Working out ranges

OK Spoon, I will take a look at 3bet ranges.

How does this help me construct an overall range though?

Shouldn't a 3bet range be decided after I know what my whole range should be?

Originally Posted by Cobra_1878

OK Spoon, I will take a look at 3bet ranges.

How does this help me construct an overall range though?

Shouldn't a 3bet range be decided after I know what my whole range should be?

Nope. The size of your range as a whole is going to be a function of the number of hands you want to 3-bet for value (among other things). Try this:

1. Start with finding the hands in your value 3-betting range. Use the size of that to determine the size of your 3-bet bluffing range (but not the hands in it) by deciding what percentage of your 3-bets you want to be total bluffs.*

2. Call with some reasonable number of hands that aren't strong enough to 3-bet with.

3. Choose the hands for your 3-bet bluffing range that aren't good enough to be in step 2, but keep the range itself to the size you found in step 1.



* Here's a quick example of what I mean by this. Suppose for whatever reason your value 3-betting range is QQ+. That's a total of 18 hand combinations. If you decided that you wanted 75% of your 3-bets to be bluffs, then you would need to bluff a total of 54 hand combinations to achieve that. I'm not sure how mathematically inclined people will be who read this, so I'll offer a quick shortcut formula on how to find that number of combinations of bluffs.

# of bluff combinations = (bluff %/value bet %) * # of value bet combinations

In this example:

# of bluff combinations = (75/25) * 18 = 54