Here is the hand:
Imagine you’re in Malta playing the 2015 PokerListings Battle of Malta. Lucky you!
You are close to the bubble.
The blinds are 1,000/2,000/200.
Preflop
Everyone folds to the player in middle position. He’s an aggressive Swedish pro, with 136,250 chips, and he raises to 5,000. Two hands earlier, the villain lost 20% of his stack on a bluff on the river.
You’re on the button with K♥K♦ and a stack of 130,500.
You decide to 3-bet 12,000 chips.
The small blind and the big blind both fold.
Villain calls.
The pot is now 28,800 chips.
Flop
The dealer reveals Q♠K♠7♠.
Villain bets 12,000.
The action is back on you. You now have a 118,500 stack.
What do you do?
So we've 3bet and an aggressive villian has just decided to flat call out of position, which means we can generally cap his range as he's very very likely to be 4betting with hands like AA, KK, QQ, AK and probably JJ.
The villian has now decided to act 'out of flow' and lead into us for a little under half pot. The first and most important thing to do now is to try and assign him a range.
Now this flop hits our range better than it does his so he is going to expect us to cbet quite a high percentage of the time, for this reason, I think he'd check/raise his more vulnerable value hands like K7, Q7, KQ and maybe 77. He should almost never have QQ after flatting preflop and of course he can't have KK. He's also likely to act in flow and just check/call is very very strong hands, namely flopped nut flushes like A5 of spades.
So if we assume he check/raises or check/calls almost all of his made value hands, (and there are very few combos of his value made hands due to us have 2 of the kings), and it's unlikely he has any total airballs, it's fair to assume that his range is very heavily weighted towards draws.
We are in very good shape against all draws, apart from a massive combo draw like JT with a spade so we want to get more value here and attempt to get all the money in on the flop if possible, while not allowing him to set his own price to draw. So we will definitely be raising the flop.
Some other important factors to consider are that
1) it's the bubble
2) he has us covered
3) he is very aggressive
All of these factors mean that he is even more likely to take very aggresive lines in order to try and make us fold because no-one wants to be the bubble boy and he can put us under the threat of bubbling.
He has bet 12,000 into 28,800 and we have 118,500 behind. We don't want to give him a great price to outdraw us, but at the same time we want to give the illusion that if he jams over the top of our raise then he could make us fold.
I would raise to around 35,000 total, this means that if he does decide to flat we have set the pot size up on the turn to be around 100,000 and with only 83,500 behind it leaves us a perfect stack to shove on most turn cards. If he does call, he will be calling another 23,000 to win 75,800 which is not a good enough price with any flush draw or any straight draw like JT so he is making a mistake (flush draws have an 18% chance of hitting the turn, and straight draws only a 16% chance)
It also has the added bonus of giving the aggressive villian enough room to be able to jam some of his draws and think he has some fold equity, which would be a big mistake for him.
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