One thing I would like to encourage is for you to give some idea of the style of play villain has played when you post these hands. That is important information for us to have. But we don’t have the info, so I’ll assume he is playing straight forward poker.

Your squeeze makes perfect sense to an UTG+2 raise and an MP2 call. I might argue that your sizing is a bit big. I’d go with 3,900, but I don’t have that big of a problem with your line. I’d go 3x rather than 4x, but I’m curious what others have to say.

Interestingly, the original raiser folds, but the guy who flatted the original raise now calls your healthy squeeze bet.

The flop is really good for you. Not only do you have trips, but you have a pretty strong blocker to the flush draw with your queen of that suit and there’s an ace on the board which is great if villain has an ace in his hand.

I think now is a good time to consider what his range of hands is that he might have played it the way he did preflop. He just flatted an early position raise and then once again flatted your large 3bet. That doesn’t sound like AA to me. It’s possible he played it tricky, but do you really flat two separate times preflop? A case can be made that he just flatted the initial raise hoping to induce a squeeze. But when you did squeeze, I think he is more likely to try to build a big pot than he is to flat a second time. So for the moment I rule out AA. If he played it that way and then it flopped set over set, well, good game, it’s a massive cooler, nothing you can do. And he hasn’t played it this way yet, so ignore the monsters in the closet for the moment.

So nothing else is beating you so the question is whether to slow play your monster trips or bet into the villain. I kind of like betting because of the ace on the flop. If he has an ace with a great+ kicker (AK, AQ) you are getting action. Even ace, mediocre kicker will probably call one street. If he has a flush draw you want to make him pay to see a card. I don’t think he has a flush draw though since the Ad is on the board and you have the Qd. So what flush cards does he have? KJ, KT, JT, T9, 98? That would be a pretty ambitious call of an UTG+2 raise, and a really bad call of your 3bet. If he has a pair like JJ or worse you probably aren’t getting any action out of him the rest of the hand no matter how slow you play it. If you keep checking he has showdown value and will be reluctant to bluff. So given that I don’t see a lot of hands he will want to bluff with, I like your line of betting postflop hoping he has an ace.

If the flop had been Qs, 6d and a brick then I’d like the idea of just checking the flop to try to induce a bluff or to get a bet of yours called on a later street. But with the A and Q on the flop I just don’t see him putting too many chips in the pot if he has a mediocre postflop holding. So I like the idea of betting to build a big pot if he has an ace. Again, it would be really helpful to know what your read is on the villain to really determine the best line to take.

Maniackid11 said
Great analysis, rppoker. One thing I would like to point out, that you (and Andrew) helped me notice, is my flop bet sizing. I think it could be extremely exploitable because if you remember the ATo hand, I used a smaller bet-sizing. I also posted another hand where I had a set of 9s and used the same smaller bet sizing for flop and turn. This is definitely a leak of mine that I will need to focus on because I think I could be easily exploited.

As for the flop bet here, I agree with you, and that’s what I was thinking. In retrospect, I think villain is probably flatting with a smaller pocket pair here and we don’t have to worry to much about him having a monster. I think he would probably 4-bet me with KK+ and Ak. Which leads me to believe he was calling with a pocket pair trying to flop a set. Which would have been great for us and a disaster for him.

I think I like the 4x 3-bet here because I don’t necessarily want to play a multi-way pot with QQ. Now I am curious as to what other players think about this though.

As for reads and what not, I don’t ever put to much stock into them unless I notice that they are extremely passive over a 100+ hand sample size or they are playing way to many hands. Ok, I’ll say it like this; my ability to identify players is not strong enough for me to ever really feel confident in my read unless I see them playing too much or playing passive. Something I will work harder to improve on in the future but for now I think I have my work cut out for me with other areas. I find that learning poker is a slow process for me, and something that has gone in progression from one area to the next. One of the things that draws me to this game is the challenges that it brings. I love the fact that I could never learn enough and I don’t ever see myself thinking that I will eventually “know everything” and stop learning.  

While I appreciate the fact that you have decided on certain aspects of your game to prioritize, I encourage you to pay attention to how other players are playing. If you are only making your decisions based upon the strength of your hands and not also considering to how villain is playing it will be difficult/impossible to try to play “perfect”/GTO poker. You are only thinking about half of the hand.

Maybe for now you just focus on paying attention to the two players who act before you (most likely to attack your blinds) and the two players who act after you (players whose blinds you are most likely to attack). These players impact you the most. That way maybe you don’t feel overwhelmed with things to focus on. Of course if you are multitabling you may feel it is difficult to do this as you continue to learn. Maybe some days you only play on 1-2 tables and focus on how your opponents are playing. I only play in live multitable tournaments so I am always single tabling, which makes it much easier to focus on what other players are doing. I pay attention to what people are doing EVERY hand, including the hands I don’t play. Eventually, to truly play your best poker, you will need to be able to recognize the different playing styles of the other players at your table. When you watch TPE training videos of hand histories and/or deep run sweats notice how the person doing the video is always talking about how the other players have been playing and what villain has done in previous similar spots. What you have plays very differently against the table rock as opposed to the table lunatic. Digging deeper, does the table rock cbet the flop 100% of the time when first to act or does he only bet when he has it postflop? Does the table lunatic only cbet the flop when he misses and then shut it down on the final two streets or is he willing to two- and three-barrel with air? These are important things to be aware of.

If you feel you have to fix other parts of your game before you address what I am talking about then at the very least make a mental note that this is an aspect of your game to eventually work on. But I really think it is something to be working on at the same time as the other stuff.