I played a little NL session yesterday. The games are becoming more and more aggressive. At some point I had the PFR numbers on the table summing up to around 150. This basically means every second hand was 3bet. I looked up my stats since the beginning of the month and around 30% of my steal raises have been 3bet. 3betting is so popular and so many people seem to do it with any possible trash just because they figure your range to be sooo wide. Especially, in button vs blind situations, I start doubting if raising the button is even profitable any more. Note to self, I must watch again this movie.
I have been experimenting with different approaches to cope with light 3bettors from the blinds.
One option is to call more liberally 3bets. And to counterfeit the fact that people cbet 3bet pots virtually every time you need to loosen your standards for when to stack postflop. I think that in some of those situations you should be prepared to push in with as little as overcard and gutshot, because the light 3bettors have general advantage once they put in the cbet that there is only one more bet to go in and you never have enough information unless you have a monster.
Another possibility is to 4bet lighter. My experience show that somehow 4betting small IP makes people push over you more often than fold. The reasoning behind it is that usually you would not do it with QQ+ and often you would do it as bluff when there is a history of light 3betting. Usually, the stack sizes do not allow 4bet push.
You could also decrease the size of the open raise from steal positions. This gives you more room postflop to use position, when you have playable hand. This will also make people less inclined to play big pots OOP against you. I haven’t experimented with that much though. I am thinking to start opening to 2.5BB like in tournaments, then a 3bet goes around 8BB.Thus the pot on the flop is 16bb and if cbet is 10bb, then we have more options. We might call for a pot of 36bb with 82bb effective stacks of we might raise the cbet to 28bb and still have room to fold with 36bb invested and putting a lot of pressure on the 3bettor.Hmm, I need to experiment with this one.
And of course, the ultimate solution is to tighten up significantly your ranges, but then you need to find other spots to open so that you don’t appear too nitty.
Not an easy one, but I intend to try a mix of smaller size open raise and calling more 3bets IP, I will report maybe in a month how does it work.
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