Playing Tight Aggressive – Facing 3-Bets

There will be times in a game of poker where you will pick up a nice hand, raise to our standardised raising size, only to find that an opponent behind us re-raises, or 3-bets, us. It is essential for us to react correctly to these situations, as when they 3-bet the pot becomes hugely inflated. If you make mistakes in these situations you can find yourself losing a lot of money.

We want to continue with our current philosophy of ‘Tight is Right’. If we start calling 3-bets with all sorts of mediocre hands we will find ourselves in very tough situations postflop, and end up on the losing end a lot.

What Should You Do With Your Strongest Hands?

If we’re sitting there holding AA or KK and see someone 3-betting us we’re in a very happy situation indeed. What we don’t want to do is start playing it cool and just calling. We want to re-raise our opponent (called a 4-bet) and try to get all the money in the middle then and there. Our 4-betting size should be around 2.5 times the 3-bet size. For example, if we raise AA to 3BB, and our opponent 3-bets us to 9BB, our 4-bet size should be to around 22BB.

There is another nice situation we can sometimes find ourselves in, when the action is yet to reach us and we have seen a raise and a 3-bet occur before us. There should be no messing around here, we can just 4-bet our whole stack, rather than making a normal sized 4-bet and possibly having to see a flop with two opponents still in the pot, which can put us in awkward situations.

What About The Rest of Our Hands?

The strongest hands pretty much play themselves, we just want to go all-in. But once we hit the middling value hands it can be pretty tricky to know what to do.

With our strong pairs and strong Ace hands, such as QQ, JJ, AKo, and AKs, we can usually call a 3-bet (much better if we are in position). We can also call a 3-bet with all pocket pairs, providing both we and our opponent has a stack size of at least 20 times the raise size. This is exactly the same as the Call20 rule from our starting hands article; as if we hit a set we can usually win our opponents’ whole stack.

As for the rest of our hands, we should simply fold them when facing a 3-bet, unless we have strong information that our opponent is playing too loose. The exception to this rule is that if the 3-bet is the smallest is possibly can be (called a min3-bet), in which case we can call the majority of our hands and play them postflop.

Summary

• When facing a 3-bet, we should stick to our Tight is Right philosophy
• We should 4-bet our strongest hands, AA and KK, and try to get our entire chip stack in the pot preflop
• We can call a 3-bet with some of our other strong hands, such as QQ, JJ, and AK
• We fold all our other hands when facing a 3-bet, unless it is a min3-bet