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When you are sitting in the BB and face a raise from the button with an effective stack of 100 big blinds, you should be defending around 40% of your hands. According to the solver, you should be 3-betting around 13% of the time and calling 26% of your range.
When you call preflop and check from the BB, which you should do 100% of the time on dry boards, you will often face a continuation bet.
This is the specific point in a hand that we’ll focus on in today’s article. We'll be looking at dry flops, i.e., boards that contain no or very few draws. The setup is 100 big blinds effective, facing a standard 3x button open.
Some important takeaways before we dive into specific board examples:
- The big blind is checking 100% of the time on dry flops
- When defending against a c-bet, we will mostly be calling and mixing in a few check-raises
- We’ll be check-raising more when facing a smaller c-bet sizing
- You should raise top pairs much more often on low flops to protect it
Tip #1: Do Not Overfold on Ace-High Boards
Ace-high dry boards aren’t necessarily bad for our big blind defense range, and you shouldn’t auto-muck on these flops. The button is likely to bet even more often they they should, so you need to be defending quite a lot of the hands.
While the big blind defense range does not have the strongest aces here since you 3-bet those before the flop, there are still plenty of hands that we can continue when facing a small continuation bet.
For example, on a flop of A♠9♥5♣, we’ll be continuing with over 60% of our preflop calling range. The default action is to call, but about 10% of the range will also be raising.
- We’re calling with almost all single-pair types of hands, including even pocket deuces
- Our strong hands (two pair+) are a mix between raising (70%) and calling (30%)
- Weak draws, such as gutshots and our weakest bottom pair hands with some backdoors are the best bluff raise candidates (54s, 78s, etc.).
Since the button preflop range is very wide, we are not folding any hands that have showdown equity at this point.
As for our raising range, it is a nice balance of very strong holdings and weak hands, allowing us to pick up some pots without going to a showdown while making it impossible for the opponent to exploit these raises, as we have enough value hands.
Tip #2: Check-Raise More Often Against Small Bets on High-Card Boards
Our big blind strategy for ace-high dry flops is pretty straightforward, as the button player will use the small c-bet sizing almost 100% of the time.
On high-card dry boards like K♠8♥4♣, however, our defense strategy will change quite significantly depending on whether they go with a large c-bet sizing or a smaller one.
Let’s first look at what the button c-bet GTO range looks like:
Playing against big c-bets
As you can see, on these textures, the button uses big sizing (70% of the pot) about 20% of the time, which is not negligible. Their range in these spots consists largely of strong hands (strong top pairs and better) and bluffs like gutshots and ace-highs with backdoor flush draws.
With that knowledge, we’ll continue against the c-bet more than half the time and raise only 5% of hands.
The hands we’ll raise with at some frequency are:
- bottom sets
- top two pairs (over 80%)
- middle sets (around 50%)
To balance it out, we’ll add a few weak hands, such as gutshots and weak bottom pairs.
Other than these, we’ll be calling with 50% of our range, continuing with all of our pair holdings and the strongest of our ace-highs.
Playing against small c-bets
Against a small c-bet (30% of the pot), we’ll be continuing at a much higher frequency of over 70%, and our check-raise frequency increases to 16%.
In these spots, we almost always raise our value hands to build the pot, which increases our ability to bluff-raise with a wider hand range.
Compared to the previous scenario, you can see that our calling range doesn’t change too much, but we now have a few more weak hands added to the raising range. This works because, by choosing this sizing, the button will have more air and mediocre holdings, giving us more space to attack.
Tip #3: Check-Raise Your Strong Top Pairs for Value and Protection on Low Flops
When defending your big blind against a continuation bet on a low and dry board, the most important takeaway is that you should play your strong top pairs more aggressively to get value and protect these holdings.
Let’s look at an example of a 9♠5♥2♣ flop:
When facing a small continuation bet, you should raise your strong top pair holdings (A9, K9). This percentage dips a bit when the button c-bets for a large sizing, which they’ll do quite often, but you should still be going for a check-raise over 60% of the time with these holdings.
Our overall continuing range in these situations is around 60%, and we’ll continue more against a smaller size, but the difference isn’t huge.
Against a larger sizing, we’ll eliminate the most speculative hands, like T7 and J7. However, we can continue with them as calls or raises at some frequency against a smaller sizing.
The bottom line is that, on dry boards, the big blind should continue around 60% of the time overall, mostly calling with all hands that have showdown value and raising with a mix of the strongest and weakest holdings (e.g., two pairs, sets, gutshots, and bottom pairs with weak kickers).
These examples assume that your opponent is using optimal sizings when c-betting, which is not always going to be the case. Therefore, you should study minimum defense frequencies to see how much you need to defend versus different bet sizes. As a rule of thumb, you just have to remember that the smaller the c-bet the more you need to defend. Here is the % you can refer to:
| Bet Size | MDF (how much of you range you need to defend) |
| 1.5 Pot | 40% |
| Full Pot | 50% |
| ¾ Pot | 57% |
| 2/3 Pot | 60% |
| ½ Pot | 67% |
| 1/3 Pot | 75% |
With this big blind defense strategy, you’ll make it impossible for the opponent to exploit you, and you’ll have a perfect balance across different types of dry flops.
