not depolarized since it's behind his 5bet range.

learn to float some boards. 90%+ of FR regs aren't capable of triple barreling as a bluff or even for thin value.

you can also raise board textures that hit your perceived range harder than your opponents.


Hero (MP+1): $103.90
CO: $103.00
BTN: $145.52
SB: $138.98
BB: $180.45 (VPIP: 19.86, PFR: 12.32, 3Bet Preflop: 4.26)
UTG: $100.00
UTG+1: $100.00
MP: $194.30

SB posts SB $0.50, BB posts BB $1.00

Pre Flop: (pot: $1.50) Hero has J A

fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to $2.75, fold, fold, fold, BB raises to $8.75, Hero calls $6.00

Flop: ($18.00, 2 players) 7 4 Q
BB bets $9.00, Hero calls $9.00

Turn: ($36.00, 2 players) 9
BB bets $19.00, Hero calls $19.00

River: ($74.00, 2 players) Q
BB checks, Hero bets $67.15 and is all-in, fold





UTG+1: $58.65
MP: $33.73
MP+1: $242.10
CO: $85.36
Hero (BTN): $52.64
SB: $65.81 (VPIP: 11.25, PFR: 7.48, 3Bet Preflop: 3.83)
BB: $50.00
UTG: $46.08

SB posts SB $0.25, BB posts BB $0.50

Pre Flop: (pot: $0.75) Hero has T A

fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to $1.00, SB raises to $3.50, fold, Hero calls $2.50

Flop: ($7.50, 2 players) 7 Q 9
SB bets $5.50, Hero raises to $13.50, fold





UTG+1: $100.00
MP: $472.56
CO: $100.00
Hero (BTN): $101.62
SB: $101.70 (VPIP: 19.02, PFR: 13.77, 3Bet Preflop: 5.73)
BB: $101.70
UTG: $99.12

SB posts SB $0.50, BB posts BB $1.00, 7 players post ante of $0.20

Pre Flop: (pot: $2.90) Hero has 9 8

fold, fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to $2.50, SB raises to $8.50, fold, Hero calls $6.00

Flop: ($19.40, 2 players) T Q 6
SB checks, Hero bets $10.00, fold





BB: $101.69
UTG: $40.00
UTG+1: $93.76
UTG+2: $81.01
MP: $100.00
Hero (MP+1): $142.72
CO: $41.40
BTN: $141.35
SB: $100.00 (VPIP: 14.98, PFR: 11.60, 3Bet Preflop: 3.56)

SB posts SB $0.50, BB posts BB $1.00

Pre Flop: (pot: $1.50) Hero has T 8

fold, fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to $2.75, fold, fold, SB raises to $10.00, fold, Hero calls $7.25

Flop: ($21.00, 2 players) 2 3 7
SB bets $12.00, Hero calls $12.00

Turn: ($45.00, 2 players) 9
SB bets $24.00, Hero calls $24.00

River: ($93.00, 2 players) A
SB checks, Hero bets $96.72 and is all-in, fold

Not to stir the pot rr, as I agree with you that we can all have different takes on how best to play the game we love, but I think that the betting lead is overvalued in the current unl climate. I frequently let the donkey do the pulling instead of doing the pushing myself. Giving the average unl player rope to hang himself with the bottom half of his range is printing money these days. When this circumstance occurs, it is the aggressor that is being exploited, not the player without the betting lead.

Fwiw I am not actually denying this is true.

No worries, That's clear to me; I know you're only speaking on the one situation where rr is applying the idea to strategy as a whole

I absolutly agree with kraven that letting an over aggressive opp Harrell away at us is profitable.....and we can exploit his use of the betting lead....but im not talking about your aggressive donk fish who i think most are agreed flagging the 3bet against is fine......where i think the waters muddy is against a thinking aggressive opponent who has a value weighted range that includes some double and tripple barrell bluffs....against these oops i don't think flagging 3bets is good because they will use the fact they have the betting lead to put us in tough spots.

Eric what you are stating as facts i just don't agree with....yes some Nits have hyper tight utg ranges, but i just don't believe this is the normal at uNl....infact i would suggest that most opponents having a dumb understanding of how opening ranges should differ relating to absolute position....abd this can be a great source of profit......(don't know if this changes much but i play almost exclusivly zoom poker, and now im thinking about it maybe plenty of oops there just fast fold until they see two cards they like and play them regardless of position......

Pretty sure zoom ranges are even tighter. But what ever not going to continue discussing this. Not going anywhere anyways.

Just had a look at a few zoom players at nl10 and nl25....my sample is much bigger at nl10.....alot of villans.....most infact have almost exactly the same opening range from utg through mp....most open up on the co less on the hj....
.this seems like it should be exploitable but how would be best to go about it.....i mean these are pretty nitty ranges we are talking about......is it directly exploitable? Or are they just losing value that can't be directly obtained by us.

wanna know the real reason to flat these hands? I just filtered for when I open the button, have less than AK/JJ+, get 3-bet, and call in my current database. Over 505 hands my winrate is 214bb/100. I realize this is a smallish sample size but that means over 505 hands I was POSITIVE 1080.7 big blinds. Meanwhile if you had folded every single one of these you would have been NEGATIVE 1515 big blinds. This means that by flatting I almost won an extra 26 buy-ins than I would have if I had folded these hands every time. The total sample size is something like 200k hands so over a 100k hand sample size flatting these hands (and I flat MUCH worse than AQ/AJ I flat pretty much every pair in that spot, even stuff as bad as J8s), I increased my winrate by 1.3bb/100.

So sure, call it a style thing. But if your style includes hurting your winrate by over 1bb/100 then your style just sucks.

Also note that most of these hands are at 200nl+ where I'm facing much better players than most of you are as well.

And yeah having the betting lead/initiative is a thing, although it's not anything special in and of itself. The advantage to having the initiative most of the time comes from the fact that you're not capped. So the person who 3-bets is going to have all their QQ+/AK hands plus a good amount of strong hands, some bluffs, etc. Meanwhile the caller is going to have basically none of the QQ+/AK hands. So if the board comes K22r the 3-bettor can have AK/KK+/some 2x whereas the caller hardly ever has better than KQ. This allows him to bluff wider as well. This is a bigger deal when ranges are narrower but in general I don't think is going to be too huge a factor in general when our opponent's range is 11% preflop going into a 3b pot.

interesting stuff Zach.......it would be interesting in my opinion to see how the win rate would be if we 4 bet often here, I don't think its particulaly surprising that you are winning when flagging relativley strong hands in position, I think the question here is about what is optimal?
To find that out we would need a huge sample of someone who always 4bets....i like the concept but i think that would be foolhardy...especially in the micros and im not willing to give a reasonable edge to find out if i can make a bigger one over a massive sample.....if anyone has a decent sample on 4bets from late position vs blind 3bets with marginal holdings i think it would make really intersting reading.
In terms of betting lead i think you have articulated some of the points i have tried to make quite nicely....we don't raise for the betting lead, but it is a factor (of many) when we or villan has it.

Right because I never 4b bluff either. I give up.

I'm not saying you don't 4bet bluff........im just wondering weather or not a 4bet in this spot could be more profitable.

That's the same as saying that position has no inherent value in poker either, since ouselves and are opponents are still just trying to make hands after all, and whoever has the stronger hand range in a given situation will win out.

The reality is that position and initiative matter a lot, with initiative being more important in low SPR situations, (like 3-bet pots), and position being more important in high SPR situations, (like 2-bet pots). At least that's the point I'm trying to make, but most people seem to disagree with this.

Don't apologise for double posts when you are posting great stuff.

This is so easy to say in theory but hard to do in practice since you never know where you are at and floating with overcards can mean you're giving your opponent's big hands even more value, and if they double barrel a lot, then you are folding the turn too much if you float the flop light, and then you're losing a big chunk of bb's in a hand you could quite as easily just not got involved in.

100bb's isn't really that deep when the skill edges are so slight between most regs these days.

Playing deeper tables would probably be more interesting and fun to play, but barely any tables run.

Position means you get to act last. What does initiative mean (beyond some slight range differences but this is different on different boards anyway)?

Actually lets play a game. We're going to play HU, the small blind and the big blind will be equal, and I will get the button every hand. You will act first preflop and get to choose to either raise or fold. I then get to only call or fold if you raised. This way we pay the same in blinds, you get initiative every hand, and I get position every hand. We can play with 30bb stacks to mimic closer to 3b pot situation. Do you actually think you would come anywhere close to winning long-term in this situation?

Ironic that you post this.

Then this:

There are probably a lot of regs who actually have a pretty huge skill edge on you if the first is your actual thought process when playing poker. The goal of poker isn't to "know where you're at" or think about how you could "quite as easily just not got involved in". I already showed you my numbers, and how not getting involved in these hands would have cost me ~1.3bb/100 over my last 200k hands. Once in awhile I lose my stack floating and bluffing into a hand that calls, once in awhile I'm going to call flop and have to fold turn, once in awhile I'm going to call down 3 streets and he'll have the nuts. But then you have the times you call flop and he ch/f turn, or you call 3 streets and he was bluffing, or you call 2 streets and bluff river and he ch/f. All of these are possibilities, and you need to consider the overall average of these things, not just worry about the bad things happening sometimes.

These forums really degenerate into a war of who can articulate there point best and who can come up with the most far-fetched hypothetical situation......i don't think anyone is saying the betting lead is as important as position or that we should use it as a major factor in our decisions.....but we can't just ignore it as a factor either.....the fact that this thread is this long and has so many points of view shows that this flagging 3bet situation is not a simple situation with a correct unexploitable method of proceeding....what is clear is that with a hand like kq or aj on the button we should be making dollars the debate is how best to go about making those dollars

Zachvac has given you examples, bb winrates, theory and strategies to back up his arguments, what more can you possibly want? Should he play for you?

Why can't we ignore it? Should we consider the phase of the moon as well? Whether it's raining in Rome?


There's "points of view" on the internet that the US government was behind 9/11 and that humans have yet to land on the moon. Should we consider those points of view as well? Sorry but if your standard is to 4b these hands against an average reg with an 11% range, it's a huge mistake. There are some circumstances where it could be ok, but in general 4betting against most regs is just going to be bad and if you ask any successful poker player they will agree with me I promise. I've given you plenty of math/theory to back up my side and your response has been "well there's debate on an internet message board". I'm done wasting my time unless you want to actually bring a rational argument to the table with logic and/or math.

I don't know why your attacking my view here.....i have never said its more profitable to 4bet, all I have said is it would be interesting to find out......i have said I flat these hands in position and am simply interested in finding out if there is a better way of playing this spot, because flating and the folding to a c-bet is horrible, but I also don't much like bluffing into a poorly defined nutted range, you provide your maths for calling and its profitable, this isn't a surprise, its a relativley strong hand on the button of course its profitable, if your not Making dollars with aj/kq+ on the button your probably not a winning player, do we know 4betting here would not be more profitable (villan dependant)..... I have said it would be interesting if someone had those sort of stats so we could actually analyse it .......and this stuff about the betting lead is really out of hand.....it is a factor of course it is, its not the major defining factor, its not as important as being in position, but it is better for us when we have it......

The game you suggest isn't completely fair because we would have to also allow you to never be dealt JJ+ and AKo/s. Ok, sometimes people flat AA in position etc. but this can cost value and hurt your 4-betting range so we'll assume that people only flat with big hands against certain opponents for a good reason and that for arguments sake you wouldn't flat big hands vs me say.

So you can have position every hand, I have initiative every hand and the possibility of having premium starting hands in my range. Then we will see who wins.

The initiative is not just about the betting lead, it's that you are also more likely to have a big starting hand compared to the flat-caller. I think this is huge considering probably 95% of our winnings come from JJ+, AKo and AKs, and a lot of our losses come from when our opponents hold these hands, (of which in this scenario they don't have these hands that often when they call our 3bet and we are the aggressor from the blinds).

This is actually the only actual part that matters in initiative, and that's relative ranges. But the only reason it matters is when considering ours, because we already gave our villain the top 11% of hands, which includes JJ+/AK. Essentially the advantage of initiative is that our range is capped and we can't have those hands, and on many boards villain's value range will be much wider than ours and thus can vbet wide and similarly bluff wide because they have such a wide vbet range that is rarely beaten by our hand.

However given that this is the ufr section, I think it's actually pretty irrelevant to 99% of villains you will face. One of the biggest leaks people at these levels have is they have an extremely hard time vbetting wide. How many times do you see someone 3-bet QQ out of the BB vs. a button open, cbet 963r flop, bet offsuit 2 turn, then ch/c J river? I feel like honestly most regs might even take this line with KK sometimes. Unless people are taking advantage of you being capped to value bet wider (how many people you play against bet TT on this river? None ever? Good you don't need to worry about initiative), this is pretty much a non-issue. Your opponents are probably mostly just playing their cards, and while they may be able to hand-read on a fundamental level, they're typically too scared of losing their stack or value betting with the worst hand to value bet sufficiently wide when their opponent's hand range is particularly weak. And if they're not doing that they can't be bluffing wide either, which is where the actual money is made facing a capped range.

And in fact this brings about an example of not having initiative against bad players as well. How many people at your stakes are cbetting 80%+, particularly in 3b pots? I'm not going to run through math or numbers but you're going to have to trust me that against good players doing this is a leak if they open standard ranges preflop. The reason they do this is because they either think people are folding too much to cbets (which may be true, but you as a good player can take advantage of that ), or probably because they were taught that initiative was important and that they should cbet all their air because most of the time people miss so they'll fold. So if our opponent is going to make mistakes like cbetting too much when they have the initiative, it should be our job to put them in a position to make that mistake as much as possible.