Playing Postflop in 3-Bet Pots

Save for Later

It goes without saying that the pots which have the greatest significance in NLHE are the bigger pots. A pot above 50bb in size can change the momentum of your tournament, and take you from a medium stack trying to scrape into the money, to a powerful chip leader. In many instances, these bigger pots are going to come at times when the pot was 3-bet preflop – it’s simply pretty difficult for big pots to happen when there’s only one raise preflop, since it’s much harder to get large amounts of chips in postflop without a lot of action.

Therefore, it’s certainly important for us to study 3-bet pots if we want to maximise our winrate. I debated whether to title this article something different, like ‘How to play after you’ve called a 3-bet’, since it will be mostly focused on situations where you were not the 3-bettor, but you can use the principles involved to figure out how you might adapt your strategy in situations where you 3-bet and get called. In general, these spots are going to be a fair amount easier to play, since your range is going to be very strong and you’re often going to have nut hands.

Let’s take a look, therefore, at some of the key principles at work when negotiating 3-bet pots and trying to avoid being put into too many tough spots in big pots. Bear in mind that these principles hold true whether you’re in position or out of position, but flatting 3-bets out of position is a situation that is pretty tricky to negotiate overall, so don’t kid yourself into thinking that a little bit of studying is enough to drastically reduce your ‘Fold to 3-bet’ stat. You’ll still need to be folding to 3-bets a lot OOP, even if you do play better in the pots that happen after you do call.

Get used to folding a lot!

The first thing to remember about 3-bet pots is that you’re going to be at a range disadvantage almost all of the time, unless your opponent is 3-betting an insanely high frequency. What this means is that there’s only a very few specific types of boards on which you’re actually ahead, and therefore on many boards your only recourse in terms of strategy is to do a lot of folding to prevent putting too many chips in the pot while you’re behind.

There will be boards on which your strategy can involve a check-raising range or even a leading range when out of position, or where you can bluff-raise in position, but it’s going to be very difficult to defend your range in many circumstances, and a board that starts out bad for your range on the flop is not likely to get much better if your opponent has few air hands in their 3-betting range.

The tighter you perceive your opponent’s 3-betting range, the more likely you should be to either fold preflop or make marginal folds on unfavourable boards. Floating the flop against a tight 3-betting range is playing with fire, as the frequency with which you face a second barrel will always be higher in a 3-bet pot. In general, when trying to decide whether to call a 3-bet in the first place, try to consider how many types of boards there are on which you would be happy to call a c-bet – with some types of hands like low suited connectors, offsuit Aces or low pairs, these boards are few and far between.

Understand your opponent’s range construction

It’s one thing to know roughly how wide or tight your opponent is 3-betting, but another thing entirely to consider how that range is constituted. For example, someone who is 3-betting the top 6% of hands for value could be building that range with 88+ AJs+ AQo+, or it could be TT+ AJs+ AJo+, KQs – and that’s not even considering the bluffing part of their range.

Many people have very Ace-heavy 3-bet bluffing ranges, so it’s important to note that Ace-high boards are going to favour the 3-bettor quite heavily in most circumstances – however, at deeper stacks you may find people 3-bet bluffing with suited connectors, suited high card hands, offsuit broadways, or even smaller pairs. Making a note of any showdowns you see in these situations can help you to gain valuable information about the way your opponents are building both the value and bluff portions of their 3-betting ranges, and this in turn will make life a lot easier for you postflop.

Make use of the boards that favour your range

Obviously, while we do have a disadvantage in many spots after calling a 3-bet, there are going to be boards where the opposite is true. Since our range for flatting versus a 3-bet will rarely contain cards lower than an eight and will most likely be less Ace-heavy than our opponent’s, the boards that are better for us are usually the ones where all three cards are between an eight and a King.

Bearing in mind that more dynamic flops usually bring the range equities closer together in any situation, it obviously helps us as the preflop caller when the board is more dynamic, since it reduces our range disadvantage. This means we’re looking for connected, flush-draw flops, or even monotone ones.

On these boards themselves – connected, flush-draw flops with three high cards but no Ace – that’s where we can start to show some aggression. Consider a board of Queen-Jack-Nine with a flush draw – can your opponent really be extremely comfortable with pocket Aces on that flop if you make a big check-raise?

It works the same way with value hands – on the boards that are good for us, our opponents’ 3-betting hands are likely to be vulnerable to bad turn or river cards, so we don’t want to slowplay a big hand in these spots and risk not getting paid when the board gets worse for villain’s range. Play your big hands fast in 3-bet pots, because your opponent is going to hate the idea of folding an overpair or top-pair, top-kicker.

Be wary of stack size fluctuations

Finally, one of the biggest considerations in 3-bet pots is the impact of stack sizes, and the correlation isn’t where you’d think. It’s tempting to suggest that playing very deep-stacked in 3-bet pots is beneficial because you have more room to maneuver and better implied odds, but in reality the idea of playing a very deep-stacked pot with a significant range disadvantage is not ideal – not only might we lose a big pot, but it’s going to be very difficult for us to realise the full equity of our range, because we’re very rarely going to see all five cards. It’s also relevant that super-deep-stacked play rarely happens in MTTs, and when it does it’s usually in the early stages when it has very little bearing on our ROI.

Conversely, at shorter stacks like 30-40bb where a large amount of MTT play happens, we lose a lot of our room to maneuver – it’s hard to have a check-raise bluffing range in a 3-bet pot at 35bb deep, for example, and it’s hard to construct a preflop flat-calling range that has good enough board coverage to maximise our EV. We can comfortably get it all-in with a decent draw, but we’re also going to be in some uncomfortable spots with middle-strength top pair hands where we find it hard to fold.

What we’re left with is a range of stack sizes between about 40bb and 80bb where calling 3-bets is a little more manageable – it’s a little easier to get stacks in if we flop a good draw and therefore make sure we realise all our equity, and it’s still not that hard to stack an overpair if we flop a set, a straight or two pair. It’s also possible for us to make a move over multiple streets and put villain under pressure where appropriate, or apply stack size leverage depending on the situation in the tournament.
If you’re looking to improve your own game, therefore, direct your focus to how you combat 3-bets in this 40-80bb range – this will require addressing your 4-betting strategies as well, but playing better postflop in 3-bet pots is a good place to start. These spots are going to come up often at all stages of a tournament (unlike 100bb deep spots), and they can play a pivotal role in maximising your winrate.