Quote Originally Posted by Chopper
euph, why wouldnt you only call the 3bet, and shove non-A flops? or fire out what looks to be a cbet of 2/3? i feel you could still get away, but you would keep the 3bettors a bit more honest against you.

or start 3bet shoving more than QQ+/AK to loosen them up and get your premiums paid in stacks. maybe 88+/AQ+/AXs/67s-9Ts? those may be way off, but you would have the image of a monkey-shover and be live against most callers. maybe you only do that to the "regs" for a couple thousand hands to showdown and change your image...in their eyes.

read disclaimer below.
Calling a 3bet with QQ and c/rai on a non-A board is probably fine, and it's probably the best way to extract from JJ and AQ (assuming JJ would fold to a shove pre, which I think is mostly true). I'm not sure. It's not a bad idea, but I'm not sure its a better idea than just shoving.

Halvsame and I worked this out, but it became a pretty lengthy explanation. I'll try and boil it down to worst case scenario:

Villain only 3bets with QQ+/AK and will always call my fourbet shove. What equity do I need against his range to break even by shoving over?

It turns out our break even point is just a smidge over 40%, and lo and behold QQ is 40.2% (still -EV but it's close).

Of course most opponents will 3bet wider than QQ+/AK, and indeed some will even call wider than that. But at least at my stakes by far most will only call your fourbet with these hands. Now we're facing the same hands WHEN CALLED as the above hypothetical but we're going to pick up the 18bb pot a significant percentage (as high as 20-25%) of the time depending on how lightly they're 3betting.

But now look what happens when he have something like JJ and the same worst case scenario:

JJ is a 36% dog against QQ+/AK, which comes out to about -7ishbb EV if villain calls 100% of the time. This is about 3.5 TIMES more -EV than QQ was. That's pretty significant. And every pocket pair below JJ is about 35% equity (34 for 22, 36 for TT) and little changes at that point.

Basically in this spot we might as well hold 22. It doesn't much matter. It has the same equity as JJ give or take a % or two.

We're bluffing. Of course we knew we were bluffing thats why its called a fourbet bluff. So we're hoping villain then puts us on a monster and folds, and yet an essential element of midstacking is that bad players call too much, and do so without implied odds. So we've reached a dichotomy. We can't really tailor our strategy around making people call too much and then simultaneously expect them to make big folds.

Clearly what I'm showing is that if you're finding a villain that is 3betting you lightly, you should shove more. A LOT more. Basically any pocket pair is shoveable against a guy who is 3betting more than about 5% of his hands ( 99+ AJs+ KQs AKo ). But then you need to be careful. If you continue to bluffshove over his 3bets and he tightens up his 3bet and call range, you're going to be in some majorly -EV situations.

My conclusions on the fourbet bluffshove:
Generally speaking, not worthwhile but in very rare circumstances where I know villain well and I know I'll play with him in the future, and I know he'll be paying enough attention to remember me. I don't think that happens very often at my stakes.

I hope that made sense.