WPT GTO Trainer Hands of the Week: 30BB Button Call Vs 50BB Big Blind 4x 3-Bet
This week you’ll be practicing a very common situation in Small Stakes cash games. A primary feature of Small Stakes games is that larger open-raise sizes are typical. For example, in a local $1-2 home game, the open raise will be often $10 or more.
In this spot, you open-raise to this larger 5BB raise size preflop from Middle Position and after the opponent reraises to 15BBs on the Button you call.
Given that Villain is the last preflop aggressor, their range will typically be stronger on most flops. Due to your overall equity disadvantage, you should generally check to the raiser in this spot.
You’ll also want to keep an eye out for semi-bluffing opportunities on the turn when Villain chooses to check behind on the flop. You can often take down the pot uncontested on a future street and have some backup equity when they continue.
After the Villain calls your turn bet, the decision of whether or not to fire on the river when you miss should be dependent on how the river card interacts with your range versus the Villain's range. If it’s likely to have helped Villain, you should often give up.
When we check-call on the flop and the turn card favors our range more than Villain’s range, be willing to sometimes lead out. This “donk-lead” allows us to deny equity with our made hands and to semi-bluff quite effectively on specific turn cards. This concept can go hand in hand with “blending draws”, where we donk-lead with a draw on the turn when a different draw comes in. This allows us to represent the draw that came in, while having backup equity in case our lead is called or raised.
Beware of continuing with underpairs on a paired flop. The possibility of being counterfeited on future streets undermines the profitability of these hands and they should typically be folded.
We can target spots to bluff where we have a weaker holding that blocks hands in our opponent’s range that make strong hands on a particular board.
To see more examples and test your skills, you can play through five free solved hands from this scenario.
To access the free five hands, visit this page.
Regular play on the WPT GTO Trainer will help you adjust your decisions closer and closer to GTO strategy.
You don’t have to be the world’s best player to use GTO Strategy, and thanks to the WPT GTO Trainer, now you don’t have to buy expensive software or have expert level knowledge to study GTO.
Why use the WPT GTO Trainer?
The WPT GTO Trainer lets you play real solved hands against a perfect opponent in a wide variety of postflop scenarios for cash game and tournament play.
If your goal is to be a tough poker player then you should try the WPT GTO Trainer today.
Register a free account here (it only takes your e-mail address to begin) to play hands and see true GTO strategy in real-time.
The WPT GTO Trainer has over 2 billion unique solved flops, turns and rivers that are fully playable.
As you make decisions in a hand, you receive instant feedback on the specific EV loss (if any) and Played Percentage for every action you take as compared to GTO strategy.
The full selection of scenarios for the WPT GTO Trainer are only available to members of LearnWPT, however we’re giving PokerNews Readers free access to the Trainer on a regular basis with the WPT GTO Hands of The Week.
Use this series of articles to practice the strategies you learn on LearnWPT (or at the table) and test your progress by playing a five-hand sample each week.
Sponsor-generated content from LearnWPT
