I'm not sure what's going on but small/mid stakes GGPoker and Pokerstars MTTs used to be predominantly made up of Russian players but now it's Brazilians. Still the odd European and Canadian but it's as if the Brazilians have taken the place of the Russian players.

More to the point, they play so LAG and treat any ace, even A6o, like AA and if they hit then they rarely fold, even if a wet board, heavy aggression, or put all-in. Whilst it's tempting to scoff when your KK gets busted to a reckless pf call with 5 9, or a small pocket pair, the Brazilians make up well over 50% of FT players.

Has anyone else noticed this? Why the influx? Why are they playing like noobs from the 2002? Why are they so successful? And how do you counter when they 3 bet with any 2 cards?

If people are 3betting you too light then you can just open limp more to combat the pots getting as large OOP, you can also 4bet at a higher frequency. The reason to limp is they're wanting to steal what's in the middle so when you raise there's more out there so by limping they have a lower amount to steal.

You call them noobs yet you're asking how to combat people who 3bet light.

you need to get all in against them before they have a chance to shove

Who cares? Did that hurt your feelings?

calm down little guy

Correct. Previous poster wanted to virtue signal and feel good about himself. As evidenced by his insult to you. Apparently it's okay for him to have a pop at people but not okay for people to do the same to him.

poker is big is brazil, treated almost like a sport.

in order to combat 3bets first make sure your opening range is correct. Dont be over opening against players who will attack your opens. Second you can likely call 3bets, even out of position wider then you think.

hand example: you open from MP with 35 bigs to 2x you get 3bet by the aggro player on the btn to 6x, blinds fold

pot is roughly 10bbs now, its costing you 4bigs to win 10bigs. your getting 2.5-1 odds here.

Assuming your opening say 20% of hands. you can flat hands like AJ+,KQ,,ATs+,JTs and obviously getting in 1010+, maybe 99,AQs+

so in short just start by getting your opening range correct and then figuring out which hands you can call 3bets with (again wider then youd) expect. once youve nailed down those two aspects villain actually cant exploit you and also like poster above mentioned you could also incorporate a limping range if the guy is a spazz tard

You have basically one good punch that you need to make count entering a MTT, you can either snap raise all-in with a good hand, or one strategy that can work is trying to get heads up with a player that raises you just to be an asshat and go into aggression mode with re-raising to see if you can force the fold with their garbage hand.

Don't get discouraged, I had Aces cracked by 75s, someone just cold called out of nowhere and flopped a straight. I suggest isolating a good target as much as possible with a premium hand, and snap 3bet / 4bet them with the intention of going all in pre-flop, you must get a hand and a situation in your favor to give yourself the most edge to win.

EDIT:

I forgot to mention that you should try going in first and betting in position in normal bet sizes, and the players at the table may also appreciate that, I dropped into a table just now where another new entry did a snap all in call on me in the big blind, and now all the deep stacked players will not let him see a flop without his entire stack.