I typically play 1/3 games where your average player is loose passive. They play too many hands preflop. Call with marginal hands on the flop. And generally don't show enough aggression when they should.

I've been wondering if I should abandon 3-betting altogether, with the exception of AA and KK, since it is much easier to play properly post flop with an inflated SPR.

Let's say after my 3-bet the SPR is now 2.5 rather than 10. My opponents decision tree has shrunk quite a bit and even a typically loose passive player will make far fewer mistakes (although the mistakes the make will be costlier).

Has anybody tried this strategy? Or can anybody offer some insight in why it will lose EV?

In a roundabout way, this is sort of how I approach my 1/3 NL game. I'm either looking to setup a very big SPR (where I'm not handcuffed to commitment decisions on early streets and can hopefully utilize my lolpostflop skillz to make decent decisions) or a very small SPR (where I happily handcuff myself to commitment with big TP type hands, so long as I didn't offer a world of players decent IO). I typically accomplish this from most non-LP spots my simply limping in (mostly to 3bet reraise), which works well at typically loose tables that see preflop being raised twice as often as being limped around. My limp/3bet range is most definitely not just AA/KK, however it isn't remotely light at all and always completely value heavy (TT+/AQs+/AK in general although could get wider/thinner dependent on factors); for example, limp/reraising AK with big dead money and non-deep stacks to setup SPRs of 1ish is printing money regardless of whether we get called or not (imo).

My guess is that it can really depend on the type of game you play in, especially with regards to stack sizes. If you're playing in a deep BI game, there's probably a pretty good argument for attacking loose raisers with loose 3bets in order to isolate while still leaving a fairly big SPR / lottsa play behind. But if you're playing in a more run-of-the-mill smaller stacked game, light 3betting is probably lighting money on fire as you're mostly just the table maniac versus a field that will end up with an overall tighter range against yours, imo.

ETA: Regarding 3betting versus flatting an open (say when we're in position facing a raise) also boils down to "it depends" for me. If there are lots of callers sandwiched inbetween, then there is lottsa dead money to go after so probably leaning to a 3bet (but again, for me, never light). But if there ain't any other dead money, or someone else might 3bet for me behind me, or if I flat we'll probably go HU anyways, or I'll likely end up in position anyways with a flat, or if raiser is on tight side and I'd hate to get 4bet to sacrifice all my equity, etc. then I'm fine with leaning to a passive preflop route and flatting with some hands that are in the bottom of my 3bet range in the first case.

Gbut,justoneidiotsopinion,andothersmaydisagreeG

I'll let others jump in, but a reason for 3betting is to get your villains to give up their equity in the hand. When 22 folds to your AK 3bet, it was actually ahead. Thats a big win.

I think you have the right idea, but for the wrong reason.

The reason you should rarely 3bet in these games with loose passives is because their raising range is stronger than you would expect. If you have TT or AJ and a loose passive limps, your hand is in great shape against their range. But against a raise? Well, since most of the range that you’re doing so well against is in their limping range...suddenly your hand may not be strong enough to go into a value 3bet range.

In my experience with loose passives, 3bets for value are best when you have a big pair and can get called by worse when you flop an overpair. If you think you can get away with bluffing, use a polarized range. But it still won’t be too big, because your value range won’t be.

Sure, if you want to take a tool out of your toolbox, feel free to. It's certainly not optimal though and you will lose value and your opponents will realize their equity more. I wish all my opponents stopped 3betting.

Opponent dependant. There are players who I'm only 3betting KK+ because their raising range is so strong. There others who I will hit with A5ss or 65ss because they have a fold button against me. There are others who raise wide enough and hate folding that KQo/AJo are 3bets for fat value.

Removing 3bets except the nuts is pretty bad TBH, I think it's better to be too tight than too loose but you lose a lot of value if you're simply never 3betting say AQo/AJss/TT with the aim of either isolating a weak player/picking up the dead money from overcallers.

Could you elaborate why you feel that in a weak game you lose value and opponents realize equity more.

I'm looking at hands like AK, AQ. On one hand 3 betting allows me to take down the pot immediately. On the other hand my opponents will fold hands like A2-A7 which probably stack off when an A flops.

I recognize that this strategy is not used and therefor likely has flaws I am not thinking of, but could you help me pick out specifically why I get more value from 3-betting AK AQ and negating my post flop edge over calling these hands and retaining a large post flop edge.

Are your opponents raising with A2-A7?? If so, they are not loose passives.

The best way to beat these super soft 1/3 games is to play a value-oriented strategy. Simplistically, that means you should be betting/raising anytime you have the best hand. If players are playing any 2 cards and/or raising bad hands, then I certainly wouldn't limit myself to just 3betting AQ+. There are all sorts of hands we could have that crush their 3bet calling range.

Can you beat the game by playing reasonable ranges passively? Absolutely. However, expect mediocre results like some of the members in this thread. If you want to crush then you need to play your hands for max value.

If this was a 5/T game vs highly aggressive opponents then it makes more sense to take some passive lines but vs a bunch of loose passives at 1/2 we should play our hands aggressively for value and we should expect the vast majority of these opponents will play their hands pretty face up against us. When we have a big hand, we want to grow the pot. When we have a small hand, we want the pot to be small. It's a pretty simple concept.

If they fold, they can't realize their equity. That being said, this is live low stakes where players are not disciplined and will often try to realize their equity with dominated hands.

BTW, if your 3bets are getting folds, then you should be 3betting wider, not tighter. Also, if 3betting negates your postflop edge then you need to work on your game. These opponents play all stack depths terribly.

The other issue is that you are welcoming hands into a multiway pot with a hand that doesn't necessarily play that well multiway. Then postflop it's going to be harder for you to fold the 2nd best hand especially because it's underrepped.

As an example if you call with AQo on the HJ you are inviting the CO and Button to call behind us (costing us position) with hands that have decent equity against AQ. Then if we flop an Ace or Queen we'll have a difficult time folding even if we are a very distant 2nd place. If we 3bet our hand preflop in this spot, we get the value when we are ahead, we fold out hands with equity, we maintain position, and if our opponent does cooler us it's not as big of a deal because stack depths are not as deep and we already got much of the value when we could (ie villain wasn't getting right implied odds to call, called anyways and binked a miracle flop...whereas if we just flat pre the miracle flop is far more likely because of more opponents and it's more costly due to stack depths)

I keep thinking about this and have read all the replies. While they're all reasonable replies, only one touches on post-flop - which is where it really matters.

I would suggest that you choose a few hands you 3-bet pre (win, or lose) and post them, because that's where you really need to work. A JJ hand from MP would be perfect.

If they are raising A2o they are probably raising 60%+ in which case you should be 3 betting hands like ATo and 88 for fat value.

I’m going to be harsh because this cancer keeps festering in this forum.

The answer to beating loose passive opponents isn’t to make less value bets. It’s to make more value bets.

Not only are you throwing away a ton of value preflop by not 3 betting the top of your range (and poker is a game where any value you don’t get, is value that your opponents do get), but you’ll be getting yourself in tons of dicey postflop situations where you’ll be faced with so many variables with deep stacks, that you’re bound to make errors.

Meanwhile, by raising and calling a 3 bet with an overly weak range, your opponent has already made a huge mistake. If you have an overpair in an SPR < 3 pot, he basically has no way of beating you in the long run, because he won’t outflop you often enough. Meanwhile, a 10 SPR pot multi-way, a stack off range is going to be much tighter, since even a drooler knows that middle pair is going to be good infrequently when 5 people see a flop.

I just don’t get why people want to let fish off the hook on the street that they all play the worst


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The biggest mistakes are made when some players 3bet from a chart and not even pay attention to their villains ranges and are frequently pressing buttons. However there are always good squeeze opportunities in these game types without a doubt as well as 3betting wider vs laggier players.

First I'll say no, you shouldn't do this. However, there is some merit to the idea. Imagine if you were playing an opponent who will always call no matter what, but never bet himself after the flop. Optimal strategy here is to check to the river 100% of the time, decide if your hand has >50% equity against his range, and either jam or check back. Even with AA, the horrendously bad postflop strategy will net you more EV by just calling and checking down than the 80% equity you can get preflop.

That example was made as extreme as possible to show the point, but in practice people aren't *that* bad.

Dream Crusher gets a gold star.

It seems like there are at least 3 relevant questions to think about here:

(1) Will 3betting allow us to build a bigger average pot by the river with our strong hands than if we flatted? (as DC discussed). There's potentially some argument to be made that against super nitty players we could extract more value from dominated hands by flatting, but in general I think the answer to this question is clearly "yes" and this is a factor in favor of 3betting.

(2) Even if we have the best hand, is there value in "forcing people out of the pot"? e.g, either (A) forcing the original raiser to fold a hand with some equity against us (as Venice said), or (B) we think we're likely to make better decisions in heads up rather than multiway pots (as DC said). I don't think (A) is super relevant. There's potentially some merit to (B), especially if the callers were ahead of us (i.e., dead money) rather than us trying to price out potential overcallers behind us.

(3) Even if we have the best hand, is there ever value in flatting to set up the correct SPR? Even jdr and GG agree (!!) that if we flop an overpair with SPR 3-4, our opponents can't beat us long term. So SPR <3-4 is great. If 3betting can get us there, we should totally do it. But if we're deeper and a reasonable 3bet would set up a more middling SPR of 7-10 while flatting would set up a deeper SPR of 20+, perhaps you could argue that's a factor that might cause us to be less likely to want to 3bet (I worded that very carefully, I'm not saying not to 3bet here, don't flip out at me).

I don't use a no-3-bet strategy, but I have had thoughts similar to OP. It's interesting to think about these different factors at least even if you don't do it.

First let's look at the main reasons we 3! at llsnl

- To isolate weak players
- To gain position post flop
- For value
- The occasional juicy squeeze spot
- Deny players left to act the opportunity to realize their equity

Why would we give all this up? If we entirely give up 3betting all hands but AA and KK we also become very easy to play against, we all have those players in our games so this needs no explanation.

Here's an example, that in my mind applies to your question about post flop:

V1 opens to $15 with A7 in mp
Hero calls HJ with Ak
V2 calls BTN with 109
V3 in SB calls with 56
V4 in BB calls with Q9

Hero has 29% equity, we're going 5 ways to the flop with no initiative and no real way to range the loose passive droolers at the table. We lost value pre flop against a worse hand that we would have had 68.5% equity against had V1 valled.

Where does your post flop edge come in here? Because there are going to be a lot of boards that are going to be very difficult to play.

Lets say the flop comes out K47. It looks innocent, but look again.

Whats the plan? I don't think you have retained your large post flop edge.

Obviously this is an extreme example and we can cherry pick others to prove points but your post flop edge in 3! pots is going to be larger heads up with position and initiative.

I also think its very villain and game flow dependent. But if we just flat, hope to hit our hand and value bet when we do... well then we're no different than the players we are surrounded by.

This also applies to my games (same stakes) where nobody bet folds pre flop and single raised pots often go 4-6 ways.

I totally get the point about how it's easier to make better decisions heads up, but in terms of raw equity, 29% of a 5-way pot > 69% of a heads-up pot. With our good hands, we generally don't gain pot equity (i.e., percent equity * pot size) by forcing people out -- we gain pot equity every time someone calls with a worse hand than ours.

Again, I'm totally sympathetic to the argument that we might make better decisions heads up than in 5-way pots, but some on this forum would say "we shouldn't be sacrificing EV to avoid having to make tough decisions" (sound familiar?)

I think I'm missing something?

But as far as your "pot equity" concept pre flop:

29% of a 5 way $75 pot is $21.75

If we 3! to $55 and the PFR calls, 69% of a heads up pot is $78.66 or we just take down $19 uncontested.

Is that what you meant? What am I missing?

Yes, absolutely, raising larger means more money in the pot which means our pot equity is larger. This is a good reason to raise. I was just questioning the idea of raising *specifically to stop people from overcalling*, because *for a certain bet size*, more callers with worse hands generates more pot equity than if they folded.

In other words, raising to build the pot is good — I was just questioning the idea of raising specifically to stop more people from overcalling, which you often see people advocate. (I’m not necessarily saying it’s a bad idea to raise to get heads up, just that the benefits of doing so aren’t captured by the “pot equity”/“EV” abstraction).

Maybe I need to go back and spend some time on this but I've always understood us to be kind of "bleeding equity" the more players call pre flop, and that in combination with giving up position, to me, is an unattractive spot. I've increased my 3betting in the last couple hundred hours specifically for these reasons and I like the (short term) results so far, but I believe they are very specific to the games I play in.

For example:

Loose V1 opens HJ with AQ
Hero mixes in a 3! in the CO to 3.5x with 99

We go heads up with a little over 52% equity and the value of initiative and position (is there a way to put an equity or $ amount on this?)

Or

Loose V1 opens HJ with AQ
Hero flats in CO with 99
V2 BTN flats with 10J
V3 BB completes with K6

Equities
V1: 34.74%
Hero: 21.2%
V2: 19.78%
V3: 24.15%

K6 suited is ahead!? really!? All hands that are individually worse than ours have joined forces to decrease our equity enough to make the flat call a decision we regret.

Again, an extreme, extreme example, but in combination with having no initiative and not being last to act, I think for OP this can be an example of how, actually, his post flop edge could be negated by just flatting.

A is highly relevant in online games. Few hands make more than +3bb EV, so if you can grab that uncontested with anything other than premiums, you are making out like a bandit. Checking my old database, only QQ+ made more than 3bb, even JJ was +2.66 and AKs was +2.38.

It'd be very interesting to see similar databases of millions of live hands from winning players. The win rates per hand would obviously be higher, but then raise sizes would also be higher so you make more when they fold. I think you'd still quickly reach a point where having them fold equity is beneficial but maybe more around AJs or AQo.

Let me put it another way.

You being a PFR and facing a 3bet is one of the most -if not the the most- minus EV situations in poker. When you find yourself in that spot, your strategy should be designed to limit those losses.

Who wins the EV you re losing?

All of those things you listed sound like reasons to 3-bet more, not less

This ^. 1000% this.

Why would you not raise wider if these are loose passive fish? They are going to overcall with suited ****.