If they start opening too many hands at the bottom of their range, i.e., their worst hands, then they’ll often have to fold to our pre-flop raises. This is to not only get good value from our strongest hands, but also by raising we will prevent our opponents from being able to steal our blinds as frequently. 3-BettingĪn essential part of defending your BB is to have a good 3-betting range. Our defending range should take this into account based on the position that our opponents have opened from. We want to make our lives as easy as we can post-flop and limit mistakes. We should, therefore, only be calling with hands from the BB that have a good chance at realizing their equity and can money from our opponents in the long run. The higher the card value and the more closely the two hole cards are connected, the more raw, pre-flop equity they will realize. Hands with high pair value, suited combinations, or connected combinations will realize their equity better than others. In that article, I discussed how the raw equity of a hand isn’t as significant as realizing a hand’s equity. If you want to learn more about suited and connectedness, you can check this article here: The Importance of Suitedness and Connectedness in Poker. Sure, we’re going to get a reasonable price from the BB most of the time, but we must think about ranges and equity realization. This should be reflected in our calling range from the BB. This causes opponents to open a tighter range from early position but a looser range from late position. This is because it’s less likely that they’ll play the hand out of position (OOP), and it’ll also be less likely that their hand will be beaten. If you were not aware, players will open at a higher frequency as they approach the button.

To counter this, we should have a solid BB defending range, understand your hands’ playability and understand what a solid BB defending range should look like. Or you could be under-defending your BB, simply bleeding chips at the table and giving your opponents an easy opportunity to steal your chips when they open wide from the CO or BTN. For example, you could be calling pre-flop too frequently, causing you to miss the flop more frequently, resulting in folding to your opponent’s bets. One of the easiest places to lose a ton of value in poker is with poor big blind (BB) defense.

3-bet calling range