I'm currently creating a balanced defending range that involves me 4betting around 30% of my range in a specific spot. The only thing I'm unsure about is should i be defending 30% of my pfr in this spot or 30% of my rfi (raise first in)?

Thanks

What's the difference between the two? Seems like your PFR includes limps and your RFI doesn't. Is that the only difference or am I missing something?

Also do you have a call 3-bet range OOP or are you only defending by 4-betting?

PFR includes and hands you've raised (isolating limpers, 3betting etc)

RFI is where there has been no action in front of you and you raise.

As for your final question, I will have a 3bet calling range but I'm gonna use my 4betting range as a starting point that I can work from.

I've been thinking about this subject too recently. My thoughts:

RFI range is where I believe you should be working on as you generally are facing the same situation in any hand you play. This assumes you are working with your standard opening raise of BB and expected 3 bet raise range you face - therefore you have a clearly defined pot size range in terms of BB to help your equity/EV calcs.

PFR is a different scenario based on the fact that you have action before you. Assuming a limper or 2 in front, the ranges of the possible 3bets (both in terns of hands & chips) after your raise may require consideration and revising against a RFI scenario. Basically, compared to the RFI scenario, there are more variables that may influence the pot size and equity/EV calcs that will help define the range you are working on.

I never understood players players would map out specific 4 bet rules to follow when every situation is different but then again I never really seriously played cash games online before so I'm only questioning to try to understand.

Are you assuming random limpers and random players 3 betting with no history? Wouldn't it depend on the opponents stats? Would your decision change if the limper was very tight, short stacked, and limping into an aggressive table? Would effective stacks ever play a roll? Do you never raise/call? Does it depend on position raises or if it's coming from the blinds? Are you only raising for value or polarizing to some degree and removing some broadway hands.

In live games this is a very situation dependent question so maybe it's just an issue of always playing similar stacks vs a pretty narrow bandwidth of thinking for a given level but wouldn't that change depending on the stakes? It just seems like it still depends on a lot of things? Maybe many are just implied understood as being exceptions.

Not trying to critique, just trying to understand.

Playing with a mostly robotic style can be beneficial when you're multi-tabling and have less actual time to think about every decision.

When you get deep into multi-tables, a lot of decisions boil down to a function of "is it more +EV for me to put valuable time into thinking this situation out completely against this particular villain and making the right exploitative play, or restricting myself to one of two options in this spot and simply adding another table to my rotation since I'll be taking less time with each hand".

I see, this clears up a lot of online cash game posts. Thanks.

It's less about time considerations and more about designing ranges that aren't easily exploitable so that you have a default schema or gameplan you can rely on when you have little or no information about your opponent, or when you're facing tough/balanced opponents who aren't easily exploitable.

Exactly this.

I think that the best way to go about this is to use a program like CREV. Before you assign default ranges for your self, you should make assumptions about what villain's range is despite the fact that they are unknown by using information we have on the player pool as a whole.

I do think that if you are playing anything below $1/2 online you will probably find that you are rarely going to be able to defend your opens as much as 30% against an unknown. When you are in mid to late position you should be widening your range quite a bit especially if there are unknowns to your left and you have a lot of hands played at that stake( unknowns will turn out to be rec players more often the larger your sample of the player pool). But you are going to be unknown to the unknown players you encounter so their 3betting ranges may not be adjusted for your wider ranges from mid to late position.

Basically, if somebody is 3betting a static range of JJ+/AK with just a few bluff combos against your 25% CO open you are making a big mistake if you try to 4bet 30% of the time.

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious with regards to unknowns.

Against tougher opponents I can see why you would want some sort of sound not very exploitable strategy to fall back on and you can probably come up with one using CREV. The thing is, you are probably leaving a lot of money on the table by not constantly adjusting because if this villain is 3betting you often enough to raise concern then it shouldn't take long for a 4bet/5bet dynamic to emerge in which case the best strategy to take is probably going to look quite different from the safe strategy you devised previously. For example, initially you might figure that it is best to flat AQs against there 3bet or obvious reasons but just a few orbits later it might be best to 4bet/get it in vs a ship.

Another thing to consider ( sorry if tldr)) is most of the time you need to worry about this stuff you will be facing aggression from a player that is heavily polarized. I don't think it makes sense to be 4betting the bottom half of your value range against these guys. Like if they are flatting with TT against your open then why would you want to 4bet JJ?

raise first, definitely. If i were you id be looking a bit more into the math bc your numbers seem a bit off. i.e I dont see a spot where 4betting 30% of your range can be balanced unless you're going broke extemely wide

I would have to agree with Lazy Ace and angeles with regards to finding less exploitable re-raise ranges at 100bbs deep.

The gap rule, domination factors, and % of premiums vs multiple opponents, prohibits profitable re-raise strategies that are designed to fold/showdown results. You must have either a -EV R/F gap, -EV re-raise range, or include a profitable calling range.

GTO play has only been shown to work when extremely short with a few BBs. I imagine that a 20BB stack can possibly work with sufficient mistakes by opponents but even those will be taking a significant number of flops.

There is no profitable raise/fold only pre-flop strategy at 100 BBs deep without other players who will be making even bigger mistakes, but for 1 street poker, these should be few and far between.

I would also like to add that when capping a calling range with a re-raise range, your calling range is obviously losing value rapidly as well as becoming far more exploitable post flop by being too narrow to represent enough boards and too transparent.

Therefore as stacks get deeper, you must sacrifice marginal re-raise range value in preference of calling range value but of course this must also include skill edges in post flop play.

Thanks for the post.

The situation is basically that there are a few regs, maybe 3 possibly 4, in my games who make life difficult in this spot. I've looked at each of them individually to find specific leaks that I can exploit in terms of them folding too much to 4bets etc but nothing too obvious jumps out at me against these particular villains so I'm basically looking for a sort of baseline strategy against them that I can then deviate from when it's +EV.

I've actually done some calculations and when defending 30% by 4betting my range should be weighted with 40% of it for value (will call a shove) and 60% bluffs if I'm playing an optimal opponent. Now obviously I'm not playing an optimal opponent but baseling strategy yadda yadda. This has given me the following possible ranges

1) Value: QQ+ AQ+, Bluffs: A2s - ATs
2) Value QQ+ AQ+, Bluffs: A2s - A6s, KQ

Now playing FR I know that calling with AQ is gonna be bad so I'm gonna deviate from 4betting 30% by calling with AQ instead of 4betting.

One thing I've noticed from this little exercise is how important it is to go beyond the basic stats we have. For example, one villain is 3betting my MP opens 6% which makes it look as though we shouldn't have much of a 4bet bluffing range but on further inspection I've found that he's 3betting 10% and 12% respectively from the CO and BTN v my MP opens, in which case I'm definitely opening up my 4bet bluffing range, especially given how strong my perceived range will be in these spots (until villain notices my adjustment - if he ever does)

If I defend only by 4betting then anything less than 30% allows villain to 3bet any two and profit. The 4bet range isn't all for value though or else I definitely would be going broke.

Watch WCGrider's vids, there are some free ones on youtube I think in the vid he is 4 tabling like 100nl or something like that and goes in to this subject and explains it fairly well. Long story short, he claims that he will never flat a 3 bet almost every unless getting great odds to do so and preaches a 4 bet or fold philosophy fairly strong. These are synopses of the vids but thought I'd share because i struggled with this myself for a while and became much more profitable especially from the blinds given these situations.

The only problem I have with not having any calling range at all in these spots is that it allows villain to be completely polarised against you (if they know you'll never call) and I think that just encourages them to open up their 3betting range even more. I know that I love playing against people who either 4bet or fold and weight my 3bet range very heavily towards bluffs but that's probably because they aren't 4betting enough.

why would you want to do that? also your numbers definitely seem to be off.

Id take a look at your numbers again, and develop a calling and 4betting range that achieves somewhere between 50-60% fold to 3b in these oop spots if youre finding it hard to deal w/

Why are the numbers off? I've based them on bet sizing and various articles/books I've read. If they are off can you expand on that and explain why etc?

Thanks

I think it's a fallacy in a lot of spots in poker to believe you need to defend x% of your range against resteals in order to prevent villains from auto profiting on any two cards.

Look at big blind vs button as an example. A decent player on the button open raises, the SB folds and we are in the BB. This is a spot where we have to accept that we are going to lose money in the long run because we can't overcome positional disadvantage + having to post money blind regardless of our cards given our opponent is competent.

So if we accept that we are going to lose money in this spot where should we allocate that loss? If we construct a range that is wide enough to prevent villains bluffs from having any immediate profit then we must be losing money on later streets since we aren't losing preflop? Or our range is wide enough that we are infact making mistakes preflop that we are simply punished for on later streets.

I think that open raising in say mid position and facing a 3bet from a good player is going to put us in a very similar situation. It should be 0EV or better to open each hand in our range otherwise why would we open it right? Our EV from the bottom of our range comes from these 2 sources: a) winning the hand without a showdown either pre or post or b) getting value post flop on good boards.

Now given that the bottom of our range is going to be 0EV or slightly higher, it makes sense that the times we are getting 3bet we are losing money but hopefully we can make that up by stealing blinds or getting to flops against bad players in the blinds.

If players left to act are good and aggressive then we can tighten up our range a quite a bit since they don't allow us to steal pots uncontested often enough.

But what if the conditions at the table are such that a very wide opening range is warranted in spite of the fact that we are being exploited now and again by 1 particular good regular to our left?

Imagine we are in the CO, a good tough regular is BTN and there are 2 big fish in the blinds. You could argue that being exploited by the BTN 3betting us close to 20% of the time is acceptable if we were still profiting overall by opening 40% of the time because of how massively EV it is to play pots against the fish. In this scenario, trying to play GTO after we get 3bet seems like a pretty big mistake when we are already playing a massively exploitable strategy. But if that strategy is hugely EV then that is a trade off we should be ok with.

Sorry again if tldr but I have one more thought on this topic. If we are at a table where we need to stay because of fish to our right and are forced to deal with good regs to our left, we can tighten up a lot when the fish is not in the hand. It's not likely that the reg at the level you are playing is going to notice this adjustment on this one table. Then when you start playing back at their 3bets at a very high frequency it could very easily throw them for a loop thinking you are playing back much wider than you really are.

As an example, you have 3 aggressive players to your left and you are in the CO. Suppose you normally open 20% in the CO. What if you dropped that down to 10% and started 4betting 50% of that? Your range is still going to be really strong especially when you face a 5bet you can comfortably stack off with a pretty strong range and frustrate regs by appearing to always have it.

I think it should be easy to come up with a modified short stack strategy when joining a table with LAGs on your left.

Your short stack should at least be able to neutralize most of the aggression in position edge and even flip/flop it if you play it well and they don't adjust correctly. Of course you'd have to come up with a whole new kind of short stack strategy for this particular layout but its only 1 or 2 streets so it shouldn't be that difficult. Just run a bunch of equity calculations since you'll be shoving either pre-flop or flop.

The nice thing is if you play a short stack for an edge when LAGs are on your left if they leave you can then cap and your problem is solved.

Down the road if you maintain this strategy X% of the time when the table favors it, you'll be distorting players DB on you which I think is hilarious.

Finally you can play more tables when adding a mix of short stacking.

No offence but I'd take up self-harming before I took up short stacking.

I think this depends on skill level of player highly, with a novice/break even player they are most likely having trouble post flop, especially out of position. At the majority of live games say 2/5 and under and most live MTT's ummm $250 or less it is much better option? (numbers are just random and not well thought out FYI) The problem lies in when other players are able to adjust fairly quickly like you said, but for the break even player I think it's better than trying to hit the flop hard or donking in to somebody after missing a flop.

Balance is so important and a wide range of stakes (we'll say cash games) the pre-flop edge is very very low. Can we assume that 4b is almost essentially the new 3b and can we assum we are rarely getting flatted by anything less than QQ,AK+? It's hard for me to speak as a whole though as I've experienced drastic changes when jumping stakes (I play anything from 50NL to 1000NL back in the day) I believe this is a topic that can go on and on but so much of it depends on your table image, game flow, etc..A healthy balance of both is obv ideal and I think you know your answer already. But I would try and find some of the vids I was talking about and maybe it could help identify new spots.

sorry just saw this now.

depending on the sizing your fold to 3bet needs to be ~65% to ensure that a villain doesnt auto profit by 3betting u with atc in a given spot.

if we take the button as an example where most players are opening 50-65% (lets use 55% for this example), we need to defend 55*.35 ~19%. From there just doing some math on 4b numbers can give us an appropriate bluff/value 4b range and then the rest of our defense we can be calling. (keep in mind that these numbers are simply so we're not being exploited)

oop if we look at the co for ex. v btn steals, assuming a 30% co open we need to defend only 10.5%~. being oop in a resteal spot, I'm fine with us going broke a bit wider, which will allow us to 4b bluff a bit more, but there is still going to be a good portion of our range that we need to defend by calling unless we wanna be going broke with 66 every time in that spot.

In that spot if we're trying to defend only by 4betting, then we're going to be 4b folding/bluffing far too much unless we're 4b/calling some very very marginal hands which will play very poorly in 4b pots oop. Keep in mind too that this is only to achieve an unexploitable fold to 3b (you will yield higher better results folding much less, which further prevents us from just 4betting as our defense oop)


edit- also in response to the polarization, it is still going to be best to be polarized v u if you're folding 60+% to 3bets, even if your defense includes calling a decent portion of them

+1

If villain is only shove/fold after your 4B and you fold these to a shove:

AXs, KQs, AQo, KQo

You've effectively put the top of your 3B calling range into your 2B/fold range.