GPS Sheffield

[Skippy]

Thoughts on 3 bet pre? I don't here, but maybe I should?

[Tal]

Thoughts on 3 bet pre? I don't here, but maybe I should?

I imagine the answer is why play OOP without the betting lead, esp if an ace high flop doesn't get you much value?

[Rexas]

I'm happy taking the betting lead in this spot, although often in cash games I'm always torn between raising or flatting the AQ in this sort of spot, in a tournament im almost always leaning towards a three bet against more than one opponent here. In fact, trumper did pretty much this to us on day 2, we rasied utg and he flatted AK out of the bb, and on an A high board, got two streets of us barrelling, not believing he was as strong as he was.

TBH, I'm rarely ever going to say I never do something, or always do something, so sometimes ill flat here, but im pretty heavily leaning towards the three bet.

[theprawnidentity]

It also depends on your style of play too.  If you're only 3betting a really narrow range in general then theres nothing wrong with flatting (obviously disguises the strength of your hand, but you probably have to do this with your full range if you're going to do it with AQ).  If you're going to flat then you have to evaluate the board texture and be prepared to do something funky post flop sometimes.  You can rep alot of boards when you just complete the BB.  However, if you play aggressively and have a really aggro image then 3betting can defo get you action from worse.

[wazz]

If the stacks are short enough that you can comfortably call someone's jam (and be correct to do so) then I would consider 3betting pre, and would definitely prefer AQo to AQs to do it with. Here it seems we're too deep and if we get it in preflop we're in bad shape. So if we 3bet we would have to fold to a jam; we haven't turned our hand into a bluff, as we don't get much better to fold, and in any case the pot is still pretty small so we don't really gain very much by sometimes getting 22-66 or whatever to fold. All we achieve by 3betting is getting all the hands we dominate preflop to fold (obv this is live so we will sometimes get calls pre from ATs/AJs and KQs/QJs but they have way more Ax and Qx in their range pre that they'll probably fold).

We're getting ~ 4-1 to call preflop, so we should be defending a reasonably wide range here - say all pps, Axs, A8o+, K8s+, JTo+, perhaps a little wider - when we have a weak range, it's nice for the sakes of balance to throw in a strong hand like this one from time to time, and of course when the board does come Qxx or Axx people don't usually think we're as strong as we are so will try to barrel us off the hand, especially in position.