldn't be taking anything from you either.


Let's consider this hand step by step as a hand-reading exercise:

Pre-flop: Villain cold-calls an open-raise from his immediate right in MP1.

A player like this probably plays a few too many hands and isn't good about three-betting hands he probably should. I think his range is reasonably wide here, but not absurd: basically, I think it is going to contain A LOT of pocket pairs (these are very likely cold-calling hands from a player like this), suited broadways type hands (KJs, QJs, etc...), and a couple of decent offsuit big-card hands (AJo, AQo, KQo).

A player with those numbers is not going to be playing hands like 76s here (his VPIP would be MUCH higher if he regularly played small suited connectors for raises), or hands like A3s. He MAY be any any ace type who is more likely to play A3s than QJs, but it's more likely he's not.

So let's say villains range is something like {22+, JTs-KQs, QTs-AQs, AJs, AJo-AQo, KQo} plus something like 30%{AA, AKo, A2s+, 45s+} (meaning we include those hands but discount them to only 30% of a full hand).


Flop: You bet out after three-betting from the blind pre-flop, and villain raises. This is a strong show of strength. We can eliminate all the non-pair hands, and should discount a lot of the medium pair type hands very heavily (I don't see hands like 88 here, for example). After you three-bet and villain caps, I think we can cut the range down to just the sets, big draws, and heavily discounted K hands. Villain is not capping here with A2s or A3s.

So villain's range on the flop is something like {22, 33, AK, KQ, AA, Axs, 45, xx}. Everything but those first two need to be heavily discounted based on both flop and turn action. We throw in xx as there's a small chance he's got something bizarre and is having a psycho moment.

Turn: Villain likes the 3 and continues to put heavy pressure on this hand. By this point I think we can effectively remove AK, KQ, and the draws, because those hands just aren't raising and capping this turn once the board pairs and considering you have not come close to stopping showing strength. AA also needs to be heavily discounted because AA slows down somewhat by this point as well. So villain's range is, voila, {22, 33, AA/xx}.

As I mentioned before the distribution is probably something like {70, 23, 7} or so.



That's enough information for me to check-call this river.

Sorry for the typo, looks like deranged fixed it correctly. Won't let it happen again.