I like that you’re trying to make thin value bets and also that you aren’t simply deciding this is a mistake based on the results. Those are both things that will serve you well over the course of your poker career.

I do think it’s very likely that you have the best hand on the river, but I don’t think it’s a guarantee, as every once in a while you’ll run into KJ or a slowplayed 6 or some other strange hand like AK.

What I’m getting at is that probably having the best does not, by itself, mean you should value bet. You have to be ahead of the range of hands that will call a river bet. The question is, will your opponent call with worse hands often enough to make up for the times that you run into better?

There are two ways of trying to answer that:

1. The exploitive approach. Did you have some reason to think this player was very loose (this could just be the fact that it’s a $1 tournament, I can’t speak to that!) or would call very light in this spot? If so, I like your bet.

2. The balanced approach. If you aren’t sure how often your opponent will call with a Jack or worse, the question to ask is how easily you could be bluffing in this spot. After all, the hope of beating a bluff is his incentive for calling with those hands. The more that you would bluff in a given spot, the more thinly you can value bet, and/or the larger you can make that bet. When it would be difficult for you to show up with a bluff, it’s hard to get away with thin value bets, especially big ones.

In the latter case, I don’t like your riverbet.

I think your flop bet is OK with two overcards to the board, but I wouldn’t suggest it with a hand like 87s. That means that on the flop you either have a good Jack or AK/AQ/KQ. When the King comes in, the only hands you could possibly bluff with are AQ combos. There are actually a fair number of those, but I suspect that you would not always play AQ this way.

I think if you’re going to bet at all, it should be a smaller bet, somewhere between 30 – 50% of the pot. By offering your opponent better odds, you compensate him for the fact that he will rarely catch you in a bluff.

As it is, I think folding a random Jack to your river bet is a pretty easy decision for Villain, and so I’d only make this bet if I suspected my opponent would make a bad call (which again, in a $1 MTT, might well be a reasonable expectation).