One of the biggest stumbling blocks for many people when it comes to improving their game is that they start out with an incorrect perception of how poker works. It seems obvious to them that it’s possible to make profit with the strongest hands in the deck, so they look at the next best hands and say, “well, when I get better I’ll be able to make money with these hands, too!”
From there, they extrapolate that if they can get good enough, maybe they can make money even with 72o, and things will be easy forever! If only that were the case. They may not necessarily believe this is true if you asked them, but on some level deep down they might operate on the basis that it’s theoretically possible.
The reality, though, is that there are only certain situations which we can turn into profit – some of them are just not going to work out in our favour without a bit of variance going our way. Not only are the majority of these profitable spots going to come with strong hands (we’ll probably make 20-30 times more money with pocket Aces than we would on average with pocket deuces, for example), but they’re also going to come in situations where we have the advantage of being the preflop raiser. Here are a few reasons why the spots where we flat-call preflop with non-premium hands don’t play as big a role in our success as one might think.
It’s really hard to make a lot of profit
The most significant issue with the spots where we flat-call preflop is that our range is almost always going to be at least somewhat capped. There are certain hands that we just can’t really have very often in certain spots – after all, we would at least have some kind of a 3-betting range in almost every situation.
This puts us at an immediate disadvantage – our opponent can have all the strongest hands in the deck, while we can’t. Depending on the flop that comes out after we call, our disadvantage will often increase – there are only certain types of dynamic flops that will level out the gap between our range and the preflop raiser’s.
Having done a lot of database analysis among multiple players – both my students’ and my own databases – I’ve seen a lot of evidence that it’s hard to achieve a winrate of more than roughly 0.2-0.5bb per hand in situations where we’re putting ‘passive money’ in the pot preflop. In contrast to the 2.5-3.5bb per hand we will often be able to make in situations where we’re either raising an unopened or limped pot or 3-betting versus a raiser, this is a negligible amount of profit. When we decrease the stack sizes in question, this gets even lower – achievable winrates are lower as stacks get shallower.
It puts you in more multi-way pots
One major difficulty with flat-calling preflop, and a reason why it’s so difficult to achieve profit above a certain level, is that with every player left behind us to act in the hand, our chances of being able to play heads-up against the original raiser decrease, and our overall equity in the pot decreases by a level that isn’t necessarily counterbalanced by the amount of money added to the pot by the additional callers.
In fact, not only are we allowing players behind us to realize more equity in the pot fairly easily by giving them much better prices to call, but we’re also not even going to be able to see a flop 100% of the time given that players behind us can also 3-bet and force us to fold.
When we factor in the increased difficulty in playing postflop and getting value from big hands that comes with playing multi-way pots – it’s harder for us to represent bluffs when we have to worry about more opponents, which means it’s harder for us to get value in turn – we can start to see that multi-way pots are simply not a particularly profitable situation for us overall, unless we have position and our opponents are weaker players. If we’re out of position with two or even three players calling behind us, we’re fighting an uphill battle to break even in the hand.
It’s less profitable than 3-betting on average
I mentioned earlier that flat-calling in general is rarely going to make us more than 0.2-0.5bb per hand on average. This is a function of all the times we flat-call preflop – of course there are going to be some hands we flat-call with that don’t end up making money, and there are going to be some that end up making a lot of money, but we always have something else to compare each hand with. We always have more options.
Those options in most cases are folding – which will usually make us either 0bb/hand or roughly -0.1bb/hand, depending on whether there are antes in play – and 3-betting, perhaps to an all-in sizing depending on the stacks. At anything more than 30bb, we’ll probably eliminate the all-in option, so we’re left with a more traditional 3-bet option.
If you look at at your database on Holdem Manager 2 or PokerTracker 4, you’ll probably find that your 3-bet profit margins are pretty solid – if you include all hands, a winning player might make 3-4bb per hand in 3-bet spots, and if you narrow it to the top 3-5% of hands that might jump up to 6-8bb per hand. If we look at the other end of the scale, a solid winning player might find that their 3-bets make roughly 1-1.5bb per hand on average, even when we discount premium hands.
This is certainly some fairly solid evidence that it would take a fairly significant decrease in the quality of our play in 3-bet pots or our selection of 3-bet spots in order for our profit margins to decrease. Even if our winrate decreased on average by 3-betting a wider and therefore weaker range in certain spots, an increase in 3-bet frequency will most likely compensate for a slight decrease in average profit margin. We also have the benefit of preventing players behind us from capturing their full equity in the pot, since most players have incredibly tight cold-4-betting ranges.
The Big Blind – the exception to the rule
Now, none of this goes to say we should never flat-call preflop – of course that’s not the case, there are plenty of spots where it can be perfectly fine. However, it is worthwhile to note that spending countless hours focusing on how to scrape out an extra tiny bit of profit from our flat-calling spots might be less productive and impactful to our game than studying up on how to find better spots to 3-barrel bluff as the preflop raiser.
The one exception here, though, is in the Big Blind. If we fold the BB, we make around -1.1bb/hand, since we lose our BB and our ante. Thus, our goal in the BB isn’t necessarily to win money, it’s to reduce the amount of money we lose, since it’s almost impossible to overcome the disadvantage of having to fold our BB very often.
This means flat-calling in the BB is imperative with a fairly high frequency – after all, it’s not sustainable to defend our BB purely by 3-betting, since 3-betting a 30% or 40% range in that spot out of position would end up doing more harm than good. We certainly need to spend some time focusing on how to generate profit in BB spots, and minimize our losses by allowing ourselves to profitably defend as many hands as possible versus a small raise.
This factor – that our goal in the BB, and to a lesser extent in the Small Blind, is to get as close to breakeven as possible – makes flat-calling a much more significant part of our strategy, in order to neutralize the amount of money we lose by folding. In other positions, though, you may find yourself over-estimating the extent to which frequent flat-calling forms part of a solid preflop MTT strategy – we always have other options, and depending on the situation at hand, there are other things that can lead us towards greater profit.