Continued from Part One...
Polarised Three-Bet Ranges
Now that I’ve shown how powerful three-bet bluffing can be, you might say we can three-bet with impunity. A problem arises if we do not tweak the frequency of which we three-bet bluff versus three-bet value well. Some examples can illustrate this:
(Hand #1) £1/3 full-ring live game at the Grosvenor Victoria Casino in London (the Vic). You open A-Q off-suit to £12 UTG+1 and it folds to the rock on the button who hasn’t played a hand in an hour and showed down K-K and A-K suited the last two times he reraised. He three-bets to £45. What is your play?
In this first example, it is quite obvious that the correct play is to fold. You are crushed by the rock’s three-bet range, which is heavily weighted towards A-A/K-K/Q-Q/A-K premiums; you don’t want to pay him off.
(Hand #2) £1/3 full-ring live game at the Vic. You open K-Q off-suit to $12 UTG+1 and it folds to a maniac on the button who has three-bet the last three out of eight raised hands. He three-bets to £45. What is your play?
Here, arguments could be made for both calling and reraising, but I think folding here is definitely too weak-tight. For a maniac who has shown that he has no control over his aggression, his three-bet range is heavily weighted towards random junk/A-x/suited connectors/any pair.
These two examples are very extreme and simplified, but they highlight the importance of balancing. If you only raise with premiums and limp with speculative hands, then opponents will soon catch on and figure your tight opening range and won’t pay you off. You need to mix in some speculative hands as well. Therefore, just like balancing your normal opening ranges, you need to balance your three-bet ranges.
If you play like the rock and only three-bet premiums, you will not get paid as often as you like. Your three-bet range consists of only A-A/K-K/Q-Q/A-K and is very transparent to other players at the table. Good players may even be able to call your three-bets in position just to outplay you and take the pot away on certain ‘dangerous’ board textures like 8-5-6-7-x, knowing your range of hands cannot take the heat since it is so tight and obvious.
On the other hand, if you play like the maniac, you will get played back at too often. Most of your three-bets consist of air and other speculative type junk hands, and your opponents will know you are full of it most the time and that you probably don’t have a strong hand on the K-7-3 rainbow flop after three-betting preflop.
Good players may be able to take advantage of this and play perfectly against you. They may play back at you regularly with their marginal or even weak holdings, and trap you with their premium hands, letting you barrel off post-flop. Therefore, you need to add more strong hands in your three-bet range and three-bet bluff less. For example, throw away those 7-6 suited hands a third of the time, flat call a third of the time, and three-bet every now and then to mix it up. A good blend would be a mixture of bluffs and value hands.
However, there is still a problem. This applies to playing against the same regulars in a game over and over again. When playing against a decent and competent opponent, balancing your three-bet range with just really strong hand types to really speculative/weak hand types is not enough. Yes, your three-bet range is balanced to a certain degree, but it is also very polarized. To an opponent paying attention, over the long run they will know that whenever you three-bet you will either have A-A/K-K/Q-Q/A-K, sometimes A-Q and J-J, or speculative weak hands (air). Your three-bet range is either nuts or air, and is still very transparent. Your smart opponents will realise this eventually, and may use it to their advantage to exploit you.
Balancing Your Three-Bet Range
To give an example, you three-bet preflop and your opponent calls. Let’s say that because your three-betting range is so polarised, your opponent has smartened up and decides to call with any two cards to outplay you. He is either trying to out-flop you the times you have a strong hand, or steal the pot later when you have air hands. The flop is A-7-4 rainbow. When you continuation bet this flop as the three-bettor with a polarised range, you can only have A-A, A-K and A-Q as genuine value hands (since you are polarised you never show up with A-J/A-T/7-7) or air, which has whiffed this flop completely (apart from 6-5 and a hand like A-3 suited).
Your smart opponent knows all of this. So because there are so few genuine hands you can have here, much less compared to the huge amount of air you can have, he can potentially float this flop with no pair, no draw (something like T-9 off-suit), wait for you to give up with your air and take it away on the turn when you show weakness. An alternative is to put pressure on you and bluff-raise the flop profitably.
He can also choose to four-bet you preflop a decent amount of time, with air, knowing that statistically you have a speculative weak hand (air) much more of the time than you have a strong hand. You will be forced to fold your weak hand and lose the ten to thirteen big blinds it cost you to three-bet.
Therefore, you need to add some medium strength hands to your three-bet range, further balancing and depolarising it. Every now and then you should three-bet with 9-9/8-8 type hands, or something like K-Jo/Q-Ts. This has the purpose of adding further deception while still giving you initiative when you decide to play these hands aggressively.
With a balanced range, now it finally puts your long-term opponents in a tough spot. Even a smart opponent won’t be able to exploit you as you can literally have any two decent cards when you three-bet. The flop can come down K-T-9 rainbow, and now when you continuation bet, you can have anything from A-A/A-K to T-T/9-9/K-Q to Q-Js/8-7s/A-4s/6-5s. Your opponent, if holding a hand like K-J, will not know what to do. Some of your range has him crushed, some of your range is drawing but has a lot of equity, and some is full on air.
When you have a balanced three-betting range, your long-term opponents can no longer play back at you lightly at a high frequency, and will also find it hard to not pay you off when you do have a strong hand (and he has a less strong one) because he knows you can still have some bluffs in there. Most importantly, as long as you don’t three-bet too much air and too many medium strength hands, he can no longer pinpoint your three-bet range and know what hands you can’t have when you three-bet. This adds tremendous deception to your game, and they are put into a guessing mode. This gives you a huge edge over them if they don’t adjust quickly and properly.
In the next article I will be discussing some specific three-bet spots versus different types of villains. I’ll also be giving an overview on four-betting.
If you would to ask any questions about what I have written in this article, please post on my board on my profile page.