blonde poker forum

So this is a MTT, blinds at 300/600/75.

UTG min raises to 1200, folded round to me in the big blind, and flat with  Ad 7h.

Flop:  7s 7d 9s, UTG c bets to 1625, I flat with the intention to bet any non spade turn.

Turn  Ts, check check.

River  8c putting 4 to a straight with 3 spades. I check, UTG bets 3000 I sigh call.

One of those spots I'm sure I'm beat but can't find the fold.

How could I have played this better?

you are in a HU pot! such a tiny portion of UTG opening range will be spades, idk effective stacks but you gotta bet the turn.

What about check/raising flop?

Straight after checking the turn i regretted it, and a dodgy river card irritated me more

your hand is too good to c/r you don't want folds.
villain will very likely be continuing with 100% of his hands so let him barrell off!

the turn is not a great card to go slow playing/trapping your hand on. i'm suspect to why you had the intention to check all spade turns?  you need to bet here for value

I definitely fold pre, check call flop, check intending to call turn, and river will depend on villain a little, but probably check folding to a decent sized bet.

this

Stack size for both Hero and Villain are important before we mention folding pre. We can do lots of things on the flop and vs some opponents c/r is very good, as they just won't fold. Sometimes you have to let other people do the work by leveling themselves.

Yeah thinking back I think just building a pot early would have been good against his UTG range.

Anyway he had  Kd Jd so rivered a straight, pretty horrible run out for trips but I should have taken command of the pot.

We were both deep enough to see a flop with A7o, 50k deep ish each

C/r flop and barrel off, keep it simple.

Pre can go either way.

would defend pre, and checkraising flop a lot.

Calling then leading turn doesn't sound particularly good to me. If you c/call flop then check turn too.

Check Jam flop or just open Jam he might put you on a flush or actually have a draw himself
then it is happy days. Do both really quick which will really have him wondering.

yup

Think about what will happen if you raise the flop, he has QQ - he has less than 20% equity - but he's going to call. If he has Ks Qs then he has around 30%, but he's going to call. Even better he might have As Qs, and turn an ACE and call off at least one more bet drawing close to dead, might have ACES and raise you back to protect his hand vs spade draws and you'll be AI fading 1 out...

If he's airballing the flop KQ diamonds or w/e then this board is pretty wet, he's not going to give you the barrells here so I don't think there is any value to inducing light triple barrel bluffs from him.

If you think about the potential upside to a flop raise, it far outweighs the concerns that he might have two spades and make a flush on you. Lets think positive, punish those flush draws, don't be scared of them!!

A7o is probably not a fantastic hand to  defend a UTG open. Although here we are 80bbs
deep so I do not tend to fold much to mins esp with the Antes in play. We can try and generate some fear equity
by not passing up. On that flop I would be looking one way or another to get some chips in there. C/R does seem
like a line I like that's agreed. Bump the pot up on the flop.