Sunday, April 19, 2009

Cold-calling wizards

Among the pros who make coaching videos and play shorthanded 5/10 NL on Full Tilt, you don't see a whole lot of preflop reraising.

They frequently cold call in position rather than 3-bet. Then they gain their edge postflop.

According to my Holdem Manager database:

Leatherass9: 4.8% 3bet, $5,056, 12692 hands
Silentassassin3: 5.2% 3bet, -$3,150, 5,654 hands
Eric Liu, 5% 3bet, $9021, 1554 hands

There are plenty of other players who make a tidy profit by 3-betting more often. In fact, the winningest player in my database 3-bets 8.2% of the time.

Varying styles of preflop raising can be effective. I don't see a trend linking 3-bet percentage to profits.

However, the style practiced by these coaches is consistent.

3 comments:

Guin said...

I have been watching some of LA's videos and it seems that by not 3 betting as often they have more bb's to utilize in post flop play.

I wonder if you find that if they are deep stacked that they begin to 3 bet a bit more frequently as it wouldn't reduce the value of position as much as if you are only 100 bb deep.

Gnome said...

I would think the opposite: you may want to 3-bet the same amount or even less in deep-stacked situations.
Reraises when deep-stacked often still give opponents odds to call with hands that can bust you.
I'm not saying you shouldn't 3-bet when deep-stacked, but I don't know if you want to be jacking it up with hands like K9, A8 or KJo that may be better off seeing a flop. Meanwhile, when you hold hands like pocket pairs and suited connectors, you still may want to call rather than raise because you're getting great implied odds.

Anonymous said...

The problem with 3-betting when really deep is that your opponent is getting huge implied odds to call you with anything so even massive hands like AA and KK can start to become difficult to play on flops as dry a 259r IMO