3 bet gets 4 bet deep in Sunday Million

[ZeeJustin]

[ QUOTE ]
If you are in Zralok's spot, and you are raising ~30-35% of hands, do you want T_Mac to reraise AQ/99 type hands preflop vs. you or do you want him to flat call?

I would want T_Mac to flat call vs. me if I'm raising that wide.

[/ QUOTE ]

Depends what I got. In general I hate getting reraised, and I try to discourage them. That's because I generally fold all day.

However, if someone has a very strong hand, they will get more chips on average from me with a call. I'm a lot more likely to put in more chips postflop than preflop.

[djk123]

I think reraising is perfectly fine here only if you are planning on calling a shove.

I prefer raise/calling over flatting for a few reasons:

1)OP noted that this raise was villain's 3rd in 6 hands, so clearly villain is aggressive and opening a wide range of hands.

2) It's a CO open, BU 3bet situation. In today's online poker world, CO opens don't get too much respect, and thus BU 3bets of an aggressive player's CO open are not perceived as strong as they were in the past, which means villain is not necessarily folding AJ or even AT. They are playing 8 handed as well if that matters at all.

3) Villain's history of only playing large buy-in tourneys suggests, although obviously doesn't guarantee, that he or she is aware of resteals and possibly even capable of 4 betting light.

[ZeeJustin]

[ QUOTE ]
I think reraising is perfectly fine here only if you are planning on calling a shove.

I prefer raise/calling over flatting for a few reasons:

1)OP noted that this raise was villain's 3rd in 6 hands, so clearly villain is aggressive and opening a wide range of hands.

2) It's a CO open, BU 3bet situation. In today's online poker world, CO opens don't get too much respect, and thus BU 3bets of an aggressive player's CO open are not perceived as strong as they were in the past, which means villain is not necessarily folding AJ or even AT. They are playing 8 handed as well if that matters at all.

3) Villain's history of only playing large buy-in tourneys suggests, although obviously doesn't guarantee, that he or she is aware of resteals and possibly even capable of 4 betting light.

[/ QUOTE ]

Even if we know AJ is in his 4-bet range, and therefore have to call (given pot odds, and other hands in the range like 99), that doesn't make a 3 bet correct. If a call is marginal, the ev at that decision point isn't much more than 0.

I think we have to be happy about him 4 betting for a reraise to be correct. We should be significantly ahead of his 4 betting range. Having to call because we are pot committed isn't enough.

[T_Mac]

Cool, good discussion. At the time, I couldn't see him doing this with AJ which is why I folded. There is a big difference between opening a lot with an occasional 3 bet, and being able to 4 bet light. What also threw me off was the fact he INSTA 4 bet after my 3bet. It's possible he had resolved while I was thinking that i was FOS and he was going to 4 bet with anything he had, but I read it as strength (probably a JJ/AK type of hand).

It was just a real tough spot for me. As everyone has said, I like calling in general but raise/calling can be good too, I just didn't have a good enough read on him to make the call.

[LearnedfromTV]

[ QUOTE ]
If you are in Zralok's spot, and you are raising ~30-35% of hands, do you want T_Mac to reraise AQ/99 type hands preflop vs. you or do you want him to flat call?

I would want T_Mac to flat call vs. me if I'm raising that wide.

[/ QUOTE ]

If I'm him I don't want to get reraised a lot. As long as you're reraising him a lot, it doesn't really matter if you happen to reraise him with AQ or 99.

If he's raising too much and you're threebet/calling with the correct range, (say AK+, JJ+), then he can't profitably fourbet shove a high enough percentage of his raises to compensate for the frequency of your bluff threebets. This is true whether you threebet the borderline hands or not. But if you threebet the slice of hands that are borderline threebet/calls and that you can play profitably by flatcalling, you minimize the edge you gain from his error of raising too much. You don't need to have AQ in the range that calls his fourbet shove, because JJ+, AK crushes his bluffing hands enough to compensate for the times you fold, even if you are threebet bluffing fairly frequently.

edit: a significant part of this, mathematically, is the fact that his shove is an overbet (5x your reraise), similar to how you don't need to call a 20x preflop shove very often to make it -EV as a bluff.

Put another way, whether to threebet AQ (and any other hand that can profitably flat call, including AA) is a function of his fourbet shoving range, not his raising range, unless he is frequently going to flat call your threebets (which I doubt he will). Assuming he will very rarely flat call a threebet, the question of his too-frequent raises and your threebetting range is entirely one of frequencies.

The more likely he is to flatcall your threebet (with a wider range than AA-haha-I-trap-you), the more you need hands like AQ and 99 in your threebet range, but this is more relevant with 75-100bb than 40 for obvious reasons.

[shaundeeb]

LFTV I wish I could articulate my thoughts as well as you I could write a great book.

[mikeJ]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If you are in Zralok's spot, and you are raising ~30-35% of hands, do you want T_Mac to reraise AQ/99 type hands preflop vs. you or do you want him to flat call?

I would want T_Mac to flat call vs. me if I'm raising that wide.

[/ QUOTE ]

If I'm him I don't want to get reraised a lot. As long as you're reraising him a lot, it doesn't really matter if you happen to reraise him with AQ or 99.

If he's raising too much and you're threebet/calling with the correct range, (say AK+, JJ+), then he can't profitably fourbet shove a high enough percentage of his raises to compensate for the frequency of your bluff threebets. This is true whether you threebet the borderline hands or not. But if you threebet the slice of hands that are borderline threebet/calls and that you can play profitably by flatcalling, you minimize the edge you gain from his error of raising too much. You don't need to have AQ in the range that calls his fourbet shove, because JJ+, AK crushes his bluffing hands enough to compensate for the times you fold, even if you are threebet bluffing fairly frequently.

edit: a significant part of this, mathematically, is the fact that his shove is an overbet (5x your reraise), similar to how you don't need to call a 20x preflop shove very often to make it -EV as a bluff.

Put another way, whether to threebet AQ (and any other hand that can profitably flat call, including AA) is a function of his fourbet shoving range, not his raising range, unless he is frequently going to flat call your threebets (which I doubt he will). Assuming he will very rarely flat call a threebet, the question of his too-frequent raises and your threebetting range is entirely one of frequencies.

The more likely he is to flatcall your threebet (with a wider range than AA-haha-I-trap-you), the more you need hands like AQ and 99 in your threebet range, but this is more relevant with 75-100bb than 40 for obvious reasons.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just to clarify: Suppose you had determined before the cards were dealt that if your opponent raised, you were going to 3-bet w/ any 2, if you happened to get dealt AQ in that instance, but you knew you could not raise/call because his 4-betting range was not wide enough for you to raise/call AQ, you would flat call instead?

[LearnedfromTV]

Usually.

a - I expect that flatcalling AQ is more profitable than 3betting any 2.

b - it's nice for him to have to think about two ways he can get owned when raising light.

c (in a way this is a and b combined) - the more we threebet, the less profitable threebetting becomes. If threebetting any 2 is exactly as profitable as flatcalling AQ, but threebetting this time increases the chance he bluff 4bets us next time, that's bad, because it reduces the profitablility of a bluff threebet. Sure, we profit if the next time we threebet we have a real hand, and part of the point of threebet bluffing a lot is to get him to jam into a monster, but since bluffs make up a larger portion of our threebet range than real hands (and a higher percentage than normal because he's raising too light), we're more likely to want him to fold next time we threebet.

[luckychewy]

lftv is a really good poster.

[ZeeJustin]

[ QUOTE ]
edit: a significant part of this, mathematically, is the fact that his shove is an overbet (5x your reraise), similar to how you don't need to call a 20x preflop shove very often to make it -EV as a bluff.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't consider it an overbet. It's roughly 140% of pot (calculated really quickly, exact amount doesn't matter).

If it were simply a pot sized bet, you could actually call it an underbet since it is both preflop and all-in, in which case hero would be getting 2-1 and would be forced to call.