What Top Poker Pros Already Know About 4-Betting

You’re about to learn how professional poker players approach 4-betting.

You’ll find the answers to these key questions in this article:

• Why should you 4-bet?
• With which hands should you 4-bet?
• What 4-bet size should you use?
• How should you adjust our 4-bet sizes in tournaments?

The answers are relatively simple and you can start applying the following advice in the very next session you play.

Stick around until the end to grab your exclusive coupon code for $200 off our advanced tournament course, which expires in a few days.

What is a 4-Bet?

A 4-bet is the second re-raise in a betting round, usually seen preflop. For example, suppose you raise preflop and a player behind you re-raises (aka 3-bets). If the action gets back to you and you re-raise again, that’s a 4-bet.

While postflop 4-bets are possible, this article focuses exclusively on preflop 4-betting.

Why Should You 4-Bet?

You should 4-bet because you want to build the pot when you have a premium hand.

Sometimes you should 4-bet with a relatively weak hand with the goal of making your opponent fold — i.e. a 4-bet bluff — but your entire 4-bet range should be built around the premium hands.

Hypothetically, if you were never dealt the premium hands preflop, you should in theory never 4-bet because you’d have nothing to build your 4-bet range around. In other words, you 4-bet bluff in order to support (balance) the strong hands.

How Should You 4-Bet?

You can’t only 4-bet premium hands. If you did that, you’re not taking advantage of all the times your opponent will fold. And if your opponents caught on to your “only 4-bet premiums” strategy, they would always have an easy decision versus your 4-bets.

Of course, if you have a read that your opponent is unlikely to fold versus a 4-bet, you should weight your range more towards the premium hands and cut out most or all of the bluffs. 

Your goal when 4-betting is to make your opponents’ decisions hard. This goal is accomplished when you put most of their hands in a gray area between continuing or folding.

There are three steps to this:

1. Identify your value 4-betting range

The first step is to decide which strong hands are worth 4-betting for value in a given situation.

This will depend on a number of factors, including but not limited to:

• Your position
• Your opponent’s position
• Stack depth
• What you know about your opponent’s game

Later in this article, I’ll go over some examples that show these factors at play.

2. Add bluffs to your 4-betting range

The best 4-bet bluffing hands are suited Ax and Kx hands that can not profitably call the 3-bet. Some offsuit Ax and Kx hands get mixed into the bluff 4-bet range too, as do other hands on occasion.

The Ax and Kx hands have the best blockers to your opponent’s continuing range, which makes it a bit more likely they will fold (see: card removal).

The specific hands and how often you should 4-bet with them depend on your value range. As your number of value 4-bets increases, so should your number of bluffs.

3. 4-bet to an amount that puts your opponent in a tough spot.

Your 4-bet size should put the 3-bettor in a marginal spot with most of his hands, forcing him to call with a decent portion of his 3-betting range. If you use too large or too small of a size, your opponent will have an easy decision with most of his hands.

Bad 4-bet sizes essentially let your opponent off the hook too easily. They’re much more likely to make a mistake if you use a size that puts most of their range in a grey area between calling and folding.

What 4-Bet Size Should You Use?

The answer to this question depends on whether you are in position or out of position.

When you’re out of position, you should 4-bet bigger in order to mitigate your opponent’s positional advantage. Conversely, you should 4-bet smaller when you have the advantage of position.

Position matters because it impacts how your opponents will realize their equity. They will realize equity well when playing in position and poorly when playing out of position. If you’re not familiar with the concept of equity realization, read this article to learn about it. It’s a very important concept to understand if you want to play poker at a high level!

Now, let’s dive into specific examples, starting with when you’re in position.

4-Bet Sizing When In Position

Suppose you raise from the Button and the Small Blind 3-bets (cash game, 100bb deep).

Note: For this example, the ranges will be based on a 2.5bb open-raise and an 11bb 3-bet. If larger raise sizes are common in your games, make sure you play tighter than the ranges that follow.

A good player’s 3-bet range from the Small Blind will look something like this:

Here is what a balanced 4-betting range could look like for the Button:

This range includes:

• Pocket Tens+ and AK for value
• High card hands (red boxes) as the primary bluffs
• Some other hands (T8s, 65s, 55) as low frequency bluffs*

*These hands are mixed into the 4-bet range to improve board coverage (see: what is board coverage?).

I ran a quick and rough equity calculation to see how much equity the Small Blind’s 3-bet range has against the Button’s 4-bet range in this example:

The Small Blind’s entire range has just under 45% equity, and most of his individual hands will have roughly 35% raw equity.

Let’s decrease that to a range of 26-30% equity to account for his positional disadvantage. This decrease is due to that equity realization concept I referenced earlier.

The Button should use a 4-bet size that effectively targets these 30% equity hands. The size should make the Small Blind feel indifferent between calling and folding with these hands.

If the Button chooses the right size, the Small Blind’s decision will be marginal either way with most of his range.

The 4-bet size that hammers his range most is somewhere around 2.3x his 3-bet size. That’s about 25bb in this scenario. This size gives the Small Blind a 27% price to call (see: how to calculate pot odds), which is a tricky spot for the heart of his range (remember, those hands will realize 26-30% equity).

Now let’s take a look at when we are out of position.

Out of Position 4-Bet Sizing

Suppose you raise from the Cutoff and the Button 3-bets (cash game, 100bb deep).

Note: The following ranges will be based on a 2.25bb open and a 7.2bb 3-bet.

A good player’s Button 3-bet range will look something like this:

Here is what a balanced 4-bet range could look like for the Cutoff:

This range includes:

• Pocket Tens+ and AK for value*
• High card hands (AQo, A5s, KJs, etc) as the primary bluffs*
• Some other hands (but fewer than before) as low frequency bluffs

*This example reveals why value and bluff are imperfect terms. There are some hands, such as AQs, that straddle the line between bluff and value bet. But thinking in these terms can still be helpful when building your ranges.

Again, you should choose a 4-bet size that effectively targets the heart of your opponent’s range. You’ll need to go a bit bigger than before to account for your positional disadvantage.

Something in the neighborhood of 2.5x to 2.6x the 3-bet size is appropriate. That’s 18-19bb in this scenario.

Note: You might have noticed a new sizing option emerge: the all-in 4-bet. This is a nice play to make with certain hands when you’re out of position against the 3-bettor. Read this article to learn when and why you should make this play.

How Should You Adjust in Tournaments?

You know who knows a lot about tournament poker strategy?

High stakes crushers Darren Elias and Nick Petrangelo, who collaborated on an advanced tournament course called Road to Victory here on Upswing Poker.

Darren and Nick’s course comes with an easy-to-use preflop browser app, which contains numerous ranges that cover almost every preflop situation you can imagine at 6 different stack depths.

The 4-bet size recommended by those charts are similar the sizes I recommended for cash games:

As you can see from my giant red arrows, these charts suggest 4-betting to:

• 2.2x when in position
• 2.6-2.8x when out of position

Nick and Darren’s charts recommend using these sizes when deep (the chart is for 100bb, and the sizes are reasonable when sitting with ~60bb or more).

Once your stack approaches 50bb, all-in becomes a prevalent 4-bet size. In many situations, this all-in size is used in tandem with a non-all-in 4-bet strategy.

For instance, let’s click and examine their Middle Position vs Hijack 3-bet chart at 50bb:

 

The coaches recommends 4-betting non-all-in with AA, KK, and AKs every time in this spot. A bunch of other hands are non-all-in 4-bets at a mixed frequency (JJ-TT, 77, AQo, ATs-A8s, KTs-K9s, QJs). 

The rest of the 4-betting hands simply go all-in (AKo, QQ, and these hands as a mixed frequency: JJ, TT, A5s, A4s).

At 30bb, the only 4-bet size the coaches recommend is all-in. Which makes sense given that you’d have to commit such a big chunk of your stack when 4-betting anyway.

You can own this tournament preflop app + 30 hours of his coaching footage from Darren and Nick when you get their Road to Victory course.

As a special deal for reading this entire article, you can save $200 by using the coupon code 4BET at checkout. That code expires this upcoming Tuesday (2/18) at midnight. Learn more now!

Final Thoughts on 4-Betting

To sum up, when you 4bet, you want to use your premium hands for value (obviously). Then, balance those premium hands by also 4-bet bluffing, mostly with hands that block the premium part of your opponents range.

As far as sizing goes, you should 4-bet to around 2.3x the 3-bettors raise when you are in position and around 2.6x his raise when you are out of position (assuming 100bb stacks).

When you’re deep stacked in tournaments, roughly the same sizes are good: 2.2x when in position and 2.6-2.8x when out of position will do the trick.

These 4-bet sizes will put your opponents in a tough spot and allow you to profit whether they over-defend, under-defend, or even play optimally.

As usual, if you have any comments or feedback don’t hesitate to use the comment section below.

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