Poker Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Marginal Spots vs 3-bets
Marginal Spots vs 3-bets As you well know, you're going to be in a lot of marginal spots when facing a 3-bet. How you react and play those situations is going to make a significant difference in your winrate. Many of the decisions will be super close, so stat ranges and reads will be critical in helping you to make the best decision possible. Some of the common marginal spots with roughly 100 BB effective stacks are:
You open raise in MP
You open raise in MP (or late MP in full ring) with a normal MP opening range of about 20%, and your opponent on the button 3-bets you who has a normal button 3-betting range of about 12%. Comments: You aren't opening super wide, but your opponent is going to be 3- betting from the button pretty wide and will have position on you post flop. If your opponent is betting a normal polarized range, then you're going to be a slight dog to neutral equity with your opening range versus their 3-betting range. You would be looking at somewhere between 46–50% on average. Your opponent is going to have a positional equity advantage bump on anywhere from 1.1–1.3x of their real equity. So you'll need to fold enough of your range, turn some of those into 4-bluffs occasionally, and call with a range where you can make up your positional disadvantage. A good baseline starting range would be: 99+, ATs+, AJo+, KJs+, KQo. This would give you anywhere between 57–60% equity versus their range. If you cut out a few more of these hands like KJs, ATs, KQo, you'll jump your equity a couple of more points. So something like: 99+, AJs+, AJo+, KQs for most players who may struggle with out of position play a bit. You're going to want to turn some of the bottom of your folding range into 4-bet bluffs so that you can make up for the times you're being 3-bet and have to fold. Calling with this range, you're going to be folding roughly 70% of the time, so you'll need to mix in some 4-bet bluffs to make up for the times you're abandoning your equity. The other options are that you call with some of your suited connectors a higher percentage of the time, and bluff shove when you hit some piece of the flop, which is going to be a much higher variance strategy, but can still be effective.