When you first start out in poker, it’s very easy to get caught up thinking a lot about what ‘style’ is best to employ at the tables – should you be the aggressive type who gets into a lot of 3-bet pots and runs big bluffs, or should you be the more passive, flat-calling, ‘trappy’ type of player who takes advantage of your aggressive opponents? These broader questions of strategy can often be witnessed in actions within the course of a single hand – should you 3-bet with that Ace-Jack suited, or just flat-call in position? Which has more value?
Well, in order to figure that out in a more precise way, it takes a bit of time and practice, and a solid understanding of how you expect your opponent to respond with different parts of their ranges. However, with the help of a couple of useful pieces of software (mostly HoldemResources Calculator, CardRunnersEV and Holdem Manager 2) we can do some broader calculations and derive some useful information from them that will help us to make some rough approximations of which option is better in which circumstance.
Calculating preflop edges
If you’ve ever done any work with HoldemResources Calculator (which you probably should have – it’s pretty crucial for understanding short-stacked MTT play), then you’ll know that there’s a wide variation in how profitable certain preflop plays can be, whether it’s an all-in open-shove, a 3-bet, or any other bet beyond that. I’ve run calculations where a 10bb preflop shove with a trashy hand turned out to be +2bb in EV because of how often the opponent(s) were folding, and I’ve run calculations where getting it all-in preflop for 100bb turned out to be a question of 0.1bb either way based on the villain’s range.
What’s most relevant here, however, are the numbers regarding 3-betting decisions. I’ve seen students of mine fall into the trap of seeing that it makes them 0.5bb per hand to 3-bet with pocket nines in a certain spot, and assume that’s the right play by default – because after all, it’s profitable, right?
Well, while it is true that we need to have some evidence to the contrary in order to turn down a profitable play preflop, we’re not just looking to take any profitable play we can find at the table. We’re looking to take the most profitable play we can find in every spot. So we need to dig a little deeper in order to find out whether 0.5bb per hand is an acceptable profit margin, and thus whether 3-betting is really the right play in this spot.
Calculating postflop edges
There’s a distinct problem we run into when trying to calculate the EV of a spot where there are so many potential outcomes to come after the first action we take – we simply can’t account for every possible runout of the flop, turn and river, and we can’t do anything more than make a vague estimate of how profitable it might be to, say, flat-call the 99 in the above spot instead. Or can we?
Well, the answer to this depends on what kind of data we have to work with. If we’ve put in enough volume and been diligent with the maintenance of our hand history files, we might have built up a big enough sample of hands in our HM2 or PT4 database (once again, if you’re not using one of these programs, you should be) that we can actually start to analyse what happens over a large sample of hands when we do certain things preflop. For example, I’ve analysed databases for my students where they were playing at -20bb/100 hands in spots where they called 3-bets – this means they’re losing 0.2bb every time they call a 3-bet, no matter what their hand. These statistics come from big samples of thousands of instances, so they’re about the best metric we can get by which we can measure the average quality of the decisions we make after we make a certain decision.
What happens a lot in these situations, therefore, is that we’ll see a marked difference between the types of profit margins we see when we run preflop calculations in a program like HoldemResources Calculator, and the kinds of profit margins we see over large samples in HM2, because those large samples account for the skill level of the player making the future decisions. If we extrapolate the 3-betting decision we talked about before, where we made 0.5bb/hand, we know we’re making 50bb/100 with that play, which seems fairly solid at first glance.
However, if you take the time to look at your database, you may find that there are some specific types of spots in which you make a lot more than 50bb/100. For example, I just searched a random sample of 1.2 million hands I have stored on my laptop. These hands come from all over the past five years on various sites, and were all played by me. I searched for instances where I flat-called a preflop raise with a pocket pair from 66-99 at effective stacks of 100bb or more. The result? Over 738 instances, I’m winning at 302bb/100 hands! That’s 3bb/hand on average, every time I flat-call in that spot. If I were to assume that 0.5bb/hand is the most I could ever make in that spot, I’d be losing out on some EV.
The relationship between the two
There’s another factor here we need to consider – the value of postflop play in 3-bet pots. There are many instances where we’ll make a little bit of money 3-betting a certain hand and a lot of money by flatting and playing it postflop, but even more money by giving ourselves the chance to play it postflop as the 3-bettor. This, obviously, adds to the profitability of 3-betting in these circumstances, but figuring out when these circumstances are arising can be difficult.
How do we know the difference between a spot where a 0.5bb/hand 3-bet decision is going to lead to a 5bb/hand postflop spot, and a spot where the same 3-bet decision could lead to a breakeven or even -2bb/hand postflop spot, for example? Well, it comes down to two things in particular – opponent tendencies, and position.
If we’re up against an opponent who likes to flat-call 3-bets a lot and very rarely 4-bets preflop, then we’re likely to be in a situation where our 3-bet is often going to lead to postflop play, a situation in which we would hope to have a very solid edge on our opponent thanks to our stronger range overall (and, presumably, our skill edge postflop). This is going to frequently give us chances to profit over and above the 0.5bb/hand we gained purely by 3-betting, and in many circumstances may allow us to make more than the, say, 3bb/hand we might gain by flatting.
However, if our opponent is aggressive and is likely to 4-bet bluff preflop, folds to 3-bets very often, or has a very tight preflop range in the first place, the 0.5bb we make by 3-betting is likely to be the most we’re ever going to get – postflop play is going to happen much less often, giving us fewer opportunities to exercise our edge. Thus, there could be more benefit to flat-calling and ‘keeping our opponent’s range wide’, so to speak.
Where does position come in? This is fairly simple. Playing in position is going to either increase our postflop edge, or neutralise our disadvantage. Playing out of position will do the reverse. Thus, in situations such as the above examples, we should consider that there will be occasions where our position makes 3-betting a more attractive option. It’s not out of the question that if we’re not a particularly strong postflop player, there will be some out-of-position preflop flat-calls that quite simply don’t make us any money at all, or lose us money (thus making 0.5bb/hand for 3-betting a respectable rate of return), and vice-versa – if we’re a strong postflop player, there will be times where our positional advantage (and potentially our opponent’s postflop weakness) can turn a 3bb/hand single-raised pot where we’re not the aggressor, into a 5bb/hand 3-bet pot where we have the initiative.
Making judgment calls
Of course, many of us don’t have access to the kind of database that lets us know exactly how well we play in these situations, and using our overall winrate to determine our decisions isn’t always going to help us that much. The main thing is to work on developing an instinct for which decisions are most profitable in which spots, and that’s something that only comes with time and effort, unfortunately.
The art of making judgment calls as to the profitability of a certain spot requires a good read on your opponent, and an ability to read boards and situations, but above all it requires a good read on yourself. If you don’t think you play well in 3-bet pots and your opponent is the type of player who doesn’t like to fold to 3-bets, then making marginal 3-bets for value is probably not a good idea. Put yourself inside your comfort zone, because that’s where you’ll make the best decisions.
Similarly, if you’re up against a very good regular whom you know is a better player than you postflop, you’re probably better off 3-bet/folding that Ace-five suited in the big blind than you are playing check-and-guess over multiple streets. And of course, if the 3-bet isn’t profitable in the first place and neither is the flat-call, then you should just be folding preflop. Whether or not a certain preflop flat-call is profitable depends entirely on your own ability to play the situation postflop in a way that makes you money.
A final thought
To return to the original title of this article, you can see from the kinds of profit margins that are possible in postflop spots that postflop is indeed where the edge is, insofar as the potential per-hand winrate you can achieve is often much higher. But please don’t take that to mean you should always be doing your best to play postflop as much as possible – postflop play is a game of quality, not quantity.
Many players choose to interpret the idea of a ‘more postflop-oriented game’ as meaning that they should choose to play a higher percentage of hands preflop – that doesn’t have to be true at all. In fact, increasing your VPIP will often have the opposite impact on your postflop winrate, at least in the short term. Instead, simply focus on increasing the quality of the decisions you make in postflop situations – it’s making the best decisions that’s going to help you get into those rare 10bb/hand or 15bb/hand situations that allow you to chip up so rapidly in tournament play. Work hard, study the spots you find difficult, and your postflop comfort zone will expand.
