A bet definitely is for value. I suspect we get 2 streets of value on quite a lot of run outs against his weaker 8x and his 7x hands. There's really not actually that many combinations in his range ahead of us on this flop as most of his bigger pocket pairs are likely to 4bet pre and he's going to have very few 2 pair combinations on this flop, so we're really probably only losing to 87s (2 combos), 33 (3 combos), 77-TT (Maybe +JJ, 16-22 combos) and prob ~4 combinations of combo draws that have a decent edge vs us, rest of his range we're flipping against (His combo draws with no overcards or his bare overcard flush draws) or we're well ahead of. If we face a raise it's going to depend on the opponent... maybe call, maybe fold depending on his sizing and how aggressively the villain raises flops in these spots, but it isn't going to happen very often so I wouldn't worry about it happening too often. Besides you can say the same if you take a check/call line, what do you do if he triple barrels? By betting we protect our hand, get value from hands that are going to pot control if we check and make the hand easier to play. If we check we get little to no value from hands like 44-66, 7x, we give free cards when he has stuff like QT or KQ which have 6 outs and often some other backdoors, we make life tough for ourself on a ton of turn and river combinations and we have no information about his range so we have no clue where we stand in the hand and are likely to make errors on the turn and river because of this. If I was check calling a hand here it'd be a less vulnerable hand, one much more comfortable facing multiple bets with on a wider variety of runouts, such as AA or Ad7d |