A friend of mine (cousin actually) has been playing casually for years and recently started playing online and moved from $1-$2 live cash games at our local casino to the $2-$5 games I sometimes play in. The games are MUCH MUCH tougher than your standard live $1-$2 game, one reason is they spread no bigger games so the best players hang out here.

"Cousin Matty" has played a decent amount online and is about a break even player at micro stakes, has actually won a tiny amount over a pretty long period but is moving up to nl50 or trying to.

He has been hitting me with a lot of questions lately, really good questions btw for his level of experience, and he finally hit me with one I not only could not give him a good answer to but that kind of shook me up a bit because I felt like I really ought to be able to answer this.

"Help me construct a button range for steal vs resteals" he said "And I can maybe take it from there." He reasoned if I could help him build a 3 bet range for button vs CO and then for UTG vs UTG1 then he could sort of fill in the gaps from there.

So maybe I could get some help on helping him with this question, here it is officially;

"Assume we are 100 bb deep. All unknown players at an anonymous site (Bovada/Ignition). I am on the button and the action folds to the C.O. who open raises to 3xbb. Everyone has 100bb. No stats on anyone at this stake and just started playing.
When CO opens for 3 times the bb and I am on the button with unknown players in the blinds I think I want to flat some hands and have a polarized 3 bet range. I know the types of hands I ought to use for balancing my value combos out (A2s-A5s, K9s, 54s, 98o type stuff that is almost good enough to flat call and has some combo of blockers and playability/equity vs villain's likely continuance range) I know I want to use hands that give me good board coverage and that i don't want to waste hands like ATs and KJs that I can just flat call with and take a flop in position likely with card edge. But I don't know or really understand how to know how many combos I ought to 3 bet to balance my range.
If I plan to 3 bet something like half my 99, all my TT+, half my AQ and all my AKs/o, how many hands should I use to 3 bet light with?"


That was his question and, sadly, I don't know the answer or how to go about figuring it out. I think I focus almost entirely on reads and HUD stats and I really don't have too many light 3 bets in my game until I know my opposition a bit.

The truth is, the only hands I will 3 bet light with from the button vs CO open are exactly A2s-A5s without reads. I usually 3 bet TT+, AQ+ and A2s-A5s as my default range and I think I do a reasonable job adding bluffs/depolarizing/ switching to suited connectors/adding more blocker hands like K9s and K8s when the situation warrants it and I will often drop my value range to include hands like KQ and AJ with a bit of info. But I really don't know what to tell him.

If you were coaching a guy who just asked the question above what would you say?

Or what about the simple question; "How do we know how many bluff or light 3 bet combos we ought to have in our range based on the number of value 3 bets we want to use? Should we look to get that 2 to 1 value to bluff ratio based on the pot odds we are offering (assuming we 3 bet full pot and give villain 2 to 1)? Or can we add more bluffs because we will either get to see the flop and realize equity with our light hands or be given the chance to do some 5 betting.. one of those has to be true, right?

Yeah..

He asked a pretty basic question and Im at a loss. Any help would be much appreciated.
TY