I've been reviewing my play over the last month or so, and have found that there are two things that I am not doing half as much as I used to, and certainly nowhere near as much as I thought I was. They are:
<ul type="square">[*]Bluff 3-betting OOP preflop - ie 3-betting without a good hand; and[*]check-raising the flop - ie without a good flop fit.[/list]
Obviously the definition of a "good" hand and a "good" flop fit change depending on the opponent, but for the sake of argument say a good hand is AA-88, AKo-AJo, AKs-ATs, KQ.
I've been thinking about this, and I can find some good arguments for not using these tools that frequently, but at the same time there are some good arguments in their favour as well. Taking them in turn:
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Edit: on reflection, I'm going to make this into 2 posts, because otherwise it will get too long and it will be hard for people to respond in a focused way. </font>
3-betting OOP preflop
3-betting preflop is obviously an effective way to extract value from a strong starting hand. However, if you only 3-bet with a strong hand, you are likely hit one of two responses:
(a) Villian folds preflop; or
(b) Villian folds to your bet on the flop unless he hits a monster.
Unless you're running hot, you're not going to get enough good hands to 3-bet enough to make him play with / back at you without a strong holding. So it follows that we should be 3-betting with weak holdings also.
However, even at the second blind level (in most structures, although I know this is the first level in FT turbos) of 15-30, this is a big chip commitment. If Villain raises to 90 (3xBB), a 3-bet of 3x his bet is going to be 270. If he calls and you miss, you're almost committed to a continuation bet, which needs to be at least half the pot, so another 270. If he genuinely had a hand or has hit the flop, he's going to call or re-raise you, at which point you're probably going to have to give up. You will have committed over a third of your starting stack on a bluff.
It may be that the answer is to 3-bet heavily at the 10-20 stage, where the chip commitment is not as great, to get the metagame benefits and slow down an aggressive preflop raiser. I'm not sure.
How do you all approach this situation?