JJ and TT in the blinds..

This mainly addresses these two hands in the blinds when faced with a raise. Actually, let's throw KQs into this as well.

These are hands that it is commonly said to not 3 bet with. Problem is though, in the blinds if you don't 3 bet, you have no information on the villain's range, especially at micro stakes where players come and go quickly. So you have these hands, flat call the raise instead of 3 bet, then the flop comes with overcards and you are OOP.

Now what? You can donk lead for info here, which could've been solved by 3 betting preflop, or you can check and have the villain c-bet which leaves you with no info again.

So I was thinking that maybe in the blinds, it is better to 3 bet these hands so you aren't completely screwed on the flop, otherwise you are playing these premium hands for set value, which sucks.

Thoughts?

My standard line assuming a fairly sane, fairly aggressive opponent:

Flat pre-flop.
Call just about any flop c-bet
Call most second barrels
Fold to most third barrels unimproved

If you hit a set, try to get all of the money in.

We never 3 bet any hand for "information". We 3 bet becasue either:

A: For value. We are comfortably ahead of their opening range and their 3 bet calling rnage doesn't crush us.

B: As a bluff because their opening range is wide and we expect them to fold often.

Obviously we never use JJ/1010 for a light/bluff 3 bet, so we are either doing this because we're ahead of their range (eg. 20/16 CO opens we have 1010 in BB) or we are electing to call instead because it is ambiguous whether we're ahead of their range or not. (Eg. TAG 17/15 UTG opens and we have JJ in the BB. )

So we don't 3 bet 1010, JJ in certain spots because we are in bad shape OOP vs their 3 bet calling range which might be something like [AK AQs 1010-AA.]

So when we flat these in the blinds we're doing it to gain maximum equity post flop and also try to flop a set. This doesn't mean we're going to c/f a 8 8 2 r board though becasue we didn't flop a set. It means sometimes we may have to c/f bad boards, however, we get to play our hand profitably on favourable boards like the 8 8 2 because we didn't 3 bet and hence left villains range wide enough that we are NOW well ahead of it.

I think if you're 3 betting just for information you need to stop it as its a massive spew.

Some more considerations;

- Being SB or BB matters, especially if BB is sqeeuzing a lot.
- You postflop edge with marginal hands. You'll flop an underpair a lot with these hands, so you should be confident to play them profitable against the villain. My experience is that it's tough when being readless, but I'm not that good.
- If you're happy getting it in against a 4bet.

theres more ways to get info without betting