NoirDesir87 said:

theginger45 said:

Flop betsizing is a little small, but it might induce a few more check/raises so I don't hate it. As played I think it's absolutely fine, I think it's close between shoving river and valuebetting like 4.5k, depends on villain really but I think 4.5k is probably better. I don't think villain's range is really strong enough for us to shove river for value – basically the only worse hand he ever gets there with that actually calls a river shove is maybe T8 or 68dd. We want value from AJ or A9 and a smaller river bet achieves just that.

Don't you think by shoving the river we are polarizing our range and looks a little weaker than when we bet 4.5K (that looks like value). By shoving we can rep a missed draw (QJ, KQ, 45, diamonds) and maybe induce more ligth calls?

 

A 4.5K bet is totally fine too because as you said villain probably doesn't fold AJ or A9 but is he folding that to a shove? I think hero image and villain's profile is petty important, against a fish I'm always shoving as he will never fold Ax river.

I think polarizing is an extremely over-rated concept. What you're doing when you polarize is not only banking on your opponent's willingness to risk a big portion of his stack with a marginal hand, but also banking on his understanding of the concept of polarization. I might consider shoving the river vs a decent reg, since his c/c range on the flop and turn would be somewhat stronger, and he would have more hands capable of calling a river shove, but vs a random or a fish I think shoving river is just giving him a chance to fold almost his entire range. I disagree that a random fish is just going to check/call all the way down with AJ on this board – not to say that there aren't players who will, but we need to have a pretty good read to be sure of what kind of player he is. Plenty of players are extremely passive most of the time, except when their tournament life is at risk.

Essentially, I think it would take a really bad player to put us on a pure bluff here (because it's a really bad spot to have a pure bluff), so I would prefer to represent a range that's going for thin value as opposed to a polarized range. At least this way, if he does have AJ or A9, it's conceivable he might think we're going for 3 streets with a worse Ax hand. I guess the crux of the hand is whether we think he calls a shove with AJ/A9 or not, and I just don't think many people do. People don't c/c down OOP as light as you might think.