Quote Originally Posted by minSim
Don't take this as an insult, you and Fnord are way better players then me, and I posted my thoughts mostly because it's not the general thought and I'm not 100% confident about the conclusions I made, but:

I agree the A being a blocker is an argument, but I doubt it's that deciding tbh.
Take Qx for example, it's a blocker for AQ and QQ, so AK is would be the only difference. (it's there, but it's not thát big a part of his range)

Also, AA and AK are usually 4bets, which means I'm getting away relatively cheap when they do so. Of course it's not great to get 4bet, but it's better then being against a relatively wider calling range postflop which will cost me more as those streets are more expensive.

Not having the A also means the flop+turn will come A high more often, which greatens my postflop bluffing oppertunities when called preflop.
You're very very very much missing the point, which is not necessarily through fault of your own, but I will try to illustrate with a different degree of clarity.

Suppose you have a choice between 3-bet bluffing someone with either A5s or 72s. Then A5s is obviously the better choice, and there is no argument against that. It simply plays better and has an important blocker which takes away a good portion of the hands he would want to continue with.

Suppose some tight villain only continues against a 3-bet with QQ+, AK, which is not unreasonable, and even an overestimation against a lot of tight full ring players. That is 34 total possible combinations. If you hold A5 you eliminate 7 of those combinations, which is 20% of the hands he would continue with. How can this not be important enough for consideration?

You also suggested that you would rather be 4-bet than flat called when you make a 3-bet bluff, which is nonsense. Being called gives you a free chance to improve your hand when you are behind (which you assume you are since you are 3-betting as a bluff) while being 4-bet is an immediate loss (unless we're 5-bet bluffing which is outside of our scope at the moment).

In fact, the very reason we would prefer a hand like A5s to 72s when we 3-bet bluff is so that we can maximize our equity the times that we are flat called. Otherwise, they are exactly the same except for the blocker.