Playability and Blockers: The Keys to 3-Bet Bluffing

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When we as MTT players are first learning the game, one of the most difficult parts of MTT strategy is to wrap our heads around what it takes to open up our game and start playing more aggressively. Gaining an understanding of what constitutes a good spot to 3-bet bluff, for example, is one thing that often requires a certain amount of trial-and-error. This is natural, and like anything else, the more trials you put yourself through, the fewer errors you make.

However, there are obviously a few ways in which we can improve the efficiency of our 3-bet bluffs without trial and error, and one important factor is the way in which we select the hands which will constitute our 3-bet bluffing range in a given spot. In this article, I’ll try to give some insight into two of the primary factors which make certain hands good for 3-bet bluffing, and certain hands a lot worse.

Playability and what it means

The first factor is the playability of a hand. In short, this refers to how easy it’s going to be to play postflop, if play gets to that point. An example of a hand with good playability might be something like 10-9 suited – it can make a some reasonably strong pairs, it can make strong flush and straight draws, and when you add together the possibility of making a value hand with the fact that being able to flop a lot of draws is going to give us the ability to win the pot on later streets a lot of the time, it’s hypothetically a very good hand for us to be 3-bet bluffing with. Flopzilla shows us that 10-9 suited will flop at least middle pair or a decent draw 49.2% of the time.

Conversely, compare this to a hand like J-7 offsuit. Ostensibly it might seem like a hand with some kind of playability – it has two live cards versus Ace-King, for example, and is technically a three-gap connector that can make some straights – but in reality, it’s extremely weak compared to 10-9 suited. It only hits the flop for at least middle pair or a decent draw 31.7% of the time, which gives us a lot less to work with in terms of playability – particularly because we’re a lot less able to fire multiple barrels postflop when there aren’t many draws we can flop. Thus, we can see the benefit of 3-bet bluffing with a hand like T-9 suited as opposed to J-7 offsuit, and this benefit is enhanced as stacks get deeper and the likelihood of players flat-calling our 3-bets increases.

Blockers and their impact

Another major factor to consider is the impact of our own hand on our opponent’s range. Our having a certain card in our hand reduces the likelihood of our opponent having that card. The most common instance of this effect is when we have an Ace in our hand. If we do, it reduces the possible combinations of A-A in our opponent’s range from 6 to 3; it reduces the combinations of Ace-King from 16 down to 12; it can reduce the overall number of combinations in their range by around 8-9%.

What this means is that in instances where we might expect our opponent’s 4-betting or flat-calling ranges to include a fair amount of Ace-x hands (a logical assumption, since many of the strongest hands in the deck contain an Ace), our having an Ace in our hand directly increases the effectiveness of the 3-bet, by ensuring that our opponent’s calling and 4-betting frequencies are slightly lowered.

This effect is also true of other blockers, to a lesser extent – having a King or Queen blocker is certainly better than nothing, and having two broadway blockers, such as a hand like Q-J offsuit, can actually have a more significant impact than one Ace in some circumstances. Broadway blockers are often more useful for blocking our opponents’ calling ranges, rather than blocking their 4-betting ranges – since our opponents are more likely to flat-call our 3-bets in general when they’re in position, this gives an added appeal to 3-betting out of position with hands that contain two broadway blockers, since we’re less likely to get flatted and have to play postflop out of position.

Once again, stack sizes matter greatly here – at shorter stacks, such as around 25 big blinds, the value of an Ace blocker becomes even more significant, since our opponents are less likely to flat-call 3-bets at these stack sizes, and thus when we have a blocker to a significant portion of the hands they would be comfortable 4-bet shoving versus our 3-bet, we then see a sizeable increase in the profitability of our 3-bet. This is why 3-bet bluffing with Ace-blocker hands at stacks of 30 big blinds and under can be such a profitable play.

The relationship between your ranges

It’s crucial to consider, when choosing your 3-bet bluffing ranges, that a certain range of hands is likely to be more profitable when played as a flat-call in many spots, as opposed to a 3-bet bluff. Hands like King-Queen suited or pocket sixes are likely to be very awkward when used as 3-bet bluffs – they have so much postflop playability and potential that we waste them when we 3-bet and have to fold to a 4-bet, and the amount of value we gain from 3-betting them is minimal unless our opponents are calling 3-bets extremely wide.

Thus, it’s important to establish whether we have a calling range in a given spot, and what that calling range is, before we decide on our 3-bet bluffing ranges. The wider our calling range, such as spots where we’re in the big blind facing a minraise, then the more polarized our 3-betting range becomes, since our 3-betting range is restricted to hands which are either strong enough to 3-bet for pure value, or too weak to flat-call. However, we would still like to have as much postflop playability and value as possible in the event that our 3-bet does get called. In many instances, therefore, it makes sense for our 3-betting range to begin at the point where our flatting range ends – if we decide that J-T suited is the bottom of our flatting range, for example, then T-9 suited is probably one of the better hands to 3-bet bluff with.

Issues of balance

Balance is a difficult concept to get one’s head around, since it is both inherently connected to ideas of GTO or unexploitable play, and simultaneously very differently applied. In general, it’s a more broad concept that refers to the way our opponents perceive our ranges, and the overall ratio of value bets to bluffs that our ranges contain. In general, a balanced ratio of value bets to bluffs will contain about two value bets for every bluff – we want to be bluffing sometimes, but not too often (see Daryl Jace’s video series on the mathematics of 3-betting for more details on this concept).

Thus, if you find yourself in a spot where there are very few hands you could be 3-betting for value, bluffing frequently in those spots is going to result in a very unbalanced range. This isn’t always a bad thing if your opponents aren’t responding to it appropriately, but it’s worth considering that in a spot where, for example, we’re 3-betting 99+ and AQ+ for value (68 combinations of hands) then we only need 34 combinations of bluffs in order to be balanced. In this spot, depending on stack sizes and our flatting range, all we would need to do in order to calculate a balanced 3-betting range would be to figure out which are the best 34 combinations of bluffs to include in our range. If the villain was folding too much to 3-bets, we could include a higher ratio of bluffs to value bets, and the opposite if they’re not folding enough.

A final thought

3-betting is a tough concept to master because it’s so all-encompassing. It requires us to have a read on our opponents’ opening ranges, their responses to aggression, their play at certain stack sizes, the situation in the tournament, their own read on us and our tendencies, and all kinds of other factors. It’s natural to make mistakes sometimes, so don’t beat yourself up if you get into some difficult spots when experimenting with 3-betting ranges. It’s much better to be the aggressor and have two ways to win the pot rather than one, so if you’re playing low-stakes MTTs and having a tough time of it, perhaps now is the time to work on upping your aggression level and adding more 3-bet bluffs to your game.