3-Betting: Preflop 3-Bet Strategy with Updated Range Charts
3-betting preflop is a fundamental strategy for winning at poker. Getting it right is also easier than ever, thanks to the technological advances made in recent years.
In this article, I will break down why 3-betting is crucial for poker success and how to wield this weapon correctly depending on the situation you find yourself in.
Let’s get started!
Note: Prefer listening or watching to reading? Check out this episode of Upswing Poker Level-Up, which is all about 3-betting strategy.
Additional note: this is a full rewrite by Dan B. of a 2021 post that includes updated charts and tactics. Join us on our poker strategy Discord to discuss 3-betting strategy and more.
What is a 3-bet in poker?
The term 3-bet most commonly refers to the action of re-raising a preflop open. Subsequent raises are referred to as a 4-bet, 5-bet, etc.
Although the term also refers to the first re-raise after the flop, I will focus exclusively on preflop 3-betting.
For example, suppose another player raises preflop, leaving you with the option to call, fold, or re-raise. If you choose to re-raise, that action is referred to as a 3-bet.
Why Is 3-Betting Crucial to Poker Success
From a more beginner-friendly point of reference, we can conceptualize that we have two goals in poker:
- Increase the pot as much as possible with hands that are likely to win at showdown (value-bet effectively)
- Win pots without showdown with hands that are unlikely to win at showdown (semi-bluff effectively)
This idea permeates the entire game, starting from preflop. If we accept it as our premise, we can now see why 3-betting is important, as it accomplishes the following goals:
- It increases the pot with your strongest hands (think QQ+, AK) – aka value-betting
- It folds out better hands, or at least hands that have a good amount of equity against your weak hands (think A5s, A4s, 65s, 77, etc.) – aka semi-bluffing
Since there are only four streets of play and the stacks are quite deep (at least 100bb in cash games), the strongest hands want to start increasing the pot right from preflop.
From a game-theoretic point of view, 3-betting value hands should be balanced by semi-bluffs. That is because failing to do so results in a highly exploitable strategy where the opponent will simply stop paying your strong hands.
Preflop being a high-frequency spot makes this imbalance very apparent, and therefore easily exploitable by more skilled players.
If you’ve been failing to incorporate semi-bluffs into your preflop 3-betting game and you’ve been stuck for a while, it is worth paying attention to how your opponents are reacting to your 3-bets. If you constantly seem to get folds, they may have adjusted.
Types of 3-Betting Ranges
There are two primary ways to construct 3-betting ranges:
- Linear – usually consisting of premium hands, strong hands, and decent hands that benefit from protection
- Polarized – usually consisting of premium hands and semi-bluffs
Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
Linear 3-Betting Ranges
Here are a few situations where using a linear 3-betting range is optimal:
- When there are players left to act behind you
- The open-raiser or player(s) behind are calling stations and unlikely to fold to your 3-bet
When there are players left to act, your 3-betting range will have a very large impact on their strategy.
If you implement a mixed strategy (calling and 3-betting) in those situations, your calling range will inevitably be weaker, as your stronger hands are highly incentivized to 3-bet for value. This calling range can then be attacked by squeezes, lowering the expected value of calling in the first place.
This is why solvers recommend using 3-bet-or-fold strategies from every position except the Big Blind (in non-ante, deep-stack games).
These ranges usually look like this when fresh off the solver:
Optimal solution for CO vs HJ open-raise 100bb deep, low rake – Lucid Poker
Don’t focus on the mixing aspect, where some hands are both 3-bet and folded, but rather on the general hands being used.
The premiums benefit from increasing the pot size as they are likely to win it, and the other hands benefit from folding out either dominating hands (such as ATs folding out AJo) or simply hands that have a lot of equity against them (such as 88 folding out KQo).
For these mergy hands, the equity denial element (bluffing component), coupled with their chance to become the best hand (value component) makes 3-betting generate a higher expected value relative to calling (and facing squeezes).
As far as bet-sizing goes, raising to around 3 times the open-raise size is good when in position.
When out of position, use a size around 4–4.5x the open-raise.
These general rules assume 100bb stacks and non-ante structures.
These sizes work out great as they put the open-raiser in marginal spots with a sizable part of their range.
Polarized 3-Betting Ranges
Polarized 3-betting ranges become optimal when:
- There are no new players left to act
- There is a circumstance that increases the expected value of calling, like having posted an ante or the big blind
- You are in position to the remaining player
Without the threat of the squeeze, the expected value of calling increases. This means that 3-betting must become really good for it to surpass the expected value (EV) of calling.
As medium-strength hands prefer calling rather than 3-betting and folding out the weaker parts of the opponent’s range, it only makes sense that the value portion of the 3-betting range will need to be balanced by weaker hands
That being said, and here is where the last point comes into play, when you are out of position, you are forced to 3-bet somewhat stronger, as you will not get free turns and rivers nearly as often as when you are in position. You will then need to have hands that have some playability as your semi-bluffs.
When you are in position, given the structural advantage of being able to see turns and rivers, you don’t need as much playability to make 3-betting work better than calling.
This is why we see this difference between the 3-betting strategy of BB vs BTN open-raise compared to BB vs SB open-raise:
BBvsBTN 2.5bb open-raise (100bb, low rake) – Lucid Poker
BBvsSB 3bb open-raise (100bb, low rake) – Lucid Poker
We can see that when defending from out of position (the first image), the semi-bluff region is made out of stronger hands such as A8o, KTo, K9o, K7s, J8s, T7s, etc..
When in position, however, we are leaning more towards the weaker hands, such as A7o, A6o, A2o, K8o, K7o, J8o, J2s, T3s, etc..
One last point I want to make here is to focus on what we are not seeing, which is the solver polarizing with hands such as 96o, or 86o, or 82s. The solver is picking hands which are either on the border or just outside of the threshold calling hands. The reason for that is very logical, 3-betting with weaker trash hands would enable the opponent to not only defend wider against the 3-bet (as your bluffs are weaker), but to also tighten their open-raising range and thus ensure that he’s getting into that situation more frequently and punishing you.
What factors call for adjustments?
Always be ready to adjust your 3-betting strategy based on your opponents’ tendencies. Consider:
- How often does your opponent fold:
Against a player who often folds to 3-bets, mix in more 3-bet bluffs with weak hands. Against a player who rarely folds to 3-bets, 3-bet more linearly with stronger hands to exploit their weaker calling range.
- How often does your opponent 4-bet:
Against aggressive preflop 4-bettors, look to cut out some of the bottom hands that are going to fold against 4-bets
- The open-raiser’s postflop aggression tendencies:
If the opener plays weakly postflop, you can exploit them by 3-bet bluffing and c-betting the flop at a high frequency. Conversely, you should cut down on 3-bet bluffing against players who are calling stations postflop
- The tendencies of the players behind:
The less 4-bet-happy they are, the more you should 3-bet as you will not get your equity denied as frequently. The more call-happy they are, the stronger you should 3-bet as you go postflop more frequently.
Adjustment Examples
Let’s take this range as our baseline:
This was our CO vs HJ open-raise strategy from before.
Let’s assume now that we have two types of HJs (all else being equal):
- A slightly loose and passive HJ, who doesn’t do much 4-bet bluffing and tends to call a bit too wide
- A slightly loose and aggressive HJ, who does a bit too much 4-betting and tends to call too wide
Let’s first tackle how to maximize against the loose passive HJ player.
We have a couple of competing forces in play here. Since he calls too weak, we would generally want to 3-bet with stronger hands (value bet more). But since he doesn’t 4-bet us too much, this incentivizes us to 3-bet more, as we don’t get our equity denied as often.
Getting our equity denied is, by far, the worst of the two, as when you get called when semi-bluffing, you still have a bunch of equity to win the pot, while when getting 4-bet, our equity goes down to 0.
The resulting optimal strategy is to start 3-betting more frequently with a linear range, like this:
Now, if we are up against the second type of HJ player, the situation is completely the opposite.
We have a guy that will often try to deny our equity, who is also not willing to concede the pot preflop. In this case, we have overlapping force vectors pointing towards the same optimal counter-strategy. Here’s a useful analogy:
Your opponent is a raging bull charging towards you. What would you rather have:
- A swimsuit and a stick (loose and weak 3-betting range) – high chance of getting wrecked
- An iron shield and a sword (GTO 3-betting range) – good fighting chance
- A titanium exoskeleton with a lightsaber (nutted 3-betting range) – guaranteed victory
Clearly, you’d rather have the titanium body suit with a lightsaber. Since he’s so keen to put money into the pot no matter which way, you want to have the goods when that happens. So this is how your strategy should look:
Final Word
All of these principles apply to squeezing as well. There is no fundamental difference between the two situations, so I encourage you to apply these concepts to those situations as well.
You are now more equipped than 95% of players out there to 3-bet effectively against your opponents.
That’s all for this article! I am curious to hear your experience after making the adjustments recommended in this article, so please come back to this article and leave a comment down below about how they’ve been working out.
Till next time, good luck, grinders!
For more info on squeezing like a pro, read: The Ultimate Guide to Squeezing in No Limit Hold’em.
Continue your studies on this topic
