I think if you ran our ranges Sammy you'd find that this board is actually better for their ranges because when we open ep at 30/60 we don't have a lot of the weaker Tx combos which they do, and the bb has at least 4 combos of T7 (the suited ones). Most of our range is actually two overcards to this board so I think if you ran this potential c-bet through flopzilla or similar you'd find that we have far too many combos of off suit overcards to bet AJo profitably. It's not illegal to just cf this hand since we have plenty of flush draws, over pairs and AT hands which we can bet with. Betting AJ just means that we're betting far too much of our range, and like I said before, I don't mind if its against two weak bananas who aren't going to punish us for making an exploitative play, but these villains (especially franky playing a wide range in the bb) definitely won't just let us run them over with brute force.
This is true, but only because it turns out hero is opening stuff like AJo in EP. He
shouldn't be doing so IMO. And if we remove most of the dominated offsuit broadways from his range then he is actually pretty strong on this board.
Hero doesn't have (m)any Tx hands in his range, but he does have 24 combos of overpairs, 6 combos of sets (although maybe he doesn't open 77 in EP?), plus some nutted semi-bluff combos like AcQc, AcKc, AcJc etc.
This is a good example of how a preflop mistake can compound itself postflop. If we have AJo type hands in our preflop range, and choose to cbet them because we think our perceived range is stronger than our actual range (i.e. we are deliberately too bluff heavy on this flop), then we get
accidentally outplayed if either of the villains is overly optimistic/out of line with his floats. We cannot barrel very often when we cbet AJo with no Ace of clubs, so we allow either villain to get to showdown (or bluff us on later streets) with their weak flop peels. Basically if either villain is defending the flop 'sub-optimally' loosely then they are accidentally exploiting us and their sub-optimal play becomes optimal. I would suggest that the majority of players (even the really good ones) do not realise quite how tightly they should be defending vs EP cbets
in a threeway pot (since both opponents share responsibility for defending enough) and so they will peel far too often from a GTO perspective. Which means they are actually exploiting us by accident if we have too much crap like AJo in our cbetting range.
On the other hand, if villains are both playing very tight postflop, not defending anywhere near enough vs cbets, then we can get away with cbetting 'too much' air. Especially if our image is good, and our perceived range stronger than it in fact is. If this is the case for the majority of the table (i.e. they are too fit or fold postflop) then AJo
might become a profitable open preflop from EP, since we can exploitatively cbet too much air on many flops... although this would depend on most players also being fairly passive preflop.
But usually AJo should just be folded preflop.
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