I think a lot of these posts about vbetting could swing both ways without a read. Especially the 88 hand and the AQ hands from mikey and zach, respectively.

I had a hand come up last night that was a good value bet but only with the read i had.

Playing 40/80 lhe at commerce, two players in this pot are pretty bad. old guy is a total fish, will cold call flops with any piece and is stupid passive. The other player is a black lady that plays OK, but is on tilt. Shes lost a lot and her play reflects it.

I get 22 in the BB. old guy limps, black lady raises, i call out of the BB.

flop is Q84r

i check, old guy checks, lady bets, i raise, old guy folds, lady calls.

turn is the Q

I bet, lady calls.

river is a 6

I bet, lady calls and shows me an A.

I could have played this a bunch of different ways.

If black lady is obviously throwing around her money out of frustration and desperation now, this is possibly a great line. My main question here is what you would do if old guy calls the flop? shut down? check/call down? c/c sounds horrible if he'll call any piece of the flop, unless he foolishly got involved with something like 56, 67, T9, or JT. Would he call gutshots all the way too if he hit them?

Trying to learn a lot more about LHE, as I'm going to start playing live, and it appears that will be my bread & butter unless a miracle happens and places start spreading Razz (hah).

Flop is way too dry here if the old man calls, he pretty well HAS to have a pair there, in which case, I pretty much c/f turn UI.

now if we could say that he'll make the same calls with gutshots, would a bet on the turn be valid? obviously not if he's passive, he'll usually fold gutshots, but not pairs, but in the situation that we can deduce that...?

If he's super loose a turn bet isn't bad.

Most of the time, it's like 22 is nice, but you'd really really prefer playing it heads up in these situations. If he calls, maybe he has a gutshot with bdfd or something, so turn bet can't be bad, and obv it'll be bet/fold at that point. If he calls again on a completely blank turn, I would definitely check the river and see what happens.