Slowplayed set of kings, high buy-in MTT

DailyHandQuiz

Game type: 100R, PokerStars
Stage of tourney: Nearing bubble
Your image: TAG
Opponent’s image: Aggressive
Your hand: K♦K♠

The setup: You’re near the bubble in the 100R tournament on PokerStars. You have a solid stack, but the blinds will start getting fearsome sooner than later. This hand you get kings on the CO. The hijack raises it preflop and you decide to flat, hoping to induce a squeeze from the blinds. No luck – the BB just calls – but you do flop top set:

J♣5♦K♥

The BB checks, the raiser checks, and you decide to slowplay and check behind. The turn puts a flush draw out: 7♣.

Now the BB leads out for about half pot, and the hijack calls fairly quickly. The BB is a very aggressive player; the hijack seems a little loose but not terribly so.

What’s your play?

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5 COMMENTS (Jump to comment form)

Waste_Of_Paint

We have to raise here. There’s a chance both players are on a draw, and we can’t let them see another card without charging them. We slow played kings to induce a bit of action – we’ve got that, now it’s time to build the pot rather than get greedy.

I say make it 15k. That’s about the right amount to induce a mistake from a villain with either a flush draw or open ended straight draw as they’ll be getting 3.5 to 1 to call (especially from the hijack who is ‘a little loose but not terribly so – he could very well call off 10k of his 57k for a price that’s slightly wrong).

Also, if either of them are on a flush draw they don’t realise they’re drawing to seven outs rather than nine, so they might call thinking they’re getting implied odds when they’re not. We’ve disguised our hand and now we need to manipulate that.

There’s no guarantee we’ll get any more action if we call and the river bricks, so build that pot now. With our image we might just take it down now, which is fine, but I think more often than not we’ll get a caller and chip up healthily.

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b1aze

Doesnt TAG mean AGGRESSIVE?? Flat the pre-flop and check top set on the flop? Granted the board texture fit OK. If we raise to 15k, we are pretty much commiting ourselves, and do we really want to see the river? Shove now, make it look like a pot steal attempt.

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_CityBorn_

im sorta split between flat call and raise to something like 13k. the thing is, were pretty much only fading a back door flush draw, so a call seems pretty safe. waste_of_paint makes a good point that we dont have a guarantee they lead if the draw misses though, so i dont know. presonally i think one of the two in front would, but after 3 people calling to the river, a busted draw might be wary of a trap.

im probably juicing it a bit to 13 or so. if they have anything, and want to play, its a tempting enough price that we should get some action from at least one player. the pot will be big enough at that point that we might even get a mistake gift on the river and get the rest of the chips in. if we take it down now, not too shabby, 19k puts us near the top of the table so we can open our game up a bit.

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Pirate21

I have a hard time putting either of them on a hand I’m scared of. Their best hands are some sort of combo draw, but that’s a pretty small portion of the range. At most there’s 13 cards in the deck to be concerned about, and there’s a good chance Vs are holding several of those.
Being near the bubble it’s probably better to raise, but I don’t hate calling here. I think one of the two aggressive Vs are likely to take a stab at the pot with a busted draw and they’re gonna have to put at least 10K in to make it believable.

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Morat

Raise. We slowplayed, we got two extra bets, time to stop kidding. Both Vs can have various hands: BB most likely has air IMO, but a draw, a middling hand (eg. Jx) or even a strong hand (Kx or better) is possible. HJ most probably has a PP he didn’t want to turn into bluff, but a draw or the slowplayed 2nd nuts is also possible.
Depending on what they have:
- Air: we won’t gain an extra bet whatever we do.
- Draw: if we call we cannot make any more money on them if they miss, but we’ll loose a lot of (if not all of) our chips if they hit. We definetly want to price them out.
- Middling hands: we cannot make much more money out of them if we call. Eg. if HJ called w/ TT figuring BB might just wants to buy the pot, he’ll have to reconsider if he sees us calling too. They won’t lead river and they only call a small bet at best. Calling is slightly better, since raising looses them immediately.
- Strong hand / 2nd nuts: all the money goes in, whatever we do.

So calling is slightly better if they have a mediocre hand, raising is much better if one them has a draw. That makes me raise. I’d raise to 18k. That prices out draws (giving little worse than 3:1 to Vs) denying both direct and indirect odds. However they can have a reason to incorrectly call: BB and HJ both have bigger stacks, and they are fighting each other as well, so they might opt to call to stack each other, while we almost certainly loose them if we shove. Bad news: if they call and a scare card hits we have to call anyway.

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