People seem to be saying the only hand strong enough to bet turn with is a flush.
Personally, I'm checking turn purely due to awkward stack sizes that, if we bet, we can get owned by so so much. Ironically something I learned to refine a great deal from your good self when it's the other side of the coin. Ie putting people in very very difficult situations, not due to hand strength, but purely due to stack depths.
We're in a spot where we have 2 pair in a limped blind vs blind pot which would normally be considered huge, but due to the board runout and spr has turned into a wtAf spot.
This is a common line of thought that sounds logical/good at first glance, but it is actually meaningless when you dig deeper into it. I realise that sounds pretty extreme. So, I am going to try to explain clearly why this is the wrong way of thinking about things.
First, note that whenever we make a bet without a nutted hand our opponent
always has the option to raise, and by doing so
turn our medium equity hand into a bluff catcher. This is not just something that applies in this hand, it applies in all spots where we choose to value bet a fairly strong hand that is not nutted.
If an opponent is polarising and balancing his raising range perfectly then it is a very bad thing when our mid-strength hand is turned into a bluff catcher. We have theoretically 'lost the pot' no matter what we do. Again, this is something that applies in
any spot where we have a hand turned into a bluff catcher.
For example, we cbet AK on AJ8r after opening in EP and get check-raised by a competent opponent who is properly polarised (i.e. he is not c/r AQ) and well-balanced (i.e. he has the correct ratio of bluffs to nutted hands). Our hand has now become a bluff-catcher. And we have thus theoretically 'lost the pot' if opponent is competent enough to barrel the turn and river with the perfect ratio of nuts/air on each street.
This is no big deal, it is just something that happens some of the time. It is not a reason to refrain from betting for value and/or equity-protection. An opponent cannot recklessly check-raise with too much of his air, since he will be hugely unbalanced. Which means that we are not going to face a check-raise a huge amount of the time when we bet a mid-strength hand for value and protection.
Now you might say, "well what if villain is really aggressive and is going to check-raise this turn and jam the river with his bluffs really, really often? Isn't he just exploiting us if he ends up making us fold A7 by the river?" The answer is: No, he is not. The key is to think about your hand as part of your overall range, rather than as just an individual hand. If he is check-raising too aggressively then we will end up making money through having our nutted hands gaining more value than they 'should'. If he is not check-raising aggressively enough then he lets us win the pot too often with our mid-strength value hands and bluffs.
If we
know how an opponent is unbalanced then we take exploitative lines. But if we do not know, then we should instead play
our range theoretically optimally. If we do this then we automatically make money with our range if our opponent is unbalanced in any way - even if we don't know in what way he is leaning. If we defend vs turn check-raises and river barrels with an optimal frequency then we will make a profit unless our opponent is very well-balanced (in which case we break even).
So when villain check-raises this turn we are not really in a "very very difficult situation" as you suggest. In fact it is a pretty easy situation. We simply defend the correct percentage of our range to make him indifferent to bluffing. If we do this then we cannot be exploited. And if villain is in any way 'out of line' with his check-raising range construction (i.e. he bluffs to much or too little) then, although we are not 'exploiting' him as such, we automatically profit from his imbalance without even knowing how we are doing so.
For example, if villain is too bluff heavy then we lose out the times we fold a value hand near the bottom of our range, but we gain
more than that back the times when we get 'too much' value for our strong hands. And the mirror image of this: if opponent has too few bluffs then we lose out the times we call him down with the 'correct' amount of bluff catchers, but we gain
more than this back through the times when he lets us win the pot with our weaker hands that would have folded to a bluff. As I said in my previous post... it is reciprocal and balances out.
If it turns out that (unknown to us) villain is massively out-of-line in this spot and is going to check-raise bluff the turn and jam the river with far too many bluffs, then it is just unfortunate that we happen to hold a hand (A7) that is going to call the turn and fold the river unimproved. But remember, it balances out. So, if we instead had a flush or straight then we would be 'lucky' to have an opponent who is bluffing far too much.
On the other hand, if our opponent turns out to have far too few bluffs in his range in this spot then we
gain when we hold A7 since we get to win the pot with it more often than we should (and often get additional value from it when villain calls our bet). But reciprocally, we lose out the times we actually hold a nutted hand and fail to get as much value as we 'should' if opponent was bluffing with the optimal frequency.
Of course, the
ideal villain tendency for us with our SPECIFIC hand would be someone who check-raises the turn with far too many bluffs, but then does not bluff often enough on the river. Maybe this is how villain plays, or maybe instead he plays incorrectly in another way that benefits a different part of our range. We don't know at all. So we should just defend
our range with the correct frequency to make him indifferent to bluffing. And we do do this on both the turn
and the river. Unless villain is perfectly balanced we will end up making money with our range in some way or other.. we just won't know how!
I hope this has explained why I consider the line of thinking about 'being put in difficult spots' to be a completely incorrect one. I have certainly tried my best to put it into words!
Additional: BTW, despite writing two long posts ITT, the only post in which I actually thought about the specific hand is the first response in this thread. I wrote it in two minutes on my phone after very little thought. I roughly guessed that A7 would be pretty low down in our range on a blank river. But this was only a rough off-the-top-of-my-head guess at the time, and I haven't gone back and thought about our exact river range since then. Perhaps if I flopzilla'd this hand then it would turn out that A7 is fairly high up in our range on a blank river and thus we should call a river jam. I doubt it, but that is only an instinctive guess. The main thing I have been writing about ITT has been theory stuff rather than thinking about the actual hand.
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