Interesting stuff, thanks for all the responses. The option to check-back was a red herring, I think that would be a pretty big mistake. Might be fine to check vs. some players/populations but regularly checking in this kind of spot has to be a massive leak. River value bets are a huge source of potential profit.

My big concern was whether a shove could get called wide enough to be better than a bet/fold.

3for3 said
Yes, I guess the pot is too big to bet fold.  Betting small and folding to a raise might be a good exploit against the most straight forward players, but I don’t think I’d try that in a $215 online against an unknown.  

I think it’s fine to bet/fold in these games with an SPR<1. There are some players that I avoid doing it against. Not that I know they regularly check-raise river as a bluff, but they are good and/or crazy enough that I try to limit giving them extra opportunities to put me in a tough spot. That may change as I continue to improve.

Most players are going to be extremely weighted to value when check-raising the river in any hand, even more so when the SPR is so low. It’s rare that someone is planning to fold to a shove but then decides to bluff-raise because we bet small. Not that it doesn’t happen, but hard to imagine it’s happening often enough for us to be particularly afraid of it.

I’ve found a couple of low SPR spots to turn folds into bluffs recently due to villains’ bet sizing, but I’ve probably done it <10 times this year, and it’s not like they all worked. One of my recent attempts ended with me shoving into quads.

Foucault said
Even when slightly +cEV, big, thin value bets are generally undesirable in tournaments because, much like big bluffs or hero calls, they are low-edge and high variance.

However, this does not strike as a small edge. My Pio sim has Hero pure shoving all his KJ, even without a heart. It assigns an EV of about 3.5bb to a shove with Ks Js.

It really isn’t that easy for Villain to show up with flushes (or any other hand better than yours) here. He had a lot of incentive to raise strong flush draws before now and to fold weak ones (Pio folds bare flush draws like 6h 3h on the turn). Oh and to donk them on the river. He should have some flushes in his range, but not nearly enough to make up the majority of his calling range. Remember, he needs to call 1/2 the time to make you indifferent to bluffing for a PSB. Pio also pure shoves K9 and K8.  

Thanks for the feedback Andrew. I guess this spot isn’t nearly as close as I was thinking.

Not that I currently have the skill/balls to properly exploit it, but it strikes me that population is significantly overfolding to shoves on this kind of run-out, even at these stakes. Probably under-bluffing in this spot too, although I am much less certain about that. If we assume they defend a PSB 2/5 of the time, how much should that affect our shoving range? Would that be enough to turn some shoves into smaller bets?

I don’t imagine that it should change our decision with top two, but would we want to consider smaller sizing with something like K8/J9?

Maniackid11 said
If I had to guess one of two things happened: he checked and villain showed worse or he shoved and villain had some sort of weird flush draw. Does that sound right Gregors?  

I shoved and villain tanked through his entire time bank before calling with KsJs for a very anti-climatic chop. I probably wouldn’t have doubted the shove if he hadn’t tanked for so long, but it really made me question what worse hands we get called by. Probably just this particular villain’s tendencies (or reads they had on me) rather than anything that should be extrapolated to other situations.

Yeah, safe to say that I need more experience/sample size to do the Make a Read part of the 4-step Exploitative Process for the $109 – $215 population before I can Identify the Exploits.

I was seeing tons of hands where Reg A bets flop/turn then shoves <=pot on a river that completes an obvious draw, and Reg B tanks river and folds (or occasionally snap calls with an extremely strong hand). However, just today, I must have seen 7 or 8 hands where Reg B called it off pretty light in exactly the same kind of spots.

So easy to think I see patterns and forget that ~35k hands at these stakes is maybe 5% of the hands it would take to make any strong ‘player pool’ reads.

Probably should just bite the bullet and finally pick up PIO so that I can get better at step 1 🙂