In recent years, no-limit hold’em has become the most popular form of cash-game poker by far. With the influx of players who learned the ropes by playing on the Internet has come a new wave of hyper-aggressive players who raise and re-raise pre-flop a much larger percentage of the time than there more conservative predecessors. And you can easily notice such trend in Situs Judi poker online today.
To keep up with this overly active play, more and more players are learning how and why to make 3-bet (re-raise) bluffs pre-flop. Because the pre-flop portion of the 3-betting game with the normal 100 big blind stacks is largely mathematical and easy to learn, to gain an edge on this crowd, you have to look to the post-flop play when there’s a 3-bet and someone calls. Here we’re going to address playing the flop in these types of situations and how you can outplay your opponents.
The characteristics of flops in 3-bet pots are pretty straight-forward. The pot size is large compared to the size of the remaining stacks, and each player’s range of possible holdings is usually relatively small. The player in position will have a small advantage with all else being equal, but the positional advantage will be smaller than if the stacks are deeper relative to the size of the pot because on average fewer bets will be made in the post-flop portion of the hand. With the basics of 3-bet pots out of the way, let’s look at general strategy.
With draws that likely have 8 or more outs, you should usually be c-betting and getting the money in if the starting stacks were about 100 big blinds. The reason for this is that you only need a very small amount of fold equity for your semi-bluff to be more profitable than folding. Similarly, you should usually just get the money in if you have a vulnerable over-pair like pocket Queens on a Ten-high flush draw board because having an over-card come is a huge mistake because the pot size is so big.
The only truly difficult decisions come whenever you were the 3-bettor pre-flop and you are out of position on the flop, and you didn’t come close to hitting the board. The reason this is difficult is that it’s likely your opponents will be shoving over with any draw, so you can’t make your continuation betting range too weak by betting a lot of the time when you miss. On the other hand, you can’t make your checking range too weak either or you’ll constantly get bet into when you check and have to fold too often. One solution is to split your weak hands between your checking range and your continuation betting range, while also checking some of your strongest hands in order to induce bluffs. This keeps both your c-betting and checking ranges balanced.