Pokkercards.com

Playing 3-bet Pots As The Aggressor

Are you afraid of 3-bet pots? Most poker players are. It’s tough to play a solid game in the face of aggression. Nobody really knows how to handle it. Usually the 3-bet phobia stems from a simple lack of experience in aggressive situations. If you want to gain a significant edge on your opponents, you can- by learning how to master 3-bet pots.

You have to learn to take your opponents’ fear of 3-bet pots and throw it in their face! Let your enemies know who’s boss! If you were on the front lines fighting a war, would you show a man pointing a gun at your face any mercy? NO! So don’t show any mercy in a game of poker either! Poker is war, and you need to have that in the back or your mind at all times.

When you’ve got a good hand preflop, especially when you’re in late position, you want to 3-bet relentlessly. You know by now that being in late position is a huge advantage, and you can abuse that to a certain point. Raise as much as you can in late position, because when you’re last to act, you’re in control of the hand.

When you 3-bet preflop, you need to have a plan. What are you going to do when the flop comes? What if your cards don’t hit? What if your cards do hit? These are all questions that you need to answer before you hit that raise button!

Generally, if you’re 3-betting preflop, you want to continue your aggression postflop. This is true in a vast majority of situations. Most of the time in 3-bet pots, your opponent’s range will be very narrow- he’ll most likely be holding a hand in the top 5 or 6% of his range. This means that you can easily identify which flops hit your opponent’s, and which ones miss it entirely- and act accordingly.

For example, check out this hand. You’re on the button holding AKh, in a game of $1/2 NL Holdem. A player in middle position raises to $3. Everyone folds to you. You’ve got an incredibly strong hand, so you 3-bet to $9. Everyone folds after you back to the player in middle position, who calls your raise. The turn comes down 2-5-7 rainbow. What the heck do you do here?

Think about it. Is your opponent ever holding a hand that hits this board? Probably not, unless he’s really loose. We know that our opponent is pretty tight. If he hit this board, it’s probably with 22, 55, or 77, which are all pretty unlikely (tight players hate calling 3bets with small pocket pairs). If he’s got any pair from TT-AA, he would have pushed all in preflop. That leaves an assortment of broadway hands, such as AK, AQ, KQ, and so on.

Knowing that, what’s the best move here? Clearly, you should fire a c-bet. You want your c-bet to send a message to your opponent: “I am going to punish you with aggression. I am going to take all of your money if you make a mistake”. A good sized bet to accomplish this would be around 2/3rds the size of the pot. The pot is $21, so a c-bet of $16 or $17 sounds about right.

You’ll find that in these situations, a vast majority of the time, your opponents will simply give up. Without a hand that connects with the board, most players find it far too difficult to counter aggression in 3-bet pots.

Stay Aggressive, Stay In Control!

Now you know- playing as the aggressor in 3-bet pots is easy! It’s easy because all of your opponents hate aggression! All you’ve got to do to win stacks of chips from your enemies is force them into tough situations, because as you now know, most people suck at dealing with them.

Tweet This Post