Quote Originally Posted by loonychune
On the other hand, if this villain has been raising every hand on the button for the last 6 orbits. maybe you want to tell him to lay off and stop pinching your blinds, in that case ok, pocket 9s are fine to make a stand with.
I'd rather make a stand with 72o and flat a hand like 99 that's gonna play pretty well post-flop vs his wide opening range.
It's true that if villain is folding a ton we are going to have the same amount of fold equity with either 99 or 72o. And if he is folding enough then it might be profitable to 3bet with 72o, based on fold equity alone. As he only needs to fold 66% of the time to be profitable if we 3bet his 4x open to 11xbb (11/16.5 = .66%). However, given the fact that villain is in position, and if villain knows we are 3betting light in this position, then he should be much more likely to either (1) 4bet bluff us or (2) call our 3bets with position. And when he calls our 3bets we would really like to have a hand that is not absolutely worthless postflop in a 3bet pot.

But as you knew, if villain is folding often enough then it would be profitable to 3bet 72o. However, I still likely wouldn't do it. We don 't need to make plays on a hand-to-hand basis. Instead, we should form ranges for every decision we are going to make. If we feel he is folding often enough, then we should form a range that we 3bet in this spot as a bluff. We can widen or narrow the range depending on the frequency with which we want to 3bet bluff, which is obv based on his tendencies towards calling/folding in this spot.