The following is an excerpt from the “3-and 4-Betting” chapter in “Part Five: Beating Small Stakes Games” in our new book Harrington on Online Cash Games; 6-Max No-Limit Hold ’em by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie. The book is now available and can be ordered through our Two Plus Two Store.
Responding to a 3-bet
Sometimes, of course, you’ll be the one who opens the pot with a raise and then gets 3-bet. Responding here can be a little tricky, so let’s go through the main issues involved.
Roughly speaking, your opponents at small stakes will fall into two main groups:
- Group A consists of players who, like most micro-stakes opponents, will 3-bet only with a tight range, about 3 percent or less. A 3 percent range consists of pairs, jacks or better, and ace-king, suited or unsuited. They may fold some of this range to a 4-bet, but more likely they’re prepared to get all-in once they’ve 3-bet. As you move up the scale from $25 NL to $50 NL to $100 NL, you’ll encounter fewer players in this group. But you’ll still find some, even at $200 NL.
- Group B consists of players who play more or less as we described earlier in this chapter. They’ll raise for value, call some hands, and semi-bluff with a few more. Their exact approach will vary from player to player, but they’ll be 3-betting with something like 6 to 10 percent of their hands.
The most important skill in responding to a 3-bet is to place your opponent in either Group A or Group B. Once you know where an opponent belongs, your strategy is pretty straightforward.
Against Group A, you fold everything but your premium hands. This can be difficult because it will feel like you’re being exploited. But in fact, you’re the one doing the exploiting. They’ve told you what they have, and you’re sidestepping the trap of losing your whole stack with jacks or ace-queen.
Against Group B, you treat your 4-bet decision exactly as you treated your 3-bet decision in the previous section. You’re going to 4-bet for value with your best hands, call with some others, and 4-bet semi-bluff with the best hands that are left.
Example: In a $100 NL 6-max game, you open from middle position for $3. Your opening range from this position at these stakes is 18 percent, consisting of these hands:
All pairs
Suited aces: AKs through A8s
Offsuit aces: AKo through ATo
Suited Broadways: KQs, KJs, KTs, QJs, QTs, JTs
Offsuit Broadways: KQo, QJo, JTo
Suited connectors: T9s through 65s
Suited one-gappers: J9s and T8s (238 combinations)
Your ‘fold to 3-bet’ number for this session so far is 60 percent. Everyone folds around to the small blind who reraises to $10. You have a couple of hundred hands of data in his HUD, and his 3-betting percentage is 8 percent. So far, he appears to be a very competent player who has always shown down reasonable value. The big blind folds. So what should your ranges look like for 4-betting for value, calling, light 4-betting, and folding?
We’ll proceed here exactly as we did in our 3-betting discussion. The first step is to assign him a 3-betting range, given what we know.
His overall 3-betting range is about 8 percent. Since we think he’s a competent player, we expect him to adjust his range up or down a bit just as we would.
- Since we raised from middle position, our raising range will be a little tighter than our overall PFR. He will tighten his 3-betting range accordingly.
- Since he’ll be out of position after the flop, he wants to 3-bet light a little more, and call a little less.
- There are no callers in the pot, and only one player to act behind him. These two effects should cancel out.
- He’s seeing a ‘fold to 3-bet’ for us of 60 percent, about an average number.
The net result of all these factors looks like a wash, so we’ll assume his 3-betting number in this situation is no different from his average, about 8 percent. If he uses the same criteria we would (a loose assumption, but we don’t have any information that would let us make a different assumption), his 3-betting range would look like something like this:
3-betting for value:
Pairs: AA through 99
Suited aces: AKs and AQs
Offsuit aces: AKo and AQo (68 combinations)
3-betting light:
Pairs: 55 through 22
Suited aces: A9s and A8s
Suited connectors: QJs and JTs (40 combinations)
Hands in between the value bets and the light bets are, of course, his calling hands.
Against that 3-betting range, what would the ranges for our various responses look like? First, let’s note that when we 4-bet, we’ll fold out the light 3-bets in his range, so we just need to look at how our prospective hands fare against his value range. Here are the hands we can 4-bet for value, which are 55 percent against his value 3-betting range.
4-bet for value:
Pairs: AA through QQ (18 combinations, 1.4%)
Calling becomes a little different. We’re still trying to call with hands that are 45 to 55 percent against his range. However, when we call, we keep his whole range in the hand rather than folding out his weakest cards. As a result, it’s easier for hands to pass our calling criteria than our raising criteria, so we have relatively more hands in this group than previously. And as before, we are going to have to bluff with some of these hands post-flop to avoid being exploited.
Call his 3-bet:
Pairs: JJ through 55
Suited aces: AKs and AQs
Offsuit aces: AKo (62 combinations, 4.8%)
Finally, we still need some light 4-bets which are the best hands below our calling hands.
4-bet bluff:
Suited aces: AJs and ATs (8 combinations, 0.7%)
Somewhat surprisingly, our range of playable hands after his 3-bet is almost as large as his 3- betting range! This seems surprising at first but makes complete sense. Imagine a pot-limit game with stack sizes that are enormous compared to the initial bets, and two players who keep raising each other. At first, each raise reduces the hand range enormously as all the junk hands are filtered out. With subsequent raises, however, the number of dropped hands falls off as the curve flattens. Eventually the players are reraising with the identical range of hands: aces and kings at first, and then only aces.
One last point about 4-betting: The size of a 4-bet can be constrained by the stack sizes that remain. Imagine a game where both players in the hand have stacks of 100 big blinds. Let’s say one player raises to 3.5 big blinds and his opponent 3-bets to 12 big blinds. If the first player now 4-bets to 40 big blinds and his opponent 5-bets all-in, the pot becomes 140 big blinds (ignoring the initial blinds) and the first player has only 60 big blinds left. The pot is offering him 2.3-to-1 odds to call. Given the hands in his 4-betting range, he’s essentially made himself pot-committed with most of his range. A better course would be to make a smaller 4-bet to something like 30 or 32 big blinds which would still chase away a lot of bluffs, but would leave some room to get out of the hand if your opponent decided to push all-in. The smaller the initial stacks, the more important this issue becomes.
