Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em Excerpt: The Light 3-Bet
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Over the next week or two I’ll be posting a few short excerpts from our upcoming new e-book Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em.
Right now we’re finalizing a release date. (The only thing holding up the announcement right now is a detail related to the technical rendering and distribution of the final e-book.) Once we finalize the release date, we’ll announce it here and open preordering. This is all going to happen “soon.” I can’t say exactly how soon “soon” is because if I could then I’d announce the release date right now. But soon is indeed soon, given any reasonable interpretation of the word in the given context.
Without further ado, today’s excerpt is about the light 3-bet:
The Light 3-Bet
A light 3-bet is any 3-bet made with a hand that normally wouldn’t be strong enough. It’s a type of semibluff. You raise with the hope of stealing the pot immediately, but you retain a chance, if called, to win after the flop. Any strategy that includes 3-betting for value should also include some light 3-betting.
Potentially, any time the pot is raised and the action is on you, you could 3-bet light. Obviously you want to pick your spots, as 3-betting every time would unbalance your strategy.
When choosing your spots, follow these principles:
Attack Players with a High Fold To 3-bet Percentage
Modern poker tracking software maintains a stat called “Fold To 3-bet Percentage.” This stat measures how frequently a player folds when confronted with a 3-bet.
If your opponent’s Fold To 3-bet Percentage is sufficiently high, 3-betting them with any two cards when they open raise can show an automatic profit. Even if they don’t fold quite often enough to show an automatic profit by 3-betting, you can still frequently attack their raises with light 3-bets. Players with Fold To 3-bet stats of 75 or higher are particularly vulnerable to attack.
Attack Players Raising from a Steal Position
A light 3-bet will succeed more often against a player opening from a steal position than one opening from up front. This tends to be particularly true against raisers with a high Attempt To Steal (ATS) Percentage. ATS measures how frequently a player opens the pot from the cutoff, button, or small blind when everyone in front folds. For example, everyone folds to the button who opens for $7. He has an ATS of 45, a relatively high number for this stat. You can 3-bet this player liberally from either the small or the big blind.
An ATS above 35 indicates a loose raising range, while an ATS below 25 indicates a tighter player.
Attack Players Who Tend To Call Rather Than 4-Bet
Most players will try to defend themselves if they think one of their opponents is 3-betting light against them. Some players defend mainly by calling the 3-bet and seeing a flop, while others use a light 4-betting strategy. Both of these options are exploitable if executed poorly, but the players who tend to call and see a flop are typically more exploitable.
Callers are weaker because their opponent always gets to see a flop, and most players who call adhere too closely to a fit-or-fold strategy postflop. For instance, such a player might open from the hijack seat with pocket threes and get 3-bet on the button. They’ll call, planning to commit if they flop a set but fold if they don’t.
This strategy is a mathematical disaster. The player with the threes will flop a set or better roughly 12 percent of the time. The other 88 percent of the time, they will lose their $17 preflop call of the 3-bet. To make this strategy break even, the player with the threes would have to average a win of at least $125 each time they make a set.
Unfortunately, the player with the threes won’t come close to averaging $125. Most of the time that he shoves on the flop, the 3-bettor will fold. After all, he 3-bets light, and therefore he often won’t have a strong enough hand postflop to commit. So most of the time the set doesn’t get paid off. Overall, you expect to lose several dollars every time you call that $17 3-bet with a pocket pair then play fit-or-fold postflop. Indeed, even if you improve the strategy by throwing in a few postflop bluffs, playing fit-or-fold in 3-bet pots is so bad to begin with that you can’t really make it profitable.
Calling light 3-bets with big cards and suited connectors can work better, but fit-or-fold still doesn’t work. You have to bluff aggressively postflop to call a 3-bet profitably with any non-premium hand. Since most players who call to defend against your light 3-bets won’t play nearly aggressively enough postflop, you can exploit them by pouring on the raw aggression. Against these fit-or-folders, bet the flop frequently and, if called, follow it up with a generous number of turn barrels. They’ll fold too often to make their strategy profitable.
Indeed, if you identify a player who calls 3-bets frequently and plays fit-or-fold postflop, you should 3-bet them light over and over again. The more you 3-bet them, the more money you make, at least until they adjust.
Attack More Frequently When Callers Have Entered The Pot
Light 3-betting is often more attractive when one or more players have called the original raise. These callers rarely end up calling your 3-bet. After all, if they held a hand strong enough to play a 3-bet pot, they would frequently have 3-bet themselves. Launching a 3-bet in a pot with one or more callers is called a squeeze play or squeezing.
The benefits of squeezing are obvious – you win a significantly bigger pot when successful. The pitfall is that you will succeed less often. Also, good players are naturally suspicious of 3-bets made in squeezing situations, and that suspicion may encourage them to play back at you.
But overall, squeezing tends to be a quite profitable. You should be squeezing a significant minority of the time you’re presented the opportunity to do so.
Tags: light 3-betting, matt-flynn, no-limit-holdem, poker, small stakes no-limit hold'em, sunny-mehtaIf you find this article helpful please support the site to help keep the poker strategy tips coming.
Is this excerpt from the ‘Easy Steps’ section?