Button 3bet

As I discussed in my article on bet sizing, we are likely going to see situations that favored checking in the old AI that can now utilize the 25% pot bet size in the new AI. To recap, this is because we can get value from more of the opponent's range by forcing them to call with a wider range. Let’s look at an example.

I always think it is important to look at ranges. It is important to study your own ranges as well as your opponent’s ranges because that is important when making good decisions post flop.

In this spot snowie3 3-bet against snowie2’s open. We can see that the ranges are pretty small, but neither player is hitting the nine high flop very well.

Once both players check the flop on this board and a brick falls on the turn, snowie2 can bet small and get a lot of folds from weak overcards that have equity against the pair of eights. At the same time, snowie3 can’t fold too many hands or it will be exploited. Snowie3 must call with weak hands with very little equity.

It is important to look at ranges and understand how our bet size affects our opponent’s range. So stay focussed on what we want to accomplish with our betting and size the bet with that goal in mind. As we can see from the table image above, we are making a 2.35 big blind error by checking.

Small Blind 3Bet

This time we are going to look at how even smaller raises can be making us more money. 

The basic principles will still apply though: we have a polarized range and our opponent has a range of hands that we want to extract more value from.
This time, let’s lay out the situation in a scenario, then look at the actual hand.  

There is a pre-flop 3-bet and the flop comes down Th3c6h. Here are the pre-flop ranges and the situation.

Looking at Snowie1’s range, how many hands can call a large raise regardless of our hand? Over pairs and sets? That is about 27 combinations out of ~82 total post-flop combos or 33% of hands. Therefore, the larger we make our bet, the easier it is for our opponent to play perfect, because as we bet larger, his defending frequency decreases. Want to make his life harder? Force him to increase his defending frequency to 80%.  Now what does he have to defend with?

Let’s see what Snowie has him defend…

Because Snowie uses some raises, it doesn’t have to defend as high as 80% but it is still defending about 70% total and calling almost 63%. That’s all draws, all pairs, and AK high with backdoor flush draw. The best possible defense is that our opponent calls a ton and raises his nutted hands.

It is important to keep in mind that Snowie is playing optimally, while our day to day opponents do not! They are very likely to make mistakes when facing this kind of raise, they may peel far too often, get frustrated and raise too often, or a host of other mistakes, but we are able to continue putting pressure on them by using small bets and small raises where appropriate.

Let’s see the actual spot now.

Now against KK specifically we are not making much more by adjusting our bet size down. The set is getting paid here without widening the calling range. But look what happens if we use a half pot raise against a weaker hand like Ad6d.

Now the smaller raise.

I hope you are starting to see the value of this type of play, and start incorporating it into your game.  

Article by Eric Graul