Why, specifically, do you think that ‘setting the trap’ is the best way to go about this hand? What response do you expect from your opponent that makes it more profitable to play the hand this way compared to a ‘non-trappy’ way? I ask this with the intent of challenging your assumptions about the value of ‘trapping’, in this spot and others.

If you’re going to fold this river after playing the hand this way, you need to specifically identify that villain only does this with the nut flush. There are only 7 combinations left of nut flush hands – A3/4/7/8/9/J/Q of clubs. Are you certain that villain plays all these combinations this way preflop? Maybe not, since they might 3-bet with AJ/AQ. They may 3-bet some of the others as well.

If you are certain that they play all these combos the same way preflop, do they always play them the same way on the flop and turn? Definitely plausible that they check their entire range into the flop, but betting 1bb on the turn isn’t something we can be 100% sure they would do with all those hands 100% of the time. 

Even if they do bet 1bb 100% of the time on the turn with all these hands, do they always bet 3bb on the river? Maybe they would bet bigger, it’s a fairly small sizing.

Essentially, what I’m getting at is that it’s really difficult for the exact set of circumstances to occur that requires us to fold this river. It’s so difficult for our opponent to have one of the 4-5 remaining combos of the nut flush that it’s really hard for us to have confidence in their range.

Do they have A9/A6/A5/A2 some frequency? Maybe. Do they occasionally bluff? Unlikely, but plausible. Do they sometimes have 99/66/22/55? Maybe. All these circumstances add up to a good chance that they have something other than the nut flush on the river here.

Your hand is also very under-repped. The only reason to slowplay a hand like this on the turn is to get more value on the river – you got what you wanted when you ‘trapped’ your opponent, so you can’t realistically fold here.

Incidentally, I think not betting flop and not raising turn are both mistakes, but I wanted to point that out at the end after I addressed the river.

Nas47 said

Thanks for the response Matt. I bet my flush draws usually. Every once in a while I check because it would give me the opportunity to get paid more since players tend to discount flushes from my range. I did not fold on the river. The way villain played screams strength. He was super passive on turn and river with sizes that were not looking for folds and it looked like he was looking for thin value. When he jams the river versus my big raise which shows a lot of strength I am concerned. I called and he showed me the A7 of clubs for the nuts. I also don’t see why a thinking villain would would shove a set here as played.   

Have you run any calculations to prove that you stand to get paid off more when you hit a flush, in order to justify the EV given up by not being able to exercise any fold equity on the flop?

Be careful not to allow confirmation bias to influence your thinking. Because you’re occasionally getting into situations where you check a flush draw and someone stacks off to you on the turn, you’re convincing yourself that checking flush draws occasionally is optimal, because positive results came when you did it. If you ran an analysis to compare the value of getting stacks in on the turn some % of the time versus the value of extra fold equity on the flop/building a turn pot, you’d see that the frequency you get paid after checking doesn’t really have that much of an influence on the hand, since it only happens a tiny frequency.

It’s much more important for you to maximize the EV of your c-betting range here than it is to occasionally turn up with an unexpected hand on the turn. It’s very difficult to run these calculations without a GTO solver, but my point here was that we shouldn’t allow results of previous hands to convince us that a certain play is favorable until we’ve at least done some kind of ballpark math to figure it out.

Nas47 said

Solid argument. My decisions should not be results oriented. I recently got PIO and I will check this spot and my general cbetting tendencies.  

When using any GTO solver for flop calculations, remember that it’s most likely going to tell you to adopt a somewhat mixed strategy on the flop most of the time, i.e. doing a certain thing 37% of the time with one specific combo and doing something else the rest of the time, or similar.

When you get these results, recognize that human beings cannot accurately implement mixed strategies at the table. They just can’t. Even top-level guys who think they’re doing it are not really doing much more than following their gut and hoping their frequencies line up.

As a result, it’s in your best interests to construct a modified strategy that, at the very least, has you doing a specific thing with each specific combo in your range 100% of the time, because at least then you can make a concrete decision in that specific hand, instead of justifying whatever you ended up actually doing by claiming it’s part of a mixed strategy (which is what a lot of players do).

One step further than this is condensing your strategy so that you simply c-bet 100% of your range, and remove the checking option entirely – against opponents who over-fold, this is often the best line regardless of our desire to simplify, and if you were opening from an earlier position than the CO, your preflop range would be tight enough that it would be easily justifiable on any flop versus a wide BB defending range.

This is more difficult to pull off when you’re in the CO and your range is wide, but it may still be better to bet 30% of pot with 100% frequency here than to try to figure out which hands you’re going to check back if you’re only going to bet a 70% frequency.

My latest video series, Simplified C-betting, covers a lot of these concepts in depth, and it begins airing on March 14th. Enjoy. 

Nas47 said

Great advice! I will keep this in mind.  

Glad to hear it. Hope you enjoy the video series!