One of the most important tools that lower stakes No Limit Hold’em players can have at their disposal as far as profitability is concerned is a well timed re-raise (also known and referred to in this post as a 3-bet). Learning how and when to 3-bet efficiently is an important hurdle to overcome but putting the effort in to learn the skills will pay big, big dividends in the long term.
Re-raising when we have position in a hand is a really strong play because it takes advantages of the fact that players in the later positions (especially in six-max games) will raise with a very wide range of hands and will need to make calls that have a negative expected value to continue in the hand when they have marginal holdings. Moreover, we gain the initiative in the hand, picking up the opportunity to force our opponent of a hand. In addition, when we 3-bet more liberally, we take advantage of the average opponent’s tendency to fear a premium pocket pair; that is to say as players re-raise less at the lower limits, tending to do so only with big hands, our opponents are more likely to read us as very strong.
Because re-raising is such a powerful tool, we are able to re-raise with more marginal holdings and show profit. This is known as “3-betting light”. 3-betting with less than optimal holdings may seem risky but it really is a strong tactic. The types of hands that we can 3-bet light with are hands like T9s and other suited connectors and similar strength hands. We don’t want to be 3-betting light however with cards like QT and JQ as the hands that will call our three bets on occaison will be dominating our holdings completely.
We only want to be re-raising light from late position against middle and late position raisers (early position raisers are more likely to hold premium hands) as these players’ ranges are quite large. Ideally the villain will be tight and aggressive and must not be super tight and thus only be opening with a narrow range or super loose and thus will call regardless of their expectation.
A significant portion of the time, your opponent’s will fold to your re-raises but if they do call you, you can use your initiative in the hand to make a continuation bet of three quarters the size of the pot with the intention of picking the pot up whether we have improved or not. Of course, if our opponent re-raises our 3-bet (4-bets), we should fold almost all of the time as he almost certainly has a premium hand.
Light re-raising is a skill that requires practice but it is one that can reap tremendous rewards in the right spots. Be careful but often, you can rake in a nice pot with only a marginal hand.
This article was written by meshuganater.
Tags: cash games, online poker, poker strategy, re-raising, tactics