Hard to range villain, at this stack depth I think it’s a mistake to flat any hand. Although slowplaying big pairs is tempting, by doing so villain will be incredibly unbalanced, or flatting too many hands that would prefer to shove or fold.

I think its a close decision between c-betting or checking to induce aggression from a wider range, but I prefer a small c-bet. I’ll be back after my Sunday grind to explain. Apparently writing about poker before ingesting lots of coffee is a recipe for convoluted gibberish.

I agree with Collin that against some players we need to be really cautious here. I definitely don’t want to recommend it as a default approach, but I have been in similar situations against unimaginative regs where I think the only play was to check/fold flop. Not that I often have the insight to do so at the table, but sometimes during postgame review I realize that not doing so was a clear mistake. It feels weird folding on this kind of flop when we would have snap-called a shove preflop, but we should be really happy that villain failed to maximize the value of a big pair by turning their hand face up.

If we can assign villain a range of KK+ with >=90% confidence, I think we can afford the small chance that we are being outplayed by a creative line. You can calculate this exactly by doing confidence interval math, but I’m rusty enough on statistics (and lazy enough) that I’m happy going with the ‘logic-based’ analysis here. That being said, as a general rule in <=$22 MTTs, I think enough TAG regs are making preflop errors that I’m usually happy going with nines here.

To better define ranges, I think we should ask ourselves “what mistakes do I expect recreational/newer players to make?”

1. Playing unpaired big card hands and small to medium pocket pairs passively preflop

2. Overvaluing protection of weak made hands postflop

3. Being overly afraid of folding the best hand / Assigning our range a disproportionate amount of unpaired high card hands

That’s off the top of my head and I’d love to hear other opinions on the most common mistakes. I think a huge part of being a winning MTT player is winning the maximum from the weaker players. My studying tends to focus on playing well against the #BadRegs and better players, so I feel I have a lot of room to improve in this area.

I think the flatting range you assigned is a bit too wide, but in the right ballpark. Mainly I feel villain won’t flat many non-Broadway suited connectors. I would prefer to work with something like:

AA-QQ(1/2 combos),JJ-TT(1/3 combos),99-22,AK/AQs(1/2),AJs-A7s,KJs+,QJs,JTs,T9s,AK/AQo(1/2),AJ-A9o,KQo

Ignoring the small chance of TT(0.33 combos), villain has 25 combos that have us crushed and 108 combos that we are well ahead of. I think we can expect villain to go with all pocket pairs, and call once with most A highs.

When considering a cbet, I think we should ask ourselves 2 questions:

1. Which hands does villain fold to a cbet which may bet and/or call future bets without improving?

2. How much does giving a free card hurt us against villain’s range?

I don’t have enough time to analyze those questions right now, but I hope this was helpful.