This is from today’s $300, 20-minute level Saturday tournament on Poker Stars. The Villain is a pretty solid regular, but I don’t have much of a read on him beyond that. Blinds are at 15/30, I have about 3600, a nice improvement from our 2500 starting stacks. Villain, who has me covered, limps UTG+1, and the action folds to me. I raise to 180 with TT on my BB, and he calls.
The flop is KQ5r. I bet 250, and he raises to 1000. Obviously this is not a good flop for TT, and I’m not happy to be raised. But I’m really having tremendous difficulty putting him on a hand. I’d be surprised if there are many if any K’s in his limp-calling range, and of those, I’m not sure that he’d raise the flop. I guess with KQ, a flop raise is justifiable, but this just isn’t how a “solid regular” usually plays KQ.
55 is another reasonable holding for him, but while I’m almost always a fan of fast-playing sets, this really isn’t a great spot for it. He ought to put me on a fairly tight range raising an early position limper out of my blind. In general, he might expect to get paid off by AA and AK, but he’s going to get stacked by KK and QQ (not that that’s avoidable), but also scares me off worse hands that might bluff or pay off smaller value bets later. It’s just a rare situation where you don’t necessarily want to play a big pot with bottom set. Which isn’t to say that my opponent will necessarily think this way, but it’s also kind of uncommon to see such a large raise with bottom set on such a dry board.
(By the way, if he doesn’t put me on a very narrow, strong range pre-flop, which he doesn’t necessarily have to do, then he may not have the implied odds to call off 5% of our effective stacks with 55 pre-flop. This is why I’m just kind of working under the assumption that he puts me on a big hand pre-flop the times he shows up with bottom set.)
So the more I thought about it, the more I felt like JT (probably suited, not that that mattered much now, but in term sof hands he’d limp-call), semi-bluffing with an open-ended draw, was his most likely hand. So at first I was going to shove, then I decided to call and get it in if the draw missed on the turn, which it did. I check-raised all in, and got called pretty quickly by 55. Oh well.