In-Position Raising In 3-Bet Pots as the Preflop Caller

Part I – Theory Primer: The Forgotten Line

That sounded mysterious for a second, didn’t it? But this is an important line, one that’s greatly underutilized. And even when players do take it, they rarely execute it efficiently.

In this article, I’ll break down why I’m calling it “The Forgotten Line”, why the strategy works the way it does in theory, how your opponents are playing against it, why their approach deviates so heavily from GTO, and—most importantly—how you can exploit that gap to earn more money by playing this line yourself.

Fair warning: I’ll be weaving in some advanced strategy throughout, but don’t worry, I’ll compress everything into digestible bites to the best of my ability.

Okay, so first things first …

Why The Forgotten Line?

Let’s clarify exactly what I’m talking about with a concrete example.

You open-raise on the Button. The Small Blind 3-bets you, and you flat his raise. The flop comes, and he c-bets. You now have the option to fold, call, or raise.

With that out of the way, here’s why I’m calling it The Forgotten Line: it’s one of the most underplayed and misplayed high-frequency lines in the entire game tree.

Even very strong players—those playing from 500NL all the way up to 5000NL—consistently play it suboptimally. You’ll see the evidence for that in the data I present in Part II of this series.

But first, let’s dive into the …

Theoretical Inner-Workings

Flop C-betting Mechanics

When the Small Blind 3-bets and you flat in position, he very often retains both a wide range and a nut advantage. His goal on most boards, then, is to optimize around the large cluster of medium-strength hands. These hands want to extract value from weaker hands while controlling the pot size.

This is typically achieved through block bets—small bets that mathematically force the in-position player to defend with a wide portion of their range. As a result, the optimal c-betting strategy becomes a high-frequency, small-size approach.

The only boards that don’t favor the Small Blind are the lower ones, where the highest card is a 9 or lower. On these flops, much of his range has missed due to a preflop distribution that’s heavy on double broadways. The optimal strategy in these spots is to play more defensively.

That means c-betting at a much lower frequency, using a larger size, and doing so with a more polarized range. His checking range should remain protected by plenty of overpairs and other strong hands.

The goal here is to optimize for the large portion of his range that consists of non-made hands. By checking strong hands and betting fewer weak ones, he discourages the Button from stabbing too frequently, thus allowing his unmade hands to realize their equity more effectively.

Now that we’ve covered how the c-betting strategy works from a high-level perspective, let’s zoom out and look at the bird’s-eye view of how the vs c-bet strategy takes shape.

Defending Mechanics

In theory, the goal when defending against bets (or raises) is to create betting/checking indifference in your opponent’s range.

The optimal folding frequency is best captured by the concept of Minimum Defense Frequency (MDF). While it’s not a perfect formula—since it doesn’t account for range asymmetries—it’s still one of the most valuable tools for understanding poker strategy.

I consider it one of the foundational formulas in the game. It goes like this:

MDF = 1 – B / (B + P)

Where:

• B = Bet size

• P = Pot size

So, if the pot is $100 and you’re facing a $50 bet, the MDF would be:

1 – 50 / (50 + 100) = 1 – 0.33 = 0.67

That means you should defend with 67% of your range.

Assuming a symmetrical nut distribution, the optimal raising (or betting) frequency depends on a few key factors:

• The number of hands in your range with very high equity
• The number of hands with medium equity that are also highly vulnerable
• The equity your strongest hands have against your opponent’s folding range
• The SPR (stack-to-pot ratio)
• Your relative position in the hand

Here’s a quick breakdown of how each factor affects the optimal raising frequency:

• The more hands you have with very high equity, the higher the optimal raising frequency—and vice versa.
• The more hands with medium equity that are also highly vulnerable, the higher the raising frequency—and vice versa.
• The more equity your strong hands have against the folding range, the lower the raising frequency—and vice versa. This is because the expected value of allowing those hands to continue and contribute more money to the pot outweighs the EV of folding them out. This is the core idea behind the concept of invulnerability.

In general, the smaller the stack-to-pot ratio, the less mathematical pressure your opponent can exert on non-nutted hands—whether through raising or betting on later streets. As a result, you can raise more medium-to-strong hands and do so more frequently—and vice versa.

That said, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, the EV of calling with near-nutted hands is very high due to their invulnerability, which lowers the incentive to raise them. The inverse is usually true as well.

There’s more that could be said about the mechanics driving optimal strategy at different SPRs, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.

Finally, we have relative position. Simply put, being in position gives you the final say in how big the pot becomes in most situations. This reduces your incentive to fast play strong hands, since you can often recoup missed value on a later street. Remember—this is no-limit hold’em. That means you can always say:

Being a zero-sum game, you can probably already imagine that this factor has the opposite effect on the out-of-position player. Since he doesn’t have the privilege of acting last in most situations, he’s more incentivized to fast-play his strongest hands as a more efficient way to get the entire stack in.

With all of these factors in mind, we can infer the following: the weaker your opponent’s betting range, the more frequently you should raise. This is because more of your hands will cross the equity threshold to become value bets—and those value bets will be accompanied by a proportionate number of bluffs to balance the range and create indifference in your opponent’s defense strategy.

We can also infer that the weaker your opponent’s checking range is, the more frequently you should bet, using the same generative reasoning.

Of course, there are deeper layers to the mechanics at play behind the scenes, but the explanations I’ve provided are enough to grasp the core principles behind GTO strategy. My goal here isn’t to overwhelm you, it’s to crack open the door to deeper understanding and guide you inside.

Now, let’s get down to…

A Quick Quiz

With the theoretical groundwork laid out and examples in place, let me pose a question:

In which of the following situations would you expect to see a higher raising frequency against a c-bet—assuming all other variables remain constant?

• A) On an As 7d 5c rainbow flop, when facing a 25% pot c-bet
• B) On an As 7d 5c rainbow flop, when facing a 75% pot c-bet

The answer is A—you’ll see a higher raising frequency when facing the block-bet.

Here’s how the optimal strategies break down…

We can see that the solver raises against the 25% pot block-bet around 13% of the time, while it raises against the 75% pot c-bet only about 1% of the time.

If we trace this back through the reasoning I laid out earlier, it holds up.

When the opponent uses a smaller c-bet size, and plays in a theoretically sound way, his range will contain more medium-equity hands. This inherently means you’ll have more hands that meet the equity threshold for raising for value.

On the other hand, when he uses a larger c-bet size, his range becomes more polarized—comprised of either very high-equity hands or bluffs. As a result, fewer hands in your range will qualify to raise for value.

But that alone doesn’t fully explain why the solver adopts an almost no-raise strategy versus the 75% pot bet. To complete the picture, we also need to consider the third, fourth, and fifth factors I previously outlined:

• The equity your value hands have against the folding range
• The SPR (stack-to-pot ratio)
• Your relative position

The more invulnerable your hand is, the more incentive you have to slow play it. That’s because the downside of allowing otherwise-folding hands to realize their equity is minimized. In some situations, certain value hands are not only nearly invulnerable, but also block key parts of the opponent’s defending range. In those cases, you’re actually incentivized to let drawing-dead hands realize their equity—so they can put more money into the pot later, either by bluffing or thin value-betting.

In our particular example, your strongest hands are close to invulnerable against your opponent’s folding range—those hands would only win by backdooring a straight or flush. As a result, your incentive to raise with them is diminished.

SPR Considerations and Relative Position

Let’s talk about SPR. Without going into too much detail, at this SPR level (~4), you should generally be more conservative with your fast plays. There’s still a meaningful amount of chips left to play for, which can be leveraged against you, so you typically don’t want to open the action with medium-strength hands.

Finally, let’s touch on relative position. Being in position encourages you to play more passively with your very high-equity hands. This is for a few reasons, but the main one is simple: you can always make up for lost value on the turn and river, thanks to your ability to act last.

Wrapping Up

With all the foundational mechanics laid out, you’re now equipped to deeply understand the strategies we’ll explore in Part II of this series. In that article, I’ll break down exactly how the GTO strategies play out across a few different board textures—and compare them to how even high-level, real-life opponents approach those same spots (backed by data). Finally, I’ll show you how to exploit those deviations from optimal play to increase your win rate in this node.

That’s all for this article! I had a blast writing it—there’s a ton of valuable info here, and I hope you enjoyed reading it. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to drop them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to respond.

Till next time—good luck out there, grinders!

To learn more about how to play in aggressive nodes, read: How To Play Straight Turns After Check-Raising the Flop.