Poker Hawrilenko's hand

Matt Hawrilenko mentioned a river decision from a past World Series of Poker 6-handed NL tournament.

The blinds were 12k-24k, with a 3k ante. Assume that this is far from the final table, and that the value of chips is close to linear, so there is no particular bonus to surviving. Assume there were no short stacks at the table. The villain is known to be a good player but you have no particular reads.

Preflop (6 players): Fold, Hero (HJ, 1.8m) raises to 65k, fold, fold, fold, Villain (BB, 2.7m) calls.

Flop (2 players, 160k):

Check, Hero bets 75k, Villain calls.

Turn (2 players, 310k):

Check, Hero bets 205k, Villain calls.

River (2 players, 720k):

Villain bets 1,080k, Hero ???

The hero has about 300k chips more than the call. Let's ignore the possibility of raising for the moment. What range of hands should the hero call versus fold? What hands should the villain play this way against you?

 

I'll take a stab (at the risk of appearing dumb )...

What range of hands should the hero call versus fold?

K5+ call.

Too deep to make huge hero calls on trips or weak underboats, but the Hero's line left open too attractive a bluff spot to call just on the nuts.

(I would have prefered a C/R line OTT with solid 1 pair hands to help clarify river decisions this deep.)

What hands should the villain play this way against you?

KJ+ or total air.

This line with >K5 is pretty value owning, as it is VERY rarely getting called by worse and is always getting called by better. Even K8 is pretty much a value bet vs just K5, Zeebo's theorem notwithstanding (http://www.thepokerbank.com/strategy/theorems/zeebo/). With stacks half the size my thinking is totally different.

(I hope Im close! )

 

Donk overbetting the river is generally a value bet with a very strong hand in my experience, but if the villain is a good player and knows we are too, then I expect them to be balanced here and also have some bluffs.

The value hands that make sense to me are 88, KJ, KQ, K8, K5s, although K5s might make a better light 3b pre rather than flat. AK/KK/JJ I would expect to 3b us pre so I will largely discount those from his value range.

If he bets KQ/KJ/K8/K5s/88 for value that's 24 combos, to be balanced he's probably bluffing about 40% bluffs so 16 bluff combos. QT is 16 combos, so if he bluffs all those that seems about right to be unexploitable.

Hero's range is trickier, as he has probably gotten to the river reasonably wide, but he should call with the top 37.5% of it. The actual make up of hands isn't terribly relevant, as they all beat QT and (almost) all lose to the value hands. Depending on how wide hero opened he may be calling as wide as A8 for example, if that's in the top 37.5% of his range that got to the river in this manner. I'm taking the lazy route here rather than drilling down the combos I think we should be barreling after a wide HJ open range, but you get the point.

Ofc in practice the strongest hero hands like AK/KK/JJ/KJ/88/QQ/AJ etc. block some of the villains value combos, reducing villains range somewhat. But in general, this is how I see it.

 

See? That just proves Imma super nit!