I’d like to get some opinions on my river shove here. About the villain: he’s been playing really snug preflop since we’ve been deep and I have direct position on him. He normally plays 21/16 but he’s been playing like 16/11 or so because of the aforementioned circumstances. He knows I can turn a made hand into a semi bluff on the river (it was a blind vs blind situation a couple of days ago and he triple barreled me with ace high, I had some draws in position with ace high as well, river was an ace. He bet the river big and I realized my top pair no kicker wasn’t good enough to call his bet so I raised and he called with A8….ya).

Back to this hand: As it played out I felt he 90% has AK here because of how tight he has been preflop and especially on his bet sizing i.e.basically potting it on the flop (I don’t think he bets this big with a set). Also I don’t think he bets a flush draw with this sizing so I removed that from his range. And As is on the board. So on the river I figure we’re mostly chopping and he basically never has a flush or a FH for the aforementioned reasons. And I don’t want to chop so I stick it in. I was pleased with the result.

But after thinking the hand over afterwards I’m wondering if maybe it would be more EV+ to lead half pot to get value from AQ? I very strongly believed he had AK because his betting just seemed nutted this deep. So what I’m asking is even if I think he mostly has AK here and want him to fold the chop, should I forego trying to make him fold his AK for the times that he can have AQ here by leading smaller?

If he has AK or AT, shove is more profitable
If he has Ax-Q, lead half pot is more profitable


Rest is up to you. Combos/reads/feel.

Yeah this play was definitely not standard and it was strongly based on my reads and the feel of the gameflow at the time.

Do you think my river shove is bad? I posted this on 2+2 and all the microstakes guys say it's bad lol. I'm still comfortable with the play though.

it just depends on the strength of your reads

I felt very confident about it.

As for which river lead (1/2pot vs pot) is more EV+ depending on whether he has AQ or AK... I have my doubts about whether he'll call say a 1/2pot lead with AQ here... So I guess this is fine. Either way I think this spot isn't coming up nearly often enough to make a big difference.