QQ 3-betting or Calling?
Stacks are $2.30 effective
Hero is on the button with QsQc.
Action folds to UTG+1 who raises to 10c
Folds to hero, who 3-Bets to 30c
Folds to UTG+1, who 4-Bets to 60c
Hero calls
Pot is $1.17 both players have $1.70 behind
Flop comes 6h 7h 6c
UTG+1 raises to 60c
Hero shoves for $1.70
UTG+1 calls
UTG+1 had just joined the table so I had no useful information. He was obviously aggressive but I didn't have much else to go on.
It feels like this is -EV play on my part. I'm terrible with overpairs. The 4-bet was weird to me since he min bet.
Should I have called the 4-bet?
Should I have shoved preflop?
What should I have done post-flop?
Feedback is much appreciated.
Hi there Epithaeus, thank you for posting your hand. I agree with everybody who had posted before, except that I have something more to add, and I hope it helps you.
I don't play too much full ring games, but I see that many players are really tight from the EP, opening something between 5-8% of
hands.
It becomes hard to 3bet for value situations like this. Besides we can be mixing our 3-betting and calling range: We can, just for example demonstration, call 3 combos of QQ and 3-bet 3 combos of QQ, depending on position and types of playes/ammount of reliable information we have at our disposal.
I say that for the sake of good preflop playability. The vast majority of the field is very unbalanced with QQ+ and they will have 80% of 3-bet with these hands and, if I am being very generous, 20% calling.
Many player 3-bet a lot with QQ+ and get a lot of preflop folds, which is not good. Summarizing, what I am trying to say, very poorly, is that we should have a balanced frequency for calling and 3-betting with the same hand.
Playing the same hand in different manners is also a good way to explore our opponents at the table.
We don't have information on stacks sizes, this is not irrelevant to the description of the hand.
UTG+1 polarizes a lot its range raising to 5x because it knows that it will not only be paid by worse hands, or even better, get a 3-bet. This is a spot that we can be calling safely, because the range that is raising first is way too strong and we don't want to turn our good value hand (QQ) into a
bluff.
Now, you also made an unbalanced 3-bet preflop, because we usually are 3-betting versus 3x, 3.5x raise, so the 3-bet will be 3x, 3.1x, 3.2x, even 3.5x and we will see that 0.21 cents is a fair size for a 3-bet either for value or for bluff.
Somebody said that at 2 NLHE nobody is shoving AKs or AKo in a board like this but I strongly disagree: many players at 2 NLHE play AK as if it is AA or KK itself, preflop and postflop.
I would not be scared at all if the villain shows AK, AQ, AJ, Ax or even JJ, TT, 99, 88 since many players at 2 NLHE look to a lower flop, or lower board in any street and decide to jam, no matter what.
The UTG+1 player polarizes its bet flop quite a bit, because we usually are not betting nearly 1/2 into a 4-bet pot out of position, so either your Villain has really KK+ , or for some ludicrous reason 77 or, almost impossible pocket 6's in a situation like this, but this is very simple account:
12 combos that are beating us in this flop, 6 combos of AA and 6 combos of KK: the other combos are JJ and under, and we are beating all of them. Pay attention to the size Villain used preflop and postflop and put a note on it no matter what it showed.
All your decision-making preflop and postflop will rely on how much information you have over the player you are involved with. Personally, I don't love going fancy against players that I barely know (less than 100 hands played), unless I see that the player is the real donkey and its vomiting chips throughout the table.
Regards;
Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa
