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Every time you open from a late position that’s not the button, you are doing so with the knowledge that an in position player could 3-bet your open.
When that happens and the action folds back to you, you should be playing 24% of your entire raising range as a call, presuming you’re opening from the cutoff and the button player 3-bets.
Learning what this 24% calling range looks like is the easy part. It is figuring out what to do on different types of flops when you check and face a continuation bet, where things get tricky.
In this article, we’ll focus on scenarios where you are facing a continuation bet in a 3-bet pot playing out of position and on different types of dry flops.
Keeping things as simple as possible, we’ll use the button vs. cutoff dynamic, assuming standard GTO sizes when playing 100 big blinds deep.
We’ll cover three types of representative dry boards, but we'll get into specific examples. Here are a few main takeaways:
- Defend half of your hands and check-raise aggressively on Ace-high boards
- Mostly just call when defending versus a c-bet on King-high boards
- Defend more often on Queen-high boards with around 60% of the hands
- Continue with around 60% of the entire range even against a big c-bet on dry boards
Tip #1: Defend Over 50% on Ace-High Dry Flops by Raising Over 20% Of Hands
On dry flops containing an ace, we’ll be looking to continue with just over 50% of our entire preflop calling range, with a nicely balanced mix of calls and raises.
Let’s look at the board of A♠9♥4♣:
After we check, the button player will continuation bet around 60% of the time, using almost exclusively the small (30% of the pot) sizing.
Against that bet, we can continue with around 53% of the hands, balancing between calls and raises.
Hands that we’ll be raising with include:
- AKs
- Sets
- A9s
- AQs about 50% of the time
- Some weaker hands for balance (such as T9s,98s, 55, 54s, and 65s)
Falling almost exclusively into our calling range are decent suited aces (AJs, ATs, A8s, and A5s), AQo, pocket pairs such as JJ and TT (and some smaller pairs at a lower frequency).
With this strategy, we have a really solid balance between calling and raising hands, allowing us to extract value with our strongest holdings, have enough bluffs, and see plenty of turns with hands that have a solid equity to maintain our MDF at a desired level.
Tip #2: Adjust Your Strategy on Different Types of High-Card Dry Flops
When it comes to dry boards containing a high card, your strategy against a continuation bet will be influenced heavily by the actual high card, as there are significant differences between K-high and Q-high flops.
If we look at the flop of K♥8♠2♦, you can expect your opponent to continuation bet pretty much 100% after you check to them. Their c-bet sizing will be split between the small bet (almost 62%) and the big bet (38%).
Our overall strategy doesn’t change much based on the sizing. Against a small bet, we can continue at around 38%, while facing a bigger one, we continue at 28%.
Looking at the percentage, the difference isn’t negligible, but our calling and raising range remains pretty much unchanged. However, against a bigger bet, we’ll fold some fairly marginal hands more frequently.
As you can see, in both instances, we’re doing very little raising – 88, KQs, A5s, and 44 are the only few hands that raise with any regularity in these scenarios.
Other than this, we are mostly calling with hands that have decent equity, i.e., top pairs, middle pairs, our strongest aces, and pocket pairs such as JJ, TT, 99, and 77.
Queen High Dry Flops
Queen high dry flops are quite a bit different. The 3-bettor will continuation bet on these boards at around 90%, but this time around, they’ll use the big sizing more frequently – over half the time.
However, on these flops, we’ll be continuing at a much higher frequency, as you can see clearly on the flop of Q♠7♥2♣:
Even against the bigger (41% pot) bet, we are continuing with almost 60% of our range, and raising around 11%, which shows that these types of flops are much more favorable to continue on against a c-bet.
We are still keeping the calling range pretty straightforward and similar to the one we have on K-high boards, but we are also check-raising a bit more liberally. We are also calling more with weaker pocket pairs, and, interestingly enough, pretty much never raising with the set of 7s.
Tip #3: Defend Over 60% on Low-Card Dry Flops
When it comes to dry flops containing all low cards, we can expect to face a c-bet about half the time after checking, and the opponent should almost always use the big (70% pot) sizing.
Facing that bet, we’ll be continuing with around 60% of the entire range, 15% of which is made of check-raises, as we can see on the example of the 8♥4♦2♣ flop:
Hands that we are raising in these situations include:
- Overpairs to the board (JJ, TT, and 99) – the higher the pair, the bigger the raise frequency
- Gutshots like 65s (about 50%) and A5s (close to 100%)
- A8s around 70% of the time
- 54s about 65% of the time
- KQs mixes between calling, raising, and folding
As for our calling range, it includes all of our very strong poker hands, including flopped sets, our strong ace-highs, and pocket pairs lower than eight.
The strategy is fairly similar and straightforward on other low card boards as well, so you can use similar hand groups when constructing your ranges.
