I like the line of betting river, but it’s worth thinking about what bluffs you might reasonably have in your range at that point. You’d probably have to turn some JT or even weak Ax into a bluff there in order to be even somewhat balanced, so betting river is definitely an exploitative play.

Andrew’s logic is the nuts though, I think you were way too hasty in assuming strength on villain’s part. “Monsters under the bed” syndrome, as they call it. 🙂

Foucault said

OK, so maybe the optimal play involves turning some pairs into bluffs. Or making blocking bets. I don’t see why betting when you river a full house is “definitely an exploitative play”.  

I mean, you already identified that the reason for doing it was to give villain a chance to put another bet in with Ax. I was just following on from that reasoning, since that reasoning doesn’t really take into account whether or not villain actually should be putting in another bet with Ax – we’re making a play based on what villain will actually do, rather than what they should be doing. Based on the strength of villain’s 2-barrelling range on this board, I would imagine calling any Ax versus a river lead here would be over-calling in the extreme.

Assuming we’re not check-calling turn with Qx that often, we likely don’t have a significant range advantage on this river, which I would suspect to mean that a GTO approach would involve checking our entire range – it’s really difficult to have a leading range alongside a solid bluff-catching frequency here, and certainly a simplified strategy that doesn’t involve both options would be a lot easier to implement effectively. As a result, any strategy that involves leading out seems like it would be exploitative rather than optimal here, since it deviates from what a GTO sim would probably tell us. Not that we have to care about that, of course – I certainly like your idea of leading river – but it seems tough to assume leading is what PIO or SP would advocate here.