Hey guys,

I have a small sample of 70k hands and whenever I call 3b with SC i lost -2,67bb my standard open size is 2,5x.

How you guys doing with SC's? in 3b pots? If you doing better maybe you can give some tips of what kind of moves / floats we can make to increase our win rate with SC's?

With suited low broadways like JTs QTs QJs KTs I lost even more than with SC like 65s 76s....

If I start folding suited broadways and SC's my fold to 3bet will be over 66% and this way opponent will be able to exploit me by 3betting any garbage and making imediate profit

Looking for some ideas / suggestions / strategy how to combat 3bets.
Thanks

So you lose 0,17bb on average? Filtered for position I am pretty sure you lose less than folding except for UTG. You're not supposed to actually turn a profit with those hands anyways, just lose less than your open. If you could turn a profit with them there is a good chance they are good enough to 4bet with.

Still hands like QJs and stuff generally should be calls in position but are a lot tougher to play because you often flop second best hands with them as opposed to smaller connectors that are almost never dominated. Could probably improve on postflop play with those because many people misplay them.

Other ways to combat frequent 3betting are opening tighter and 4betting more frequently.

There's a lot of variance in the results for how well you do as a caller in 3-bet spots, so you really need very large sample sizes to draw firm conclusions. Your aim is to lose less than you would by just folding to the 3-bet, so over this sample, you'd literally have done better by doing just that (folding), but many of the "standard" calls vs 3-bets are extremely close to breakeven. It's not as if you're fist-pump calling when villain 3-bets and you have KQs. You're just trying to win enough pots to break even. Since the hands are so close to breakeven, with a little bit of runbad you'll be -EV, and with some rungood you'll be +EV.
When analysing your database, I would pay close attention to whether you are in position or OOP. It's extremely hard to play hands like KQs, QJs, JTs when OOP vs a 3-bettor, but you should do fine in the long run if you are in positon (e.g. on the button vs SB), provided you don't overplay your hand. Have a look at (or even post on the forum) some of the hands where you called a 3-bet with the hands that have been troubling you. Were the big pots all coolers, or did you make silly bluffs, or bad call downs?

FWIW, I just ran the "called 3-bet" filter on a similar sized database, and my heat map is a horror show. (My EV was about -2.75bb, but I actually lost much more than that due to runbad in all in spots).
But note the sample size. I only called 3-bets 179 times in about 80,000 hands, so some of the suited connectors were only in that spot 3 or 4 times (and it seems I never had T9s a single time in such a spot. #Variance). You can't generalize based on such minute sample sizes.

(I have no idea why I apparently called 3-bets with K7o and A4o. It might have been when I was shoved on by someone with a 7bb stack or something ridiculous like that).

P.S. If your opponents have very tight/strong 3-betting ranges, you can and indeed should, fold more often. You won't get "exploited" by over-folding, because they won't adjust. In fact, you would be exploiting your nitty opponents by not paying them off.

Thanks for the response. How are you doing with low suited broadways in 3bet pots? I lost -3.71bb when called 3bet so I lost more if I would have folded my initial 2.5x raise

When I watch higher stakes people often call 3bets with easily dominated hands not even suited like QJo KJo I wonder why that is?

Probably possible to make some profit with suited broadways and suited connectors IP with equity - by raising some flops which do not hit AK AQ type of hands.

You can see from my heat map that I actually made money (never mind limited my losses to less than 2.5bb) with K9s, Q9s and JTs when I called 3-bets, but lost money with KQs, QJs and all the suited connectors, but as I said, the results are subject to massive amounts of variance. (I lost money flatting 3-bets with queens FFS in this sample, but I'm not gonna start folding the 3rd best hand in holdem!)
I hardly ever call 3-bets with KQo/QJo/QTo, except when it's a min3-bet or it's BvB. Somehow I was profitable with all three of those hands when I called 3-bets with them, but the sample for those is about 5 hands in total. Note that AQo was a big loser when I called with it, but it's probably just a luck-based thing, where I got coolered for a stack. If I thought I couldn't break even with AQo in a particular spot, I'd fold. I'm not going to play a million hands to find out for sure whether it's +EV or not. I already know that it is, or least should be, in the spots where I call with it. (I never call a 3-bet with AQo if I'm OOP, as I'm fairly sure it's not a winning play).

I did a large database analysis on this earlier in the year. Like Arty said, you should check out results for each position individually but it requires a huge database. My database was over 1.5mil hands and some hands were still inconclusive. Few things I learned from my db (obviously my own postflop play/mistakes will make my results different from yours).

1. UTG was a real trouble position for me. Obviously being OOP to HJ-BTN never helps but in a large sample it was just mostly AA/KK when you get 3bet here (obviously I only see the hands that go to showdown so these results will be biased a bit). People just aren't playing back at UTG raises. Even the really spazzy guys weren't getting too out of line vs UTG.
   
   I was opening a tight UTG range so the majority of it still looked pretty facing a 3bet. Results were that JJ/TT were doing a tiny bit better than folding, AKo was ~breakeven. Everything else was doing worse than folding, mostly a lot worse. AQs, AJs, 99 etc would all have made more by simply folding to any 3bet. I was assuming wider ranges than my opponents actually had so these results could likely be improved, still quite surprising though.
   
   If anyone else has a large database would be interested in their results here.
   
   
2. BTN - over a large sample most offsuit broadways (KJo, KTo QJo, QTo, JTo)were losers when calling a 3bet from the blinds (folding would have performed better). Suited broadways were all doing better than folding but it wasn't by much.
   
   The big winners calling a 3bet btn vs blinds were suited connectors and 1-gappers for me. 76s/54s/75s/86s/64s were all doing better than their suited broadway equivalents. It's likely that QJs is still a better hand to call a 3bet and I was simply over-valuing any pairs that QJs made.
   
   Again, interested to see others results.
   
   
3. SB - It was hard to find a hand that wasn't profitable to call when facing a 3bet BvB. Likely due to plenty of players having wide 3bet ranges here. I'd have expected being out of position to be a bigger factor. I only open ~45% here though (I know plenty of guys, especially at Zoom, open a lot wider).
   
   

Edited to add: When doing the analysis I filtered for calling a 3bet over 7bb to remove most of the fish min3bets. Those will skew your results and make some hands perform better than they should.

All the above makes sense, and I would think that most winning players will have similar results.

Pretty obvious to see in that chart that hands outside the broadway square just don't make money. Except the time you flopped a set with 44.

I must have had some weird filters running when I grabbed the initial screengrab the other day. I just re-ran the "call 3-bet" filter on a sample of 80,000 hands of 2NL-10NL and got a larger sample size than before.



Even though there's some total junk in there, my total EV when calling 3-bets was actually only minus 1.35bb per hand, so calling was indeed better than folding for my range as a whole. 44 was particularly profitable because I actually flopped 3 sets out of 6 hands, and won a stack with one of them. 88 was less fortunate and flopped 3 sets in 36 flops, and got oversetted by aces on one flop and lost to a ridiculous backdoor straight vs a nutcase's A9o on another. QQ only flopped a set 7% of the time in the tiny sample size. Variance gonna variance.

It probably bears repeating to lurkers/newbs that if you run the "called 3-bet" filter in HEM and bring up a heat map, most of the hands will be losers (red). You just need them to be losing less than the amount you raised to in the first place.