How often should we take advantage of profitable spots

Here's the situation:

You're in the BB, action is folded to the button who opens for 3BB. You have a lot of hands on him and know he's doing that 40% of the time. You also know that if you 3bet up to 9BB his continuation range will be tight, let's say TT+, AQ+, or the top 5% of hands. That means he will fold to a 3bet 87.5% of the time there. From the BB, you only need him to fold 64% of the time for this to be immediately profitable, whatever you're holding. So great, you should 3bet with any 2, awesome.

Now here's the thing. You can't obviously do this all the time because even at the micros, people will catch on to it. So, my question is, when you have such players to your right, how often should you abuse them? What factors do you consider to decide this? I'm assuming you'll do it more often in the micros then in higher stakes, and more often against mass multi-tablers who'll probably take more time to notice (and by then they'll probably rather switch tables then having to deal with a constant 3beter to his left).

I could ask the same question for when we're out of position against a PF raiser who cbets all the time but will fold to a check-raise a high amount of the time. Again, profitable play, as long as you don't do it all the time. How often should you do it?

I make that play pretty much every single time against that player and the absolute majority of them will never notice. Think about it this way, (you never mentioned 6Max or FR, so I'm assuming the latter), the situation only has the possibility of happening once every 9 hands, and that is only if the action folds around to the button, which doesn't happen nearly as often at the micros, so you can figure this situation is only happening for you on about 5% of total hands and that is being generous(1 out of 9 for positional = 11% and I'll be generous and say that half of the time it will fold around to him, so 5% total).

Needless to say, keep pressuring him.

Chances are, it's going to be profitable to 3bet him when he raises from the CO as well. And if every single time he raises from late position the same guy 3bets him, of course he's gonna notice. I learned this the hard way, because I too thought players at $10NL wouldn't adjust, and at some point I was being called by A4s.


And come one, guys, only 1 repply?

The stats say it is almost any two cards but at the micro stakes
you are going to get called too many times for it to be profitable.
I think you have to have a hand that gives you some outs,
suited connectors, 2 paint cards (suited or not) or any pair.

The players down in the 5/10NL games are going to call you with A-rag maybe 40-50% of the time,
especially if you are doing it on a regular basis.

As with anything in poker I thing you have pick your spots.

If they called that often, it would show on their stats.

Keep at it until they 4bet you, then once they do begin to do this 3bet with a polarized range vs them, eg, Hands that you're willing to stack off with or complete air.

Bare in mind it's the micros and most people who eventually do 4bet you will have some sort of hand.

Ive found that the way most bad players in the micros adjust to your constant 3 betting is calling more with marginal hands instead of 4 betting you so when I actually get 4 bet its an easy fold. It also makes it easy to win these 3 bet pots where they call cause they have a marginal hand thats not gona hit the flop very well so you can take it down on most flops with a 1/2 ps c bet, just make sure you are picking good spots to c bet.

i think the title of this thread is misleading. the answer to that question is always.

i think your question is more about how often you have to 3bet in order to make it unprofitable to do so anymore. but as others have noted, it becomes unprofitable when people adjust.

I know, I struggled with it. The first title was "How often should you abuse people?" but that didn't seem right either. :P

Right, so the longer they take to adjust the more money we'll make. How often should we 3bet to achieve this? That's my question. I tried the 100% thing, it's just stupid. With one particular reg it got to a point where every hand we played was just insane and everyone else at the table who didn't know about the metagame involved was for sure color coding us as maniacs.

that seems good to me, especially if you arent actually a maniac. but either way, im not the person to ask, i 3bet too much (around 10%).

Imagine you were playing a bot that 3 bet 10% but folded everything but AA to a 4bet. So you would min 4bet his 3bets 100% of the time and crush it because bots don't adjust.

Now substitute a human for the bot. The person has the same tendencies so we start out the same 4betting him 100% and he folds the 1st 4 times but then realizes what we're up to and shoves over us the next 2 times. He has adjusted and now we should adjust as well (either calling the shoves lighter or 4betting less often or both).

The other option we have is to not take advantage 100% of the time but to try to do it often enough that the spot is very profitable yet our opponent takes MUCH longer to realize how we are exploiting him. Exactly how often that is will always be an unknown, it depends, type answer.