[StellarWind]

It is important to recognize that calling preflop and checkraising Villain's flop autobet has exactly the same effect as 3-betting preflop and autobetting the flop. In each case the same money goes into the pot and Villain must decide if he wants to raise, call, or fold the flop.

Provided that you assume that Villain will autobet the flop there can be no "loss of value" that everyone keeps talking about. Walk through the two sequences and count the bets if you don't believe this. Chess players call this a transposition.

Hero gains two advantages by delaying his raise until the flop:

1. Information hiding: Villain cannot distinguish big starting hands from little starting hands that flopped well. On a 983 flop, AA and 98 are played the same way.

2. Flexibility: Hero has the option of not checkraising a good starting hand if it doesn't fit the flop. QQ looks like a wonderful hand, but perhaps on a AKx flop calling down will be more appealing versus this Villain. If you 3-bet preflop it's too late for this insight, but if you just called preflop you may change your plan.

Note that Hero can also adopt a more ambitious plan. Instead of checkraising a big flop he might call again and go for the turn checkraise. The point is that having more options is a good thing.

Unless Villain stops autobetting the flop Hero is gaining these advantages for free.

Much of what I just said is a restatement of Kiddo's posts.

My experience is that I am an unlucky player. I rarely have AA, QQ, or even KQ when someone raises my blind. Usually I have to defend with some random hand like K6s or 97o.

How exactly can the blind stealer stop autobetting the flop if it means giving free cards to all of these little hands and not pushing his 4-1 pot odds for bluffing the flop? There is a reason why people autobet the flop. To me it seems like Villain's "cure" is much worse than the disease it was supposed to treat.

The preceding paragraph has much more force when Villain is stealing from the field and just happened to get heads up with BB. In this case Villain is expected to have a much better average starting hand than BB and his failure to autobet the flop becomes egregious.