3 Betting: The Odds
3 Betting has become very popular in recent year, due to the influence of poker video instruction sites. It occurs often in mid and high stake cash games (frequently as a squeeze) and often in tournaments as a countermove against the steal. In this article I will give some basic odds of 3 betting. The analysis will be not very in-depth, but is meant to give an insight in the math of 3 betting. I will address 2 situations: the 3 bet in a heads up pot and the squeeze 3 bet in a multiway pot.
Heads Up 3 bet
A common situation is when you are in the big blind and the button raises and the small blind folds. Let’s assume you are fed up with it (since the button is stealing your blind a lot) and you 3 bet. How many folds do you need for it to be profitable.
Let’s assume we play No Limit with blinds of $5-$10. In the calculation I do not take post flop action into account.
The average button open will be around 3,5 times the big blind, which is $35. There is already $15 from the blinds in the pot, which makes a total of $50. We 3 bet to $120, which is a quite reasonable amount in current games. So we bet to $110 ($120 – $10 from the big blind) to win $50. A short calculation gives us that we need a 69% folding percentage from the button. Against many opponents you will reach this percentage.
Squeeze 3 bet
A Squeeze play is when someone raises preflop and gets 1 or more callers and someone subsequently 3 bets. Let’s assume we again play $5-$10 NL and the open raise 3,5 BB. We have an open raiser en 1 caller and we are in the big blind and we have a $85 pot in front of us. We are 3 betting a little bit bigger, because there is more in the pot. So now we raise to $150. We need both players to fold around 62% to make it profitable. We need a lower percentage than in previous example, because we raise $30 more in a pot that is $35 bigger.
Suppose there is an open raiser and 2 callers, which makes a pot total of $120. Now we raise to $170 and we only need a fold percentage of 55%. So with more players in the pot we are raising just a little more to earn a bigger pot and that’s why the needed fold percentage is lower when there are more callers. And I think it is quite obvious now why squeezing has become so popular.
Above analysis does not take into account several important factors like position and post flop play. This analysis will be left for later articles. I hope that this article gives some insight in de math and odds behind 3 betting!
Read more poker strategy here.
Publication date : March 10, 2009
No rights may be derived from this column. This columns is intellectual property of the author, therefor it is not allowed to copy or distribute this column without permission in writing of the author. Love2Poker added this column with permission of the author.
