Setmining in 3bet pots

[BorisTheSpider]

Hi all,

I'm hoping for some input here on the issue of setmining in 3bet pots. Although I know, and acknowledge below, the "received wisdom" on this, I'd be more interested to hear peoples individual thoughts on this.

I know that Sklansky talked about 3bet pots being unprofitable to setmine in. Here's my theory, for what it's worth. If I can close the action, and be sure to see a flop without the risk of getting squeezed, I'd rather setmine in a 3bet pot than in a single raised pot. I think provided stack sizes give us odds to do so, 3bet pots are so much more likely to give villain a hand at the flop he's willing to continue with, that they are actually more profitable places to call with small PP with the express purpose of mining to fold if we don't set up on the flop, than a normal single raised pot.

In an ordinary raised pot, unless the flop happens to hit our opponent hard, we won't often be playing for stacks, so we will tend to look at stack sizes and overestimate our implied odds.

In a 3bet pot, we have such a substantially larger chance to play for stacks if we hit, that it seems a more profitable spot.

Of course, we will also be laying down a lot of hands we called a 3bet with.

Perhaps it is also worth considering whether we might more profitably 3bet ourselves often with small PP when it seems like a good spot to do so, since we will have some fold equity and the hands that continue with us will be those that stand a reasonable chance of paying us off if we do hit, if not, then we're done with the hand if the board texture is unfavourable to cbet, we're OOP or we have some other reason to believe we cannot profitably continue.

With the intiative, we also stand to have some fairly solid fold equity post flop if we pick our spots for cbetting in a smart way, since most peoples flatting range for a 3bet is going to consist of more combos that need to improve before stacking off than combos that will be happy to set us all in on the flop unimproved often. We probably don't even need that much FE since we're flipping with a lot of the range that flats our 3bet anyway.

With that in mind, taking a fold-or-3bet line with small to mid PP preflop might be best overall, giving us a nice mix of fold equity to offset the times we lay down at the flop after getting ~8bb-12bb in the pot, and implied odds that actually hold up more often when we hit.

It also leaves us with a big chunk now removed from our flatting range preflop, meaning we can move a few nut hands and a few of the best hands we'd otherwise fold into our flatting range to mix it up.

If we need the postflop fold equity from unimproved AK/AQ/KQs then perhaps we should usually fold OOP and 3bet IP, probably only flatting OOP in multiway pots.

Comments and thoughts are appreciated.