Light 4betting criteria

Someone with a high 3bet to steal percentage has been barraging you with 3bets. You have alot of hands on them and they look to be a decent tag other than that they have a fold to 3bet stat of 40%.

Do you 4 bet light against these sort of people?
Should we just sit there and let him profit from his 3bets?
Or Should we 4bet despite the F3B stat indicating he may shove/call very light.

How important do you think the fold to 3bet stat is in this scenario?

Well if he 3-bets light then you can 4 bet light.

4 bet your best hands and 4 bet trash, that way your decision to his 5 bet/shove is easy.

With the F3B stat, you have to ask yourself if its reliable or not. Is he actually being 3bet much? F4B again is anyone 4 betting him all that often.

It may be low because its only ever come up a few times and each of these times he held something good.

Stu_Ungar said:

With the F3B stat, you have to ask yourself if its reliable or not. Is he actually being 3bet much? F4B again is anyone 4 betting him all that often.

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True it does take ages for this stat to converge. However lets presume it has converged sufficently and it is at 25%.
Would you let this affect your 4betting range?

Fold to 3-bet and fold to 4-bet are kinda different lots of people flat 3-bets (whether it be correct or incorrectly) but not too many people are flatting 4-bets. Lots of people will thus have low fold to 3-bet but pretty high fold to 4-bet.

Stu_Ungar said:

4 bet your best hands and 4 bet trash, that way your decision to his 5 bet/shove is easy.

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Not really in this spot. Especially if we're oop we're rarely flatting so say we can 4-bet top 3% of our range for value and we want to extend it to 3% air why not just do top 6%? Basically for our air range we want the hands that play the best in our situation whether ip or oop when he does flat a 4-bet since obviously we plan on folding to a shove (or it'd be considered a value 4-bet). We don't play the game to give ourselves easy decisins, we play to make money. Even though people rarely flat 4-bets, they will from time to time and having JTs the time it does is a ton better than having 39o.

Fold to 3bet and fold to 4bet aren't directly connected at all. I mean it might indicate he likes to defend light, but it's not a guarantee at all. Looking for 4bet spots you should simply look at how often they 3bet, how often they fold to 4bet, and what kind of history you have with the player is much more important.

I generally wait for %10+ 3bettors (or someone who normally 3bets tighter but has been obviously loosening up this session), and people who fold %50+ to 4bets. I try to stick to those guidelines but will sometimes 4b bluff people with much different numbers based on history and gameflow.

zachvac said:

Not really in this spot. Especially if we're oop we're rarely flatting so say we can 4-bet top 3% of our range for value and we want to extend it to 3% air why not just do top 6%? Basically for our air range we want the hands that play the best in our situation whether ip or oop when he does flat a 4-bet since obviously we plan on folding to a shove (or it'd be considered a value 4-bet). We don't play the game to give ourselves easy decisins, we play to make money. Even though people rarely flat 4-bets, they will from time to time and having JTs the time it does is a ton better than having 39o.

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Agree completely, especially at lower stakes where people don't fold as well to 4bets. They fold less, so we do it less as a bluff and more for value/with hands that flop good equity. Which is why in general I think you can save the 4bet bluffing for higher stakes. I used to be a 200nl reg where people actually 3bet often enough for 4bet bluffing to be effective, but since moving back down to 100nl, have noticed that it's just not something I can use since people can't fold.

Out of interest, what do you guys flat3-bets with.

Right now I'm really only doing it with PP/AK (PP as set mining)

zachvac said:

Not really in this spot. Especially if we're oop we're rarely flatting so say we can 4-bet top 3% of our range for value and we want to extend it to 3% air why not just do top 6%? Basically for our air range we want the hands that play the best in our situation whether ip or oop when he does flat a 4-bet since obviously we plan on folding to a shove (or it'd be considered a value 4-bet). We don't play the game to give ourselves easy decisins, we play to make money. Even though people rarely flat 4-bets, they will from time to time and having JTs the time it does is a ton better than having 39o.

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Does this adjustment of swapping our air for value hands apply to all low stakes games, or merely the players with low fold to 3bets?

Stu_Ungar said:

Out of interest, what do you guys flat3-bets with.

Right now I'm really only doing it with PP/AK (PP as set mining)

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You shouldn't be set mining 3bets unless their both deep and their range is very tight.

I tend to call with 88-QQ
Depending on the looseness of the player and how wide their range is this range can turn into 4bets or folds.

If their a very light 3better and I have no history AQ and KQ may enter the mix (I need nicely converged stats before I do so)
If their a very tight 3better I may just call with AK (again needs to be very converged)
If I have history with them which may make them shove light depending on the certainty of whether they've adjusted to it or not I can start 4betting QQ-> 99 -> or even AQ

Deco said:

You shouldn't be set mining 3bets unless their both deep and their range is very tight.

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Thats the reason I do it.

I can see why you put in AQ and KQ, but my reluctance to include them is that they are easily dominated hands.

Depends how I view my opponent and how he views me.

If we're OOP a good general rules is to 4bet or fold, never calling a 3bet. IP we can do more flatting, but again how we play 3bet pots depends completely on what our opponent's ranges are like: How wide does he 3bet? Is that range polarized or non-polarized? Does he fold to 4bets or does he flat/jam them often? Does he cbet wide in 3bet pots and can he fold well to flop raises? How does he view us, ie will he give us respect for a 4bet or a flop bluff raise?

Basically to keep it simple, I'm only flatting if:

- My hand is good against his range, but not good enough to 4bet/call (that often means hands like AQ, JJ-TT)
- I'm trapping with a monster. This would be against someone who 3bets wide, folds well to 4bets, and/or likes to get very aggro postflop in 3bet pots, ie giving me no respect for a flop raise or barreling very light. Conversely this is someone I'm never set mining against, and am often 4bet bluffing/folding against.
- I have good mining odds. This is rare and only comes up when we're deepstacked (150bbs? 200+? Zach can probably be more specific here), or when our opponent makes like a minraise. With 100bbs I can safely say just fold your pocket pairs that aren't in the above two categories. You DON'T have odds to call. I guess this changes a bit in FR where 3bet ranges are tighter and implied odds go up, but still it's usually not as good as it seems. Again against someone who I have may have set mining odds against, this is someone who I expect to have a strong range and as such I'll never be flatting to bluff him.
- I have good bluff equity, meaning my opponent gives up well postflop. Going with the last point, this is someone we can't really set mine against. If we expect his range to be wide/weak enough to bluff against, then our implied odds are even worse and we can't mine.

I generally wait for a 3bet of 8% and something in the teens when it comes to defending their blinds.
The adjustment am thinking of making based on this thread is being slightly more conservative when 4betting the guys with low fold to 3bets (waiting for a higher 3bet% before adjusting to them fully).
And replacing my air with more value.

Decent?

ChuckTs said:

Looking for 4bet spots you should simply look at how often they 3bet, how often they fold to 4bet, and what kind of history you have with the player is much more important.

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A good summation and exactly how I would go about it if I ever had the fold to 4bet stat sufficiently converged which I never have. (and i doubt I ever will now FTP has dealt with datamining properly)

This thread is mostly to find out whether I should make adjustments based on the fold to 3bet stat when the fold to 4bet stat is absent.
Also when I refer to this I mean to point out that the 3bet stats must be extreme and the adjustments relatively small.

ChuckTs said:

- I have good mining odds. This is rare and only comes up when we're deepstacked (150bbs? 200+? Zach can probably be more specific here), or when our opponent makes like a minraise. With 100bbs I can safely say just fold your pocket pairs that aren't in the above two categories. You DON'T have odds to call. I guess this changes a bit in FR where 3bet ranges are tighter and implied odds go up, but still it's usually not as good as it seems. Again against someone who I have may have set mining odds against, this is someone who I expect to have a strong range and as such I'll never be flatting to bluff him.

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thanks

I find that you can only really setmine with stacksizes of 150BB+, with someone with a tight 3-bet range who also 3-bets on the small side. I see a lot of microstakes players 3-betting 3xinitial raise which is 9-12BB leaving a call of 6-8BB. With a 150BB stack thats giving you around 15:1.

This comes up quite a bit.

A raise of 4Xinitial raise leaves you with around 11:1 which isnt quite as attractive.

I see what you mean Deco, and here I am ranting about 4betting criteria in general

I don't think it's concrete enough to base your entire decision on, but it definitely helps. It's just like looking at how often someone calls postflop, and applying that to preflop in the sense that you wouldn't 3bet them light if they were a postflop station, but it doesn't mean anything concrete at all, it would just be a general assumption that they don't fold to bluffs well.

Deco said:

This thread is mostly to find out whether I should make adjustments based on the fold to 3bet stat when the fold to 4bet stat is absent.
Also when I refer to this I mean to point out that the 3bet stats must be extreme and the adjustments relatively small.

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I would assume that someone with a high 3-bet and low fold to 3bet must have a high fold to 4bet.

This is a player who likes to get involved in 3bet pots as he likes to put pressure on players post flop.

By 4-betting you reduce implied odds massively and thus reduce the amount of pressure he can apply in later streets.

If his 3bet stat is high then his range is weak. If the 4bet reduces the amount of pressure he can apply then he has to fold all but his very best hands.

Stu_Ungar said:

Out of interest, what do you guys flat3-bets with.

Right now I'm really only doing it with PP/AK (PP as set mining)

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Unless we're deep I basically only flat 3-bets with AA. Yes this is exploitable and no I don't believe people exploit it. When we're deep if they 3-bet small I'll start flatting in position a ton more for example JT when I know I'm against AA and the flop will come KQ9 .

But basically unless you have a plan for what to do postflop against this player (ie a specific leak that you can exploit postflop in a 3-bet pot) you generally don't want to be flatting 3-bets.