Don’t like the hand selection for 3-betting here, or the sizing. Q3s is a good hand to flat here, you can 3-bet with your T4o and trashy stuff, and probably make it a fair amount bigger – 28-32k – since your range is more polarized.

Also don’t love the 3-bet given that you’re quite deep and there are shorter stacks at the table – the ICM value of trying to play back at people who have you covered isn’t great by any means, even if this guy does only have you marginally covered.

When it comes to playing postflop, I think this needs to be a one-and-done hand, or perhaps even a give-up on the flop. Your opponent is going to be peeling your 3-bet with a large % of their opening range, and the AT7cc flop gives them a lot of equity with a big portion of that range.

In terms of range construction, a hand like Q3ss is one of the worst hands to c-bet here, since it has no blockers of any significance and no real equity for future streets. Since most of your hands with two cards 8 or higher have at least a gutshot here, using a weak Queen like that isn’t necessary. It’s also at least a somewhat dynamic flop even despite the Ace, so your c-bet percentage shouldn’t be higher than around 70% here in all likelihood.

On the turn, I think it’s tough to see villain folding much of their flop calling range – you have a lot of perceived double-barrel hands potentially in your range, like 98, J9, any clubs, or QJ/KQ/KJ. Having said that, it’s kind of hard for villain to put those hands in your 3-betting range since you’re not super likely to 3-bet them preflop, so the turn barrel does look somewhat strong, but since villain has lots of Ax in their range and a fair amount of Tx I don’t actually see them folding turn much, especially if most of their draws would check-raise flop.

Barrelling turn with the intention of barrelling river is a little better, since villain is likely to fold Tx on river, but I doubt villain folds Ax very much – when he has Ax he blocks Ax, so if he’s a better player he’ll know that, and if he’s not good enough to know that I doubt he’s good enough to fold Ax since people hate folding top pair. You also don’t rep a lot of AT/A7/A5/A4/77/55/44 since villain is likely to expect you to flat many of those preflop – if you’re 3-betting all that stuff then you’re likely also 3-betting more hands that could be bluffs here.

If the flush hit the river maybe it’s a better three-barrel, but there’s a lot of ICM pressure for you here too, that leads you in the direction of not bluffing so often. In addition, your turn sizing is too small – if you really want to put ICM pressure on (as well as being more balanced, since your range gets more polarized on turn) you need to bet much bigger proportionally. If you bet 28k on flop and villain called, 56k on turn would give the same odds in relation to the pot, so I’d say you’d need to go at least 60k to set up a theoretical ~140k river shove – even if we don’t make the shove, setting up for it makes sense for both our value and bluffing ranges. When you’re thinking about 3-barrelling, you should always be looking to set up a spot where the third barrel is all-in if possible.

ScotFish said
Thanks Ginger, one of the reasons I posted the hand here was that I was sure I had mis-played it, but it’s really good to hear the actual reasons/where it went wrong. A lot of the time before joining TPE I wasn’t being very thoughtful with my hand selection, and was just generally going for aggression without picking the spots specifically.

One thing I’ve really improved since joining has been this selectiveness, but not in all situations as you can see :-/. 

At somepoint I think it might be useful for me to do some actual range work on what hands I like to bet/3-bet in various positions with various stack sizes, as having a little more structure in this might make me more mathematical, and reduce the feel aspect of what I do where I try to do the maths on the fly/react to game-flow a little too much.   

WRT the last part, good idea. A good place to start is that the wider your flatting range in a given spot, the more polarized your 3-betting range should be, as you don’t want to waste good flatting hands by 3-betting them. In spots where your flatting range is very narrow and predictable (such as UTG+1 vs UTG) you might want to eliminate flatting altogether and 3-bet a completely linear range from AA downwards.

Your 3-bet bluffing range should also start at the point where your flatting range ends in a given spot – for example, in a BTN spot where you would be flatting J9s as the bottom of your range, J8s is one of your best 3-bet bluffs, because you’re not wasting a good flatting hand but you still have lots of postflop playability. In this BB spot, let’s say you decided the bottom of your peeling range was something like J5s or T6s (fairly arbitrary, not sure if that’s true), you could then use hands like J4s and T5s as part of your 3-bet bluffing range, to simultaneously maximise the EV of your flatting range while also giving yourself the greatest possible playability (and therefore highest EV) in your 3-betting range when you do get flat-called preflop.

ScotFish said
Thank you Ginger! It’s really kind of you to take the time to explain how to start constructing a range – sometimes stuff like this is what intimidates me when I don’t really know how to start, or what concepts to include. 

This should really give me a good spot to start. 🙂  

No problem, man (or woman). If you want a good video series to look at with regard to range construction, check out Andrew’s series on the topic. I can’t recall whether it deals with 3-betting ranges but it’s a great look at postflop range building.