Wow, nasty!
River: is villain very silly or very aggressive? If so then it's a call for me, but not super happy about it.
If villain isn't a maniac I'd have to take the nitty route and fold, these river raises are very nearly always for value.

My heart always skips a beat when this happens, then I try to justify a call by convincing myself they can be bluffing me or over-valuing two pair because they are so bad - then they show up with the nuts yet again.

200bb deep it's always a fold for me, we are not going to see too many worse hands. 100bb it's a lot closer to a call, but in this spot we're most certainly behind unless this is a uber whale.

Too many hands we lose to and a whale can have every 57/T7/JT combo in their range which is 48 combos right off the bat if I did my maths right.

Hello


Preflop: in general if there is a whale at the table you can make your openraise sizings a little bigger but if the whale is an aggressive one then PPs can be quite hard to play postflop esp in a deep situation so 3x is totally fine.

Flop: cbet is fine, calling his raise is marginal but if we assume sometimes he will give up some turns and rivers we can justify calling.

Turn: 4.9$ pot, I'm potbetting here there is just no way a whale would realise how value-heavy we are. Do not let the additional 2.4$ slip, you have to bet close to potsize otherwise you are losing a ton of money in the long run.

River: without knowing why you labelled him as a 'whale' and what kind of whale he is, I think there is no way anyone can tell you for sure if it is a call or not. If he is a 81/1, AF: 0.2 type of whale then it is a fold, if he is a 81/32, AF:1.5+ type of whale then it is a call imho.

GL

Unpopular opinion here.
This is exploit vs whale:
Whale don't usually min check raise straight draws on this type of dry board. They tend to have value hands that wanna ' suck you in '. Which in this case sets and AQ,maybe some KQ. He doesn't have much QQ in his range as whale usually 3 bets.
Vs whale ( someone who over values their hand), I would call.
But this is a fold lots of times vs passive and regs.

I think preflop is obviously fine.
Flop I don't mind checking back sometimes to induce but that way we also give them free equity so I think a bet is maybe better. If we do bet I would actually make it a bit smaller (a bit over 1/2 pot is my usual bet sizing on this kind of flop) as it's not a super drawy board. When we get raised I'm not too happy with it but I think we can get away with a call here.

On turn I would actually check it back since we are now beat by most of his flop draws. I do this to pot control and again induce another bluff on the river. This might be wrong and I'm happy to be corrected but that's my view on it (I think this is a decent play against a reg but I'm not sure about the whale since we could still be getting value from some worse hands).

On the river I woldn't use such a large bet size and when he raises I think we're beat most of the time, our only hope is that he's overplaying 66,88 and KQ. I put hands like 66,88,QQ,57,T7,JT and KQ in equilab and on the river against that range we win 29% of the time, and with the pot odds we need to beat him at least 33% to break even. So even if he does do this with with 66, 88 and KQ(all combos) we're still not getting a good price

Possible to provide vpippfr ? There are different type of whales.

I guess the hand was played on an anonymous table, so Hero might not know the whale's vpip/pfr. But the history upon which Hero decided to tag him a whale would be helpful to know nonetheless.

Snap call riv for me he's repping a set or two pair