Through extensive work on my preflop game via GTO simulators feel like I have a decent grasp on my preflop game and understand that an optimal 3! frequency should be about 6-8% (feel free to correct me). Obviously we all go through stretches where we will be higher or lower than this, but I often see players that I would consider to be very decent to good, with normal'ish VPIP, but with abnormally high 3B% over a decent sample. 12-18% which is approximately double what I expect it should be.

What are the best exploitive adjustments to make around these players?

Two situations :

1. we are in early position and open, they 3bet from button.
2. We are on the button and open and then raise from SB.

I'm looking for a general discussion but always nice to have examples to talk about. Obviously I don't care about our obvious 4 bet hand range and I can work on my 4 bet range against an optimal opponent, but there has to be some exploitive adjustments.

Lets invert the question. Why don’t we 3bet 12-18%, what problems does that create?

Inverted answer: we don't 3bet wider because being 4bet at eq punishes us more than if we had 3bet less. We flop less equity and playability, generally, and *should* have to fold more across a bunch of post flop nodes.

Fwiw my understanding is we should modulate our 3b frequency mostly by the openers range ie his position. So the Ivan in Situation 1 is way more out of line than Opal in Situation 2, imo.

Just the raw stat doesnt tell the whole story.

Pay attention who they 3bet against.
Depending on the table my 3bet can be very high, i want to iso and play HU pot with fish. So at a glance it might be high, but vs regs i still play optimal.

Right that’s pretty good

It’s key to understand that high 3b largely leads to self own for the 3bettor. You can understand this better by trying it a bit for yourself. You get into constant situations where you have to either stack off slightly too light or end up folding too much equity.

Facing 4b is the obvious damage but I think the biggest trouble arises on turns. 3bet too much and follow up with a lot of cbets and you end up in very marginal turn spots where you end up having to stack off really light or folding a bunch of equity.

The reason regs get away with this at like 1/2 online is that people freak out and over adjust with a bunch of spew and start paying off these players value bets too much because they are aggressive.

When you feed an overly aggressive 3bet strategy into a solver the adjustments are not as dramatic as you’d expect.

Your 4bet goes up a little bit

You start to limp hands that play poor vs 3bets. So maybe some hands like mediocre KK/QQ/JJ, single suited middling rundowns, poorly connected double suited AQxx kinda hands. Don’t limp everything, most hands are still better to raise. Crappy kings can be just a raise/fold. KQ64ds I’ll just raise and play happily vs a 3b.

Then there is some ev gain postflop. You take things to the turn more often. You’re able to make some lighter bluff/semi bluff raises.

You start to rape their flat calling ranges. Those extra hands they’re 3betting come from the flatting ranges weakening those usually without any further thought and readjustment. Thoughtful pounding on textures that they now interact less with is effective.

Every adjustment here is a few % but add it all up together and it’s big and actually fairly easy to beat such opponents.

Focus on the postflop adjustments because that’s where the real money is at. You can’t exploit well if you don’t understand the situation to begin with so do the work in trainer/solver so you understand each texture and what the ev of each kind of combo/line is.

1) I would think that we can 4b wider .. but not necessarily more often based on the short term dynamic. Thus we 'show up' stronger more often when flatting but also 'should' produce the same amount of 3b/folds from V otherwise .. and perhaps our decisions are easier OTF as well.

2) I would adjust my open to slightly smaller so that flatting in position is more reasonable to our stack. I would offer basically the same 'wider, but same frequency' comment as above, but perhaps defend a bit more often when bet into on the Flop.

While it's a bit annoying, you can certainly limp from the Button if they are going to 3b with the same frequency. Then Hero flats and ends up basically in the same spot as if they had 3b in the first place.


We also need to consider V 3b/fold frequency. If they don't have one, then we just let them steer the ship. GL

Awesome thread and great contributions so far.

This is rush and cash so the number is pretty representative of style, I know it doesn't converge very fast, but also you can see what people are showing up with and understand that they are out of line.

I have nothing to say about this except thank you, as you clarified a number of things for me that I was muddy about and waffling around. I have not been making many / any adjustments to these guys. Still, I felt like I had been getting run over since I'm often folding flop since I missed it so hard. Of course, that's a function of variance, but our brains are hard-wired to see patterns, and I was beginning to get concerned by the patterns I have been experiencing.

This is gold.