Stacks are 101BB effective. I open AQ from the cutoff and an aggressive button 3-bets me.
He has not been on the table all that long, and we have not tangled directly. I have been pretty active, but nothing outrageous (like playing 26/21, say). Neither of us has shown anything down. Villain is a regular and likely has a light 3-betting range. He's on the aggro side, but not over the top. He's 3-bet me once and I folded, and he's also folded to at least one prior raise of mine...in other words, nothing out of the ordinary is going on here.
OK, so I think I have too much hand to fold. What do you think...a 4-bet or a call? Or do I really need to fold. What is your general plan if you call? What about if you raise?
Let's put a specific flop out there: JT3 with two spades, and I have the Ace of spades.
If you 4-bet this (and he called preflop), what's your plan now?
If you called his 3-bet, what's your plan now?
2 comments:
There’s so much that sucks about this.
The first thing that sucks is that you don’t mention bet sizes so let’s assume a raise to 3x and a three bet to 10x so the pot as it stands is 14.5x with a 7x bet to you and you have 98x behind.
If you pop it again it’s going to be what, 30x or so? So you’d be putting in about a third of your stack and you’d need an immediate commitment plan which would probably be to flop an ace and get it all in.
If he’s an aggressive three better then he’s going to be folding a lot because a lot of time he’ll have A9 or JT or something. On the other hand, if he calls or raises you’re probably screwed unless you hit top pair or better and maybe even then.
The second thing that sucks is you’re out of position. You make the four bet and you’ve got a third of your stack invested with ace high and backdoor draw and you have to act first. Your opponent almost certainly has you beat but if you bet you’re pretty much committed. If you check, he’s going to bet and take it away from you and view that as a license to have his way with you, your wife, your kids, and your dog which would be fine but it will make every hand with him harder to play from then on out.
The third thing that sucks is that villain is in the middle, aggro but not too aggro. If he were maniacal, you’d four bet and willingly stack off because things that crush you are like 1% of his range. (Fake edit, no, I don’t care that AA, AK, KK are 2.1% of preflop combinations). Let’s just guesstimate that he’s going to three bet with TT+, KJ+, AT+, A8s+ and about a quarter of his mid range suited connectors so you get him three betting with about 10% of his hands. So a fifth of his three betting range has you crushed and really if you four bet it here he’s shoving most of the time with that range and I assume you fold.
So if you raise, a fifth of the time you’re going to lose a third a of your stack. He’s going to have to fold a boatload of hands for you to make that up. Or you’re going to have to win a bunch of larger pots when he calls and frankly I don’t see either one happening.
So raising sucks.
Calling sucks basically for two reasons. One, calling sucks. Two, calling means you’re in a hand with no position, no initiative, and no hand. If you then donk the flop you’re going to get bluff raised a lot and if you check the flop you’re going to get bet at a lot. You could check/call but you’d really just be looking for a K or Q because with an A you’d be behind AK, AJ, and AT all of which figure prominently in his three betting range and all of which would cost you copious dollars.
So I think folding sucks but it sucks less than the other options. The other ways of playing this hand imo are black holes of reverse implied odds suck. You’re just way more likely to lose your stack than win his and even if you don’t, you’re just way more likely to make a bad decision than he is.
Throw in a little reverse tilt equity and you’re pretty much completely hosed. This is why getting three bet with AQ blows chunks.
It would be much better if villain were a lot tighter so you could instafold or a lot looser so you can get it all in ahead of his range.
I had a nice comment that for some reason never went through. The point of it is, give it up preflop, you are OOP with a hand that is marginal, wait for a different spot. In this isolated hand given that flop texture. If you called pre, C/F. If you 4bet pre, C/F. You are almost always behind here and can't really fold out anything that beats you except maybe AK.
Here is the true point of the story. If the villain is truly 3betting you light enough to where you are thinking of playing back with AQ OOP, then change your table and avoid the problem.
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