Just watched a podcast by splitsuit sweeny where he suggested QQ from MP against an EP OR should be a cold call and not a 3-bet. That surprised me. I have always put this in my 3-bet range especially not wanting to let the CO or button call behind and have position on me. He was commenting on this very situation. If you are only 100 BB deep and you 3-bet and get 4-bet, you really cannot continue OOP with this hand. So something to think about.

He was making the point about reasons to 3-bet. One was to make better hands fold. That will not happen. Two was to get worse hands to call. He was suggesting we were playing against a reasonably good UTG player who would not make too many calling mistakes or post-flop mistakes. So if we 3-bet and UTG correctly folds the bottom of his range, we don't really gain much advantage. We simply pick up his small bet of 3 BB's when he correctly folds. But this will only happen maybe 30% of the time and another 30% of the time we may be facing his 4-bet. But if we cold call and we make a hand or he makes a continuation bet with AK on a ten-high flop, we extract value from him.

His third and final reason for betting was to deny pot equity to other speculative hands. I think this is an over-simplification and leaves out at least one other major reason for betting and that is to gain positional advantage over our opponent(s).

So, I still think I prefer 3-betting in this situation against most players who will call too much but his main point was some players will correctly fold to your 3-bet and in those situations you should probably just cold call. I hate the idea of letting the CO, Button and possibly even the BB come in for a single raise and me having to play in the middle in a 4-way pot. I think Splitsuit was assuming the other players were tight and recognized the strength of our cold call as everyone else in his hand example folded. But against a table full of fish and TAGs I still favor a 3-bet here.

But had we cold called and the button had 3-bet, we could easily call the 3-bet and peel one off to try and set mine with our stack sizes. So maybe that would have been the better play as the TAG on the button would likely not call on button with a very wide range against an EP OR and a MP cold call.