Flatting Too Much in Middle Position is Costing You Money

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As a poker coach, I’ve reviewed Holdem Manager and PokerTracker databases for probably 30-40 different people at this point, and there are a few common leaks and weaknesses that tend to show up in a great many micro-stakes and low-stakes players.

One of these leaks is that many people tend to be losing chips (or at best, winning only a very marginal amount of chips) when they flat-call an open-raise in middle position. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons for this, and how you can close up this leak if it exists in your game.

You’re not guaranteed position, or even a flop

First and foremost, one of the most obvious things about flatting in middle position is that there are usually going to be two, three or even four players behind you who will have position on you in the event that the hand does go to a flop.

This obviously reduces your EV in the hand quite significantly – it increases the chances of you being in an out-of-position bluff-catching spot postflop, and it makes it harder for you to get away with your own bluffs.

Secondly, it’s very easy to make the assumption that flatting in middle position means you’re guaranteed to see a flop – this is far from the case. Let’s imagine we’re flatting with a hand that we’re going to fold to any further action, i.e. if someone squeezes behind us.

If we’re in the hijack at a 9-handed table (the fifth person to act out of nine players, so right in the middle), then there are four players behind us who can 3-bet. We can calculate the frequency of a 3-bet fairly easily.

Even if each player is 3-betting a very tight range of JJ+ AK+, that means they’re each 3-betting roughly 3% of hands. If we ignore the times they flat-call and lump those together with the times they fold (even though them flat-calling isn’t a great thing for us), then their frequency for ‘not 3-betting’ is 97%.

If we multiply all these 97% frequencies together, we get a cumulative non-3-betting frequency of 88.5%, meaning someone is going to 3-bet behind us and force us to fold 11.5% of the time. This might not sound like much, but it’s surprisingly significant.

Imagine a table where the players behind us are more active and are each going to 3-bet 5% instead of 3%. In that instance, their cumulative non-3-betting frequency goes down to 81.4%, and somebody is going to 3-bet 18.6% of the time.

In a circumstance where the players behind us are short-stacked and might be prone to getting it all-in with, say, 10% of hands, that creates a spot where someone is going to 3-bet roughly 35% of the time! And this is only if we’re in the hijack – if we’re in the lo-jack, UTG+2 or UTG+1, there are more players behind and the spot gets worse.

This shows us that even when the players behind us are fairly tight, there’s little value to flat-calling a hand in middle position if we know we’re going to fold it to a potential 3-bet from behind us, especially when we bear in mind the following other factors.

You’re up against tighter ranges

The next thing we have to worry about when flatting in middle position is the simple reality that we’re calling against much tighter opening ranges than we would be if we had the button and a player opened from middle position.

Let’s take a sample flatting range of 22-TT, ATs-AJs, AJo-AQo, KJs-KQs, KQo, and 87s+. This isn’t a very well-chosen range – it’s too wide and includes too many offsuit hands – but it’s reasonably close to what I see a lot of people flat-calling in low-stakes MTTs.

Against a fairly wide middle position opening range of 22% (I’ll skip the specifics for simplicity), this flatting range would actually have 49.9% equity, which makes it look pretty strong and playable – especially when you consider that flatting on the button means there are only two players behind who can 3-bet.

However, if we compare this to an early position opening range of say, 13%, we see that the flat-calling range in question drops down to only 45% in equity. This 5% drop might not seem like much, but when you consider that there are now multiple additional players behind who can 3-bet and force the flat-caller to fold, it starts to look more significant.

Another factor that makes life hard for us is that our equity in the pot is reduced when we give other players the chance to flat-call with great pot odds behind us – by flatting, we allow the blinds the chance to cheaply realize a big portion of their own equity in the hand, and reduce our chances of being able to pick up the existing pot more frequently.

It’s easy to think that perhaps having more players flat-call behind us isn’t a bad thing, since certain hands ‘play better multi-way’ – in reality, though, this isn’t necessarily the case. Even if they’re calling with wide ranges, the presence of additional players in the pot makes life harder for anyone who isn’t guaranteed to be in position, and it also reduces the advantage of position for the person who has it.

You’ll rarely see all five cards

This is an often-overlooked part of tournament poker. When you flat-call preflop, whether it’s in the big blind or anywhere else, the likelihood of you seeing each further street goes down depending on the circumstances.

You’re very likely (perhaps 100% likely if you’re in the big blind) to see a flop, somewhat likely to see a turn, and somewhat unlikely to see a river. You’re especially unlikely to see the turn or river for free, since most people these days tend to c-bet at least 60-70% of flops.

This means some percentage of the time you’re going to end up calling preflop and folding the flop, or calling the flop and folding the turn, or calling flop and turn and then folding the river. Obviously these instances add up – the more you flat, the wider and weaker your range gets, and the more this happens.

While we should obviously be looking for ways to win pots without showdown where possible since that’s a big part of our EV, it’s also important that we have the ability to get to showdown when we do have a middling-to-strong hand – ‘realizing our equity’, as we call it.

We don’t want to put ourselves in too many spots where preflop speculation leads to flop speculation, which leads to turn speculation, which leads to missing the river and folding. The best example of this might be a middling suited connector hand – we take a flop, flop middle pair, call the flop, and then fold to a second barrel on a scary board.

This happens a lot, so it’s important to minimize our opponents’ ability to take advantage of that. Tightening (or eliminating…more on that shortly) our flat-calling ranges and avoiding postflop call-down spots is an important habit to pick up.

An alternative approach

So what’s a better way to play these middle position spots? How do we avoid these awkward situations? The answer is threefold, and it’s fairly simple.

1. Fold preflop more often with weaker, lower-EV hands. Be disciplined in our approach to taking flops, and recognise how difficult it is to make flatting profitable, especially at shorter stacks.
2. 3-bet preflop more often with hands that play well in heads-up 3-bet pots. This means taking a lot of your strong Ace-x hands, suited broadway hands, and certain suited connectors and placing them in your 3-betting range instead of your flatting range. You may even choose to eliminate your flatting range in middle position completely in certain spots, folding the bottom parts of it and 3-betting the top – this is a perfectly valid strategy which creates a linear 3-betting range for you that is very playable when your 3-bet does get flat-called.
3. Avoid passive postflop play. Be disciplined on the flop after flat-calling, be mindful of your opponent’s c-betting tendencies, and apply pressure whenever the flop or turn is beneficial for your range. Bet very frequently when your opponent checks to you, especially against tighter or less tricky players.

So there we have it. One of the biggest leaks in low-stakes players explained, and a straightforward guide to how to fix it. Take a look at your database in a month’s time, and I’m sure you’ll see an uptick in your EV when flatting from middle position.