I've been thinking about this spot for weeks and I would love to hear what r/poker has to say. This particular spot is a good representative of a question I have been asking myself recently. If we don't have any prior information, should we have a 4bet jam bluff range? Or should we 4bet purely for value unless we know we are playing against a solid reg?

The Spot:

$11 8max reg speed (ten minute blinds) on stars.com. We are in the money with 50 players out of 700 left. Hero starts hand with 39 bb and Villain covers. V is on our immediate left. We've recently been moved to this table and only have a few hands on V. The only notable hand prior to this one came with V flatting AQo after an UTG open and floating a dry mid flop.

Folds round to H who opens 2.2x with 55 from CO. V 3bets to 6x. Hero??

These are the options as I see them having had plenty of retrospect (if anyone has any alternative views please comment!).

• 4bet call
• 4bet fold (can't say I love the idea of putting in near half of our stack pre and then folding)
• 4bet jam
• open fold to 3bet
• fold pre (meme’s aside I would just fold this hand from earlier position but from the CO and 39bb I think it has enough equity to open when folded to.)

[*]In my view we near not deep enough to open call a 3bet.


I will post the rest result of the hand later . TIA!

As default, you don't want to play big pots OOP so you have to fold to the 3b this time. You will have better hands to flat and better hands to 4b for value in your range. I will not 4b jam any hand here for 39bb.
Fold and take a note

Bencb recommends sometimes pushing low pocket pairs in this spots for around 20-25bb but I don't think this works on low stakes against unknows.
If you are really sure that V is a reg ( a good one, not the pseudo low stakes regs...) with bluffs in his range u can 4bet bluff there this spot

there is nothing wrong with folding in this spot. 4-bet seems like a massive overplaying.

My 4 bets here would be a shove. Whenever you can shove for 5x - 7x the size of the 3 bet that is the sweet spot for a 4 bet shove to really put your opponent in bad spots.

I would probably bluff here at a 1:1 ratio. 2:1 is balanced for a shove here, so while I will have a bluff range, it will be value heavy.

If you look from the villain's perspective, this makes a decent spot to have a 3 bet bluffing range. And every one bluffs. (Harrington rule of bluffs: everyone bluffs because everyone know they are supposed to bluff, so for every bet there is at least a 10% chance it is a bluff.)

So I would probably shove with JJ+ and AK+, call the next couple hands down like AQ/TT/99. (AJs/88 are borderline) Then need a few hands to add as a bluff. Since it is a shove, I would have the next best hands at my disposal to be my bluff range. For instance if I don't call with AJs/88 they are the top of my bluff range. Then I have AJ/AT/KQs all have blockers to big hands at my disposal as well. These would probably be my bluff range.

So with 55, that would be too low on my list and would be a fold.

Yes, you can have a bluff range, but you must be careful in your selection of hands to bluff. You can't just decide to bluff and spazz off because you feel like bluffing. You have to consider all of your options and if you need @50 hands to balance your range, choose the best 50 options that would be in your range. Just here, I know that AJ/AT/KQ = 48 total hands. If I choose them to be my range, I can stop there. Even if I call AJs, I would still have 44 hands. So if I had to get to 50, I can add in the next suited hand or next pair available. But considering the player pool, I would unbalance slightly towards value. A true balanced range for this bet size would be 80 bluffs at a 2:1 ratio over the value range. However, I think moving it closer to a 1:1 ratio is fine as it will still meet MDF standards here.

The original question, I do not think you should polarize much of anything at low limit MTTs online. Just play for value, especially in 4 bet pots. Players make such catastrophically huge mistakes that you can get the damage done on the flop or turn with less variance than pushing these non-existent edges vs unknowns OOP.

I don't see anything wrong with flatting his raise and set-mining. The raise will cost you 3.8 bb's into a pot of around 14.5 bb's (assuming antes are in play and full ring table.) As you point out the issue is that you are not too deep but I think I would flat as a preference to 4-betting pre. If I MUST pick off your list then I suppose I would fold it but I will sometimes go all-in in this spot depending on my mood and what I think about villain.

Thanks for your response jjpregler - really enjoyed reading your breakdown and I agree with that you have said. Thanks again, happy holidays!

Thanks for the responses everyone - had some interesting comments.

My Conclusion: Having posted this spot here and on r/poker and having received some good feedback - I think the default line unless we have specific information is to open fold to a 3bet. Against good players we can consider putting this hand into our 4bet bluff range but in this scenario it would generally be a bit of a punt.

Outcome: In this particular scenario I elected to take a high variance line and 4bet jammed. My thinking being that even mediocre to weak players know that they should raise the button. A stronger player will know that my CO range is probably going to be quite wide. I felt a large percentage of the time I was going to get a fold which is a huge win and when I do get called I would have pretty decent equity. In the end Villian tank called with AJo and got there. Thanks for your input everyone, happy holidays!

Thats a really awful call off by villain. He is certainly not a reg making that call with aj off