[StellarWind]

This is an interesting post and I intend to read it several more times. Here come a few initial thoughts.

There seems to be two basic postflop countermeasures proposed:

1. Light 3-bets against the flop checkraise.

Most flop checkraises are not big starting hands. They are modest starting hands that took a cheap flop and happened to hit. The "never 3-bet" strategy has the effect of adding some big hands to the standard mix like overpairs, large top pairs with big kickers, and jumbo overcards. My average hand strength for a flop checkraise is going up not down because of these hands. For Villain to loosen up his normal flop 3-bet standards in the face of this cannot be a good idea.

Note that I don't know what dreanclown does but for me the flop is a new beginning. I'm not going to checkraise the flop with garbage just because it used to be a good starting hand. I'm going to apply my best poker skill and checkraise the most appropriate set of flopped hands that I can find without regard to whether the starting hand was QQ or 98o.

One of the advantages of this strategy is technical rather than deceptive. You save money when you delay the preflop raise and then discover that the flop sucks and in your best poker judgment you don't want to raise after all.

There is another fundamental issue with thinking that light flop 3-bets could be a "cure". The plays you describe may well be a better way to play poker. But if you can 3-bet my flop checkraise you also could have raised my flop autobet after I 3-bet preflop. If one play is good the other play should also be good because it's the same pot size, the same flop aggression, and the same hand representation. Why would one expect light flop 3-bets to do something that the equivalent flop raise wouldn't do against a preflop 3-bettor who autobets the flop?

Except of course that it's much harder to put me on a narrow range of hands when I never 3-bet preflop. Surely that has to work in Villain's disfavor.

2. Checking behind on the flop and the various follow up measures to this action.

This is very interesting and I need to think very carefully about it. But one apparent difference from your Schneids discussion junps out. This is not heads up poker. Villain is openraising from outside the blinds and has at least one other preflop opponent besides me. He figures to have a half-reasonable hand and not the virtual any-two stuff you see many players raise the SB with. Plus the SB itself is extra money in the pot. The upshot is that his openraise hand range is going to be a lot better than my BB defense hand range.

He can't just go around checking lots of flops with such a big difference in hand range and expect there to be no consequences. Yes I'll lose a bet when I have QQ but for every time that happens I'll get several free cards with raggy connectors. There's a reason people autobet the flop after a steal attempt goes headsup with a calling blind. You can't ignore this just because there is an occasional AQ or KK mixed in with the great mass of ordinary hands.

All this assumes that I won't allow my good-player opponent to simply outplay me on the big streets after he checks the flop. That would be a problem but the cure is better table selection and picking my battles more carefully.

Preflop Villain can choose to steal more often if he thinks that my blind defense countermeasures are inferior. I know I do that when I think the BB plays poorly. But I hope I've made my point that the never 3-bet strategy is not inferior, just different. In that case Villain can still increase his range but he's just making a mistake if he goes beyond his proper steal range because he is attacking a weakness that doesn't exist.

The SB and possible other players sitting behind him represent another independent obstacle to excessively increasing his steal range.

Finally there is an important practical issue. I'm quite willing to change strategies or even mix them. In a real 6-max ring game I can diagnose that he is stealing excessively a lot faster than he can figure out that I don't 3-bet headsup from the SB. Very strong hands don't come up that often and for me to go without one for a while is not remarkable at all. Me showing a premium would of course be a tipoff but it might be a one-off play.

So I expect that I can adjust to the countermeasures a lot faster than he can put new countermeasures in place. But this illustrates why I said in a previous post that I want to learn several good BB defense strategies that I can selectively apply and mix. Predictable is usually bad.