[oldschool]

OP- You are sorta on the right path of thinking accept not =) but since you put your thoughts out maybe I can help get you on the right track. Here goes.

When this player raises the limper he has a certain range of hands. like some SCs pps AK aj etc..... So when he raises such a wide range it is your job to 3 bet him enough times to disuade him from always getting to raise the limpers (which is a very profitable thing to do). you see your saying "hey dude this is my pot, your hand is most likely [censored] and i shoulda been the one to raise this dude get outa my pot" youll soon begin to realize that being the aggressor in a hand(such as one like this) give you some many more ev spots throughout a hand as well as makes hand reading easier while hiding your hand strength. This in a nutshell is why they say aggressive poker is winning poker. But I digress…..


Now if you 3 bet him to 4 or to 25$ at that point he will reraise (the 4$ raise) a certain range of hands and call with a certain range of hands and fold with a certain range of hands. Now lets compare what will happen when you raise to 4$ rather than 25$. Assuming that
1 he will not fold aa kk(probably qq or ak either but it doesnt matter once you see my example cause you are flips to both those hands) in either spot
2 hes a decent player who isn’t totally insane


ok so he makes it 1.25 you raise all in to 25. GREAT! He folded a certain range of hands BUT AA and KK make up .9% of possible hands dealt to a player. If their raising range is 10% of their hands then they will have aa kk about one in ten times. You are laying 25-1.85( limper, blinds, and his raise) that the guy doenst have those hands. Looks like you already made a “BAD BLUFF” since laying anything more than 18.5 is neg ev and anything less would be +EV. And guess what, there are players left to act who could easily have aa kk which makes it even more----- EV.

Now lets say you make it 4. accept this time he might call with more hands than he would call a shove. Lets say he calls with AK and TT-KK we could say AA but im sure he reraises both those enough to only include one of them in his calling range for simplicity sake. Ak tt-kk make up 3% of the 10% he raises which is 7-3 odds or that he folds 70% of the time you 3 bet. This in isolation is already +++ ev since we are risking 4 to win 1.85 so 30 times we “lose” 4(which we technically haven’t lost since we still get to see a flop with potential to hit a strong hand) and 70 times we win 1.85 70X1.85 – (30x4)= 9.5 of + EV ALREADY!. But wait theres more!. You might say “hey you forgot about the other players in the hand” No I didn’t- Basically if another player sees a limper a raise and a reraise from you he is gonna fold hands as strong as jj maybe qq which they would certainly want to play knowing what your hand is- and according to the fundamental thermo of poker---- “you gain when your opponents plays incorrectly mathematically against you true holding and he gains when you do the same” since the likelihood of you holding a great hand is too high to warrant his preflop commitment then hell be folding even more hands that the dude who raised the limper since hell have to call 20BBs cold to play. And if he has aa kk hell probably reraise or flat call. Either way you just found out very cheaply that your ak is no good (which is +EV compared to shoving).
Now that weve seen the bluff value of our hand and the extra information and control over the rest of the table we gain from 3 betting smaller theres something else to be discussed. THE FLOP.whats nice about being in position is that in a huge pot people will always be in tuff spots oop. When you villain calls that small raise with TT JJ QQ you get to “suck out” 33% of the time! And with AK if you both don’t improve then you get to make the bet that folds his AK and not the other way around. Now sometimes hell have aa kk and be playing sneaky guess what if you are in position you get to control the pot size and likely wont pay him off unless you flop a king or and Ace AND he happens to have aa kk (which doenst happen much at all). The sick thing about this is that I don’t even have the time or energy to hit all the points I wanted to about this but hopefully you learn two things from this

1. Position in any pot give you huge advantage
2. initiave is too
3. over shoving ai to a 5bb open for 100 bbs is simply risking to much to win too little. Risk to reward is always something to consider when playing hold em. Llike if you think villain will call that shove with hands like AJ AT (which you crush) then all of a sudden there is reward to making that move. But since youll only get the remaining 95bbs to the middle when y our crushed and not win the 5 enough times to make up for it then its gonna lose ya money =).

I apologize for what im sure is plenty of misspellings and grammatical errors.