Wise words from Foucault and theginger. I learned the game in a ‘feel’ based manner, and for many years I was guilty of trying to soul-read villains so that I could be sure I was making the right move. I also assumed certain plays (especially flop ‘donk’ bets) were only made by bad players. These thoughts still pop up in my decision making during hands, but I’ve mostly learned to ignore them. Its counter-intuitive but the more we improve at poker the more we learn to welcome uncertainty.

We’re just deep enough to consider flatting AK against an EP open, but 3betting is much more profitable as a default. I prefer sizing at least 3x the open, but villain’s raise is large enough that your sizing is probably okay. It’s important when we get to a difficult situation to examine the decisions which led to it, but in this case I think that would be pointless.

It’s common after 3betting to feel a sense of ownership over the pot, and it can be easy to forget that villain’s range for calling a 3bet should be pretty strong (especially since you have seen villain fold to 3bets already). It can be frustrating to face an unusual bet after our very strong holding misses the flop, but we need to maintain a strategic approach based on analyzing hand ranges.

These ranges are arbitrary and their merits are debatable (I can explain my reasoning if its helpful), but as an example:

You 3bet JJ+, AJs+, AJ+, KQs, KQ, A5s/A4s, T8s, 76s.

Villain defends 77-JJ, A9s-AQs, AQ, KTs+, QTs+, JTs, T9s and 1/3 of AA combos.

Working with these ranges on Q75 rainbow, the 3bettor has only a slight range advantage. You have more overpairs and top sets but villain has more top pairs and middle sets. Neither player is likely to have any two pairs or strong draws. With 10k in the middle, effective SPR is ~2.5.

Instead of analyzing villain’s possible leading strategies (which is valuable but difficult and extremely time consuming to do thoroughly), we can make strong decisions by considering how to play our own range.

These are some of the questions I ask myself during hand reviews:

1) How does each player’s range interact with the board?

2) How often can I fold without allowing villain to profitably bluff very wide?

3a) What hands do I want to raise for value?

3b) Which/how many bluffs do I want to raise?

4a) What are my best hands for calling?

4b) What are my easiest folds?

5a) How often do I expect villain to barrel the turn?

5b) Considering barrel frequency and possible turn cards, should I consider folding more or less than my answer to question 2?

6) What other hands can I call so that I am not overfolding?

This is not an exhaustive list of things to consider but, in my opinion, a very strong starting point. For question 2 you can use Minimum Defense Frequency as an anchor, but you want to adjust it (sometimes very heavily) based on range advantage. For all of the questions it’s important to consider not only the strength of our hand but also which hands we block villain from having. For the range I assigned villain, holding AK takes their total combos from 78 to 68, and reduces the likelihood of some of their strongest holdings.

Questions 5a/b are somewhat subjective (if you’re going to skip any I would skip those) but important to consider so that we have a more robust plan for future betting rounds.

If you are so inclined, it would be very cool if you want to share your answers to some or all of these questions. I’m not pretending for a second that I know all (or any of) the right answers, but thoroughly analyzing these spots is a great way to improve our game.