Fascinating hand

I posted this one at 2+2 and feel the need to post it here. Played a crazy hand at a deep-stacked NL200 table.

Villain is a good regular player, a pro, who I have at about 14/11 and who is capable of impressive aggression at times, although his overall AF isn't that ridiculous.

Effective stacks are $400.

I raise from MP2 with Ad Kd, making it $7 to go, and villain cold-calls me from the button. Everyone else folds.

Flop comes Qc 9c 5s.

That's a good enough board for a cbet, so I fire out $13 into the $17 pot, pretty standard. Villain raises me to $46.

Ordinarily that would be the end of the hand, except that I had a read that this villain was feeling exceptionally frisky today, based on some of his play. He's going to be capable of raising any draws, of course, but also I felt, pretty much any pocket pair and quite a few weak queens to "figure out where he's at".

So I reraise him up to $105. Probably pretty spewy in hindsight but with the 200bb stacks to play with, I felt like I had a lot of wiggle room as far as how hard I could push. The bluff felt justified because any drawing hand would have to feel the pressure of the implied turn bet to go along with it.

Villain calls. Well, crap, that didn't work.

Turn is the 2s, putting the 2nd flush draw out there. I check. Villain checks back.

Well isn't that interesting. I began to wrack my brain for the range of hands that villain would be checking behind on the turn, and it was very narrow - pretty much limited to draws and MAYBE the occasional weak Queen, on a hand like QKs, that just flat out didn't believe me on the flop and was now praying for a cheap showdown.

The turn paired the 9 on the board, the 9s. It felt pretty safe, even though it put the backdoor flush out there it felt like he would have bet Ts Js, which is the only spade flush hand I could have seen him having.

Now I've got a bit of a predicament. My turn check belied my weakness, but so did his; there's NO WAY he's checking back that turn with a strong made hand like a set. Too many draws - he knows that TJs is in my own opening range from MP2 and knows that I'm not the sort of FPS player that would go for a suicidal turn C/R. At the same time, I know the same of him. Each of us knows that each other's range is pretty weak, and yet, there's $227 in the pot up for grabs.

I considered a $105 or so bet, working it as a blocking bluff, which should generally be enough to push him off TJs. Yes I know I'm ahead of TJs, but the purpose is still to push him off of it because I'm in a bit of a pickle: I can't call a shove. I'm not that good; I'd adjust my read and second-guess the information from his turn-check if he came over the top of me. At the same time this player is perfectly capable of coming over the top of a weakish river bet with air, given the weakness I've shown myself. Maybe a master could bet/call, but if I bet, I'm folding to a raise.

So instead I chose to shove, an overbet of $288 into the $227 pot. I like this play best, I'm convinced, because:

- It's no worse against drawing hands that villain has decided not to put another cent into the pot with - it wins me what is in the pot without having to show down my flop bluff

- It has the benefit of pushing him off of almost any single pair hand; this particular player doesn't really have the balls to call off 140bb with a hand like TP2K or a pair below TP. His read on me isn't going to be THAT strong despite the flop bet

- It absolutely prevents him from bluffing me off the hand himself.

It felt like a 90% valuebet 10% bluff, maybe getting him off a weakish queen but certainly getting him off of 100% of what he could realistically be holding.

In this case it worked. Villain folded, and later confirmed on 2+2 that the best hand did in fact win. Which means he either had TJ and/or clubs.

Interesting hand din a very nice day yesterday: ~$1150+. My monthly graph looks a lot better now, not that it was bad before.