Hello two+two,

long time lurker, first time poster here.

I'm a beginner and find I run into these problem hands quite often.

I'll get a medium strength pocket pair in early position and raise 3BB.

I'll often get re-raised from a villain in late position.

I find at this point I'm unsure of the right play. I tend to call and check the flop. But from there I play fit or fold depending on the board texture and whether I hit my set or not. I find I have difficulty calling a c-bet when I don't hit my set and a non-ace over card to my pair hits the flop. When I do call the c-bet I usually always fold to a second barrel on the turn.

I suspect this is a huge leak in my game.

Any tips?

Should I be folding these hands to the pre-flop re-raise?

Thank you,

P_Uber_Alles

Don't make a habit of calling 3-bets when you're OOP unless you're particularly deep-stacked and/or you know how to outplay the particular villain.
In the micros, villains don't 3-bet bluff light very often, so you can "overfold" much of your opening range, and just 4-bet the strongest hands when OOP.

Thanks Arty, your reply makes a lot of sense!

I appreciate the insight.

.

Do you play 6max or full ring. Any player will find themselves facing the same difficult decisions with mid pocket pairs if they flat 3bets oop. As general rule Im not folding to one bet on a flop with one overcard.

Theres obviously loads of variables [flop texture, villain, bet sizing] but folding to another barrel on the turn could be correct a lot. You cant just call down 3 streets with 2nd or 3rd pair in every hand.

This is probably why you should begin with folding them preflop. Folding anything up to 99 out of position against a range that is almost always value is the easiest way to fix the problem and probably even the least expensive.

The reason why it is so difficult is because you are out of position and postflop you are almost always way ahead or way behind. When you have a hand like QJs you often flop flush draws, overcards with backdoors, gutshots, openended straight draws and what not. When you are in one of those situations at least you know you are probably behind but could sometimes be really close to a 50/50 with all 5 cards. This makes the margin of error a lot bigger because calling with 40% equity isn't as big of a problem as calling with 11% equity.

With small to medium pocket pairs you are either calling with decent equity (75% vs two overs) or really poor equity (11%) so the situation requires extraordinary hand reading. You need to know your equity against different ranges on a whole lot of flops/turns/rivers which is why it's better to just avoid the situation as a whole as beginner.

Thanks to all who replied, I knew I came to the right place!

I will follow your advice and start by folding these type of hands to 3bets until I gain additional experience.

depends on the sizing. generally vs a pot sized reraise you should fold, but if they give u 4:1 what choice do u have