3-bet pre-flop or check-raise the flop?

[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.

[dave44]

Stellar, how much weight do you give to the concept of "initiative"? It seems to me that "initiative" may not actually be a real advantage in a game between two perfect players.

Putting in the last raise preflop tends to limit the range of hands a player can be put on. On one hand, this can help you steal a pot when a flop hits your strong range of hands hard, but misses your particular hand. On the other hand, when your opponent can limit your range of hands, he can play better against you.

If players simply erased their memory of who put in the last raise, all that last raise you put in preflop did was allow your opponent to better define your hand.

Thus, I don't think that the way people discuss "initiative" having value is always correct. Against a weak player who will now fold too much, there is value. But against an aggressive player who can read hands, "initiative" doesn't seem to mean anything. Deciding whether to put in that last raise should be made based on the benefits in the immediate value you gain and the cost of allowing your opponent to define your range more accurately.

[StellarWind]

[ QUOTE ]
Stellar, how much weight do you give to the concept of "initiative"?

[/ QUOTE ]
I spend a lot of time thinking about this and I still don't know much.

In regards to this thread, both main lines are an attempt to seize the initiative. One could argue that the preflop 3-bet is more intimidating because of the overpair threat. Or one could argue that an attacked launched after the flop is visible is more credible because Hero made an informed decision.

Intimidation is in the eye of the beholder. The more effective threat may be opponent-dependent.

I think the initiative can be overrated because Hero doesn't see what Villain folded. There are so many cases where you 3-bet preflop, autobet the flop, take down the pot, and feel great about your game. Until you look at your hand and reflect that whatever rubbish Villain folded, he certainly did the right thing. People don't fold good hands very much.

The initiative is a semibluffing concept and bluffs only fit certain types of hands. I commented recently in a specific situation that 3-betting QJs headsup preflop might be risky but at least it is well-motivated. A similar play with 33 is pretty hopeless because the only hands that fold postflop are the ones you hope will call you down.

"Provided that you assume that Villain will autobet the flop there can be no "loss of value" that everyone keeps talking about."

Assume you have AA and your opponent has KK. If you 3-bet pre-flop, there's a good chance your opponent is capping (if 4 bets is the cap). Now assume that the flop comes A-K-5. There's a good chance that the flop gets capped as well. If you didn't three bet pre-flop, you would have missed out on two bets.

[StellarWind]

[ QUOTE ]
"Provided that you assume that Villain will autobet the flop there can be no "loss of value" that everyone keeps talking about."

Assume you have AA and your opponent has KK. If you 3-bet pre-flop, there's a good chance your opponent is capping (if 4 bets is the cap). Now assume that the flop comes A-K-5. There's a good chance that the flop gets capped as well. If you didn't three bet pre-flop, you would have missed out on two bets.

[/ QUOTE ]
First, unless Villain is a special type of dumdum (a few exist) he makes money off his preflop caps when averaged across your entire range of 3-bets. Cappers have better average hands than the people they 3-bet.

Second, there is a certain number of raises after which the cowboys will "get it" and just call you down. This number of raises is player-specific, but I don't see why on average you wouldn't get an extra raise postflop to make up for the raise you lose preflop. If the cap on the flop stops the show, then we can just start up again on the turn until he finally slows down.

Third, in this specific case I would greatly prefer to have called preflop. It's going to be much harder to figure out that KK is no good after I just call preflop. Even if he knows I never 3-bet my possible hand range is still larger and the chance of AA correspondingly less.

Tilt can and often does play a huge factor when playing heads up even at high limits. Whether these people are "dumdums" or rocket scientists is irrelevant.

Against most opponents, I agree that not 3-betting pre-flop can be made up for post-flop. But against tilting or ultra-aggressive opponents, you could be losing out on bets.

"Third, in this specific case I would greatly prefer to have called preflop. It's going to be much harder to figure out that KK is no good after I just call preflop. Even if he knows I never 3-bet my possible hand range is still larger and the chance of AA correspondingly less."

To say it's going to be much harder to figure out that KK is no good after you just call pre-flop is absurd. An average high limit heads up player 3-bets 20% of his hands pre-flop (I have 270,000 datamined hands of 300-600 to prove it). AA accounts for .45% of that 20% hand range. That means your opponent can be roughly 2.25% surer than normal that you have AA. After an ace flops, you only have three ways to make aces instead of six so he can't even be 2.25% surer.

[kiddo]

As I said earlier Im not an expert at hu. But today I tried playing like this, always call in BB and checkraise flop if I liked it. I played 3-4 hours at $5/10 and $10/20 and the guys I played against was poor but I noticed a few things:

1) Its much easier to play this way, u dont have to think until he does something on flop. U dont have to mix it up preflop and on flop.

2) Since u always play the same way its pretty easy to detect patterns in your opponents play (at least against the players I played), you always do the same and now its up to them to get a good mix of valuebetting/bluffs/slowplays on flop.

3) Bad players almost always call when u flopcheckraise them, no matter what hand they got, but if u 3bet preflop they will fold flop if they got nothing, so u often get 2 bets from them on flop when they got 3 outs or less. (This made me start to 3bet some of the weaker hands of my normal 3betting range, like KJ or small pocketp.)

4) When they see that u never raise preflop and never bet flop the once I played tried to counter that which made it easier to read them (cause they did it so clumsy) and made them play less then optimal (if they had seen my hands).

Im still not convinced its a good way to play against all type of players and against players very good at adapting. But I really dont know.

[Victor]

ok, i think my style at hu has always been somewaht close to this. i only raise my primos but rarely fold anything else. fold like 5%. prly too tight tho. kurosh would know. regardless against most players they cant recognize your 3bet range anyway so it clearly gains value.

[StellarWind]

[ QUOTE ]
Tilt can and often does play a huge factor when playing heads up even at high limits. Whether these people are "dumdums" or rocket scientists is irrelevant.

[/ QUOTE ]
There are definitely players who have specific leaks that make the preflop 3-bet a must. A classic is the autocapper who must have the preflop initiative at all cost. Anyone on wild tilt is in the same category. So are certain unpredictable bad players who erase their memories when the flop hits and don't autobet at all.

No matter what poker strategy someone advocates there is an opponent who makes it look very, very good. No matter how strongly I criticize a play in general, I would be the first to say that you should use it against the right opponent.

So I agree with you, but I'm really discussing decent opponents who are playing well right now.

[ QUOTE ]
To say it's going to be much harder to figure out that KK is no good after you just call pre-flop is absurd.

[/ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
An average high limit heads up player 3-bets 20% of his hands pre-flop (I have 270,000 datamined hands of 300-600 to prove it). AA accounts for .45% of that 20% hand range.

[/ QUOTE ]
You have a math problem here. Assuming a 20% free bettor always 3-bet AA it should account for 2.26% of his 3-bets.

But that is hardly the issue. By the time KK has reason to suspect a problem on an AKx board there will normally have been several raises. At that point Hero's logical hand range is quite narrow--just a handful of hands that hit the board very hard. It will often happen that some of those hands can be ruled out by the failure to 3-bet preflop. Perhaps ten possible starting hands of which 3 are AA may shrink to only six possible starting hands if you can rule hands out using the preflop play. So Villain sees that his 70% chance of being good is really only 50% and he applies the brakes in time to save a bet or two.