What should my 3bets do?
Posted by JoINrbs
Posted by
JoINrbs
posted in
Low Stakes
What should my 3bets do?
Let's just talk about IP 3bets for now.
a) do I want the person I'm 3betting to have a 0EV 4bet with all his potential 4bet bluffs? This seems right but perhaps not ideal in practice. He has already invested 2.5bbs and we are splitting the blinds so he could have as much as a 4bb profit with a 4bet bluff before his bluff was making my 3bet breakeven. I feel like giving him +1bb 4bets is probably fine since it lets me 3bet more, I'm still making 3bbs on my 3bet even when he 4bet bluffs, and it's really easy for me to make a tiny adjustment and suddenly be absolutely crushing him if he's consistently taking the 1bb 4bet bluff that I give him an option to make.
b) what % of my range should be
1) 5bet value jams. 2) 5bet balance jams (A5s for example). 3) 4bet calls (do I 3bet a combo of JTs and QJs so I can have a 4bet calling range, for example?). 4) 3bet bluffs with blockers (AJo). 5) 3bets with postflop playability but which will fold to a 4bet (97s).
c) How wide do I 3bet? Do I just look at all my value hands which do better 3betting than calling and then add the other parts of the range to balance those hands?
This is a thing I will be working on for the next couple of days.
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Good questions I don't have the answers to. I'm working on similar problems lately and was referred to this article by another RIO member about optimal 3b-4b-5b ranges. I'm finding it quite helpful and it may be able to help you answer these questions. http://en.donkr.com/forum/optimal-3-bet4-bet5-bet-strategies-in-nlhe-6-max---part-1-533561
If you are already versed in this material, my apologies but it may help someone else who is willing to do the work.
If his 4bet bluffs were +EV then he would never fold and always 4bet or call.
I think he means if villain's range was balanced. @OP Your question is way to broad. Maybe phrase as 3b CO v BU or something. Just 3b 50/50 ratio of 3b/5b and 3b/f. A5s being in your 5b range as some sort of balance is spew. I think you are referring to a spot where you would not 3b qq or ak like MP v UTG? If that is the case you are better off 3b/5b qq ak as they have far more value than A5s when All in. At question c) pretty much yes that is what to do.
I think if your opponent is 4 betting an optimal frequency to defend his opening range he has to fold to a shove often enough to make shoving KK+ and A5s a balanced strategy. The problem with this is, in practice at least at low stakes, opponents are not 4 bet bluffing enough and so this becomes spew vs non-optimal opponents. And vs opponents that are 4 bet calling too wide, you would need to add more value hands such as AKo and QQ and eliminate bluffs.
Sure but if that was actually something our opponents did we could counter it immediately by jamming a few more combos such that their 4bet bluffs were losing money. Our opponents can only 4bet a small balanced range before they're exploitable so it'll be very quickly apparent to us if they're 4betting or calling 100% of the time.
Meanwhile we gain very real EV. If we consider the blinds as well a successful 3bet bluff against a 2.5x open is worth 4bbs to us, so if we can increase the number of times we make that play it'll be pretty exciting. If we make it so RFI has a 1bb 4bet bluff with every combo against us now our 3bet bluff is still worth 3bbs to us if it makes the blinds fold and we get to make it more often, and every time RFI doesn't take the 4b bluff opportunity we're essentially winning an extra bb preflop. Given that RFI can only 4bet bluff us a certain amount of the time before he's very easy to adjust to and beat I think we should be aiming to give him profitable 4bet bluffs whenever possible because what giving him a profitable 4bet bluff means is that every time he doesn't 4bet bluff we're winning extra money and there's no way anybody is going to 4bet bluff with hands which would otherwise fold more than half the time so we're going to be in the half of the tree where we gain an extra big blind more often than the half of the tree where he does.
Maybe a good way to think about giving RFI profitable 4bet bluffs is you can think about this game tree as a collaboration between RFI and 3bettor to steal the blinds together. They're both benefiting from the dead money in the blinds and the fact that they've made it very difficult for anyone else to contest for that money with their preflop actions.
Another thing is that if the gametree has 3bettor calling 4bets you reach a situation where RFI cares about what cards he has for making 4bet bluffs. It'll be really hard to work out how to properly simulate such a situation but it could be that while a 4bet bluff looks like it's +4bbs if you just have the players checking down in the 4bet pots in actuality playing a 35bb pot out of position with the same range that you opened against a very tight and designed 4bet calling range will lead to you losing much more money than a model would predict. I'm not going to mess around with R but I'm guessing we defend very well against RFI having profitable 4bets by having some part of our range call those 4bets.
That makes sense, and yet seems really advanced for low stakes. You might get better answers in mid or high stakes forums.
I don't see why lowstakes players shouldn't be able to work out some good preflop strategies though :)
That's true, but not really what I'm implying. If you're just trying to stimulate a strategy discussion then yeah, by all means. My suggestion was if you were looking for really good answers I think you're more likely to find them higher up. But I like this discussion so am happy to try and contribute.
If I'm understanding correctly you're looking for hands to 3 bet that play well by calling 4 bets particularly 4 bet bluffs. So I guess this range would take on similar properties to your pre-flop calling range in that you want to have hands that are too good to fold but not good enough to shove but a narrow range?
This is getting convoluted at this point. In SB where we'd just want to 3b our best hands or fold we will have some hands that should call a 4b but aside from that there are two ways we want to construct a 3b range. 1) Our best hands that will 5b and our best hands that we'd otherwise fold to an open. 2) Our best hands altogether in which case the middle part of that range can call a 4b and the bottom part fold.
Chose one! Otherwise you make things way more complicated then they need be and if that is what you like to do then you can discuss this topic forever.
You either have a polarized range or a depolarized range!
I think 4bet-calling hands are almost as valuable as far as adding bluff quantity to our 3bet range as 5betting hands and they're also very important to have so that our 3betting range is malleable against differently-sized 4-bets. If we only have a 3bet-5bet component we will have too many bluffs against a very small 4bet counterstrategy, which is what I'm seeing employed a lot more.
Also I think having only a 3bet-5bet component is just fundamentally bad against tight ranges because you end up with local maxima where you're making KK indifferent, or making QQ/AK indifferent, or making JJ/AQ indifferent, etc., but I think you have a lot of difficulty adding or subtracting to land in the areas in between those spots if you have a reason to want to (I am not 100% comfortable that this is true) and you have no ability to adjust in game-play to different 4bet sizes to counter your 3betting ranges.
This is something you can work on for a week and then know pretty much everything there is to know about it for the rest of poker's lifetime so I don't really mind being convoluted for a while.
Then use option 2 that I listed. Problem solved w/o intelectual masterbation
If we do that we are wasting a ton of our best hands by 3betting them and folding them to a 4bet, we'd presumably much rather be calling those pre and having hands we can't call with pre be the part of our 3bet range that we fold to a 4bet.
Here's a sample range to demonstrate what I'm talking about:
20% 5bet component: 85% AA, 90% KK, A5s
30% 4bet call component: 15% AA, 10% KK, AKs, 25% AKo, our three best SCs which can't call pre (I'm using QTs, J9s, 76s for now because they are seldom dominated vs a tight 4betting range and generally can't call a tight open).
50% 3bet bluff component: KQo (or best offsuit king which can't call), AJo + 75% ATo (or best 28 offsuit aces which can't call).
Modeling this range by having pots in which it calls a 4bet checked down the range does a few things:
KK and AKs are both indifferent to calling the 5bet jam. This means we're at a nice local maxima for how much protection we're getting for our 3bet bluffs out of our jamming range.
All of opponent's opening range can 4bet somewhat profitably but almost none of it expects to win the full pot or more by doing so. Keep in mind I'm modeling postflop by just checking down and not considering that I get to play in position as well. It's also easy for me to adjust against an opponent who actually does start 4betting their entire range by making my 3bets more value-heavy.
We have good board coverage in every situation. Preflop we're still able to call with hands like QQ and 75% AKo to support a strong range, in 3bet pots we get to play in position with stuff like KQo and AJo which has a ton of high card value and also have maneuverability out of hands like A5s and 76s, and in 4bet pots we have a few AA and KK hands and a good portion of AK to ensure our range isn't godawful on any boards, but also some very deceptive hands like QTs which can make sure we have some hands to bluff with on K-high or A-high boards and give us good coverage on other boards.
It lets us 3bet 4.7% against an UTG opening range without them being able to stack off KK preflop.
Anyway I don't know what the absolute optimal ranges are and would love some suggestions if anyone thinks there are obvious improvements to be made but I'm planning on making ranges like this for AKo/QQ indifference, AQs/TT indifference, and AQo/88 indifference, or something like that, and think being able to employ them and eventually being comfortable enough to adjust them should be pretty sweet.
Looks like you've put a lot of work into this and I think it looks pretty good. Preflop is very complicated and it's impossible to know what ranges are optimal but I think you're probably on the right track.
Personally I 3bet a lot more depolarised than the range you've provided. Hands like AQs, KQs are in there at some frequency. They are the ones I call 4bets with in addition to stuff like QQ-AA and AK.
I'm not saying more depolarised is the way to go as it certainly has it's drawbacks. Just something to consider.
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