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.
You raise his bet to 28,000 chips.
Villain decides to call.
Turn
The turn card is 3♠
Villain checks.
The pot is 84,800. You have a 90,500 stack.
What do you do?
This is certainly not the best turn card in the deck but it's not a total nightmare situation yet...
This is one of those spots that shows how great it is to have position in a hand because now we can keep the pot under control.
Again, like on all streets, we now have to re-assess the villian's range, how the turn card has connected with that range and so figure out what the best course of action is.
There is absolutely no good reason to bet here at all. We removed most made value hands from his range after his donklead on the flop, but now we've raised and he's just flatted on such a wet flop then I think we definitely now have to discount all those hands like KQ/Q7/K7/77 because they are strong yet vulnerable on the flop and on such a wet flop are hands which he would almost definitely shove knowing he can get action from worse or (happily) fold out high equity hands.
The fact he just flatted our flop raise cements the idea further that his flop range was pretty much exclusively draws.
Betting the turn would be a disaster, we would be turning our hand into a bluff (a very bad one) because we are never going to get called by worse now and there are literally zero hands better than ours that we can make fold. I don't give him credit for having many bare gutshots on the flop, I think he'd only lead with gutshots that had 1 spade so they are now be ahead and aren't folding. Any 1 spade hand that called flop is of course ahead and isn't folding, so pretty much the only hand we fold out is JT (without a spade) and that has very small equity against us anyway.
Very easy check-back on the turn. This is also balanced by the fact we aren't always gonna continue firing with hands like Ax (with ace of spades) because as above, it's very hard for him to have a worse hand to call with so a check-back here doesn't need to mean we're turning our hand face up.
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