Four-betting is a term that usually refers to the fourth bet preflop. If you consider the blinds as the first ‘forced’ bet, the next bet is just that – an open or bet. Raising that initial open is called a three-bet and a big bad reraise there is called a four-bet. This article is concerned with the small four-bet, which is typically around 20-35% of your stack size, rather than the four-bet shove.
Four-bets are used in today’s hold’em cash games in a variety of ways, both for value and as a bluff. You can use them to build pots, limit fields, combat players abusing light three-bets in position and bluff players who view four-bets as incredibly strong (i.e. Aces or Kings). Because three-betting has become so prevalent in six-max hold’em, four-betting is one way of combating preflop aggression with a ‘fight fire with fire’ mentality. Of course there are often other options, but if you want to play optimally preflop, knowing when to drop the four-bet hammer will make your life far easier at tough tables.
Making money from poker is about exploitation. If you knew your opponent never varied his play and had a 100% reliable hand range for any action, then over time you would begin to build up a pretty accurate picture of what he had at any moment. After a decent sample size you would be able to map his betting perfectly and exploit him easily.
Similarly, if you only ever four-bet with A-A and K-K, your shrewd, regular opponents would be able to play you perfectly, three-betting you liberally with little risk. When you do four-bet, they can exploit you by folding and not giving your monster hand any action. For this reason we need a wider range with which to four-bet. In most medium stakes games stacking off with Q-Q+ and A-K is a given. As the table makeup gets looser and more aggressive, and if you have decided to play an aggressive game to combat three-betting, you can add J-J, T-T and A-Q. At higher stakes and on incredibly aggressive tables your range can be wider still.
Cashing in on four-bets
One key benefit of four-betting is that it allows you to generate a very aggressive image. It allows you get a decent amount of money in preflop with your strong holdings and get maximum value from your premium hands preflop. After all, if your opponent knows you play A-Q suited the same way as A-A, he can have a hard time adjusting to your bets.
Other benefits of four-betting are that it protects your late position opens and isolates against aggressive players on the button (who will three-bet you liberally if you do not adjust). A four-bet can also help to build a big pot when you are very deep and need to ensure you get fully paid, or help to negate a positional disadvantage by bloating the pot preflop.
The drawbacks of four-betting are that you can deviate from the most profitable line with too much aggression. For example, say an unknown loose-aggressive villain is three-betting a huge amount from any position early in a session, with hands that include all Broadway combinations and most Aces. You open the button with A-Q suited when you both have around 150 big blinds, he then three-bets from 3BB to 8BB. In this type of spot, calling is probably better than four-betting. By four-betting you open yourself up to a shove, which can be fine sometimes but without a good read on a player is a little spewy when you're that deep-stacked. Calling is better here as you can use your position, giving you more flexibility and a greater edge in the situation. By not four-betting you keep dominated holdings (such as A-x and K-Q) in the hand, which is great when you both flop something.
Going for value
Let's now look specifically at situations where you are four-betting for value (rather than as a bluff or to balance your hand range). Four-betting for value means creating a big pot that will frequently end up all-in, so you need a good reason for doing so. You should either have enough history with your opponent that they'll be willing to stack off against you with a wide range, have a very strong hand and suspect they have a big hand that they are incapable of folding, or have a marginal/flipping hand, but with a tonne of dead money in the pot. To illustrate the latter point, let’s say you have 9-9 and open under the gun. A maniac on your left three-bets, three loose-passive fish then call and the action is back on you. Four-betting and getting it all-in here is fine against most reasonable ranges.
There are several factors you must consider when four-betting for value. Firstly, you need to know that four-betting is the best course of action given your opponent’s tendencies. If a player three-bets loosely and plays very aggressively post-flop, but often folds to four-bets, just flat-calling his three-bet with A-A/K-K is probably a better play. You need to be certain your opponent is capable of calling four-bets with worse hands or five-bet bluffing all-in.
Considering position
You should be far more inclined to four-bet strong but non-monster hands (Q-Q, J-J, T-T and A-K) preflop when you are out of position. Because position is so important, you want to offset your post-flop disadvantage by getting as much money in preflop as possible when you feel comfortably ahead of your opponent's range. When you do have position you can call more often with these hands.
Get yourself an equity calculator and spend some time fiddling around with the maths of four/five-bets, ranges against a variety of opponents and equity. Understand that when you four-bet a maniac for value with A-J or 8-8 you are doing it for a good reason: to get all the money in! Too often players will four-bet with T-T against a nut job, and then when the guy shoves they don’t know what to do. Plan ahead. If you are not willing to get your stack in with pocket Tens preflop, don't four-bet! You're simply burning money otherwise.
If you know your opponent’s tendencies well, use all the pieces of the puzzle to get the right decision. Say you open the cut-off with J-J and the TAG on the button three-bets. Your thought process might go something like this:
- My opponent is tight-aggressive but he does three-bets around 10% of hands on the button and I’m crushing a lot of those hands.
- Given that J-J is in the top 5% of hands, I am comfortably ahead of the TAG’s range so a four-bet is viable. However, J-J will flop as an overpair less than 50% of the time. The rest of the time there will be at least one overcard on the flop, which will make life difficult for me out of position against a good opponent.
- My range in my opponent’s eyes is fairly wide, so he knows he can three-bet profitably with a fairly wide range himself.
- In terms of image, have I been three-bet by this guy a lot, or has he been dodging me? Has he been active and involved, or has he been playing generally snug this session? How active have I been?
You might decide that despite the guy being tight, your position plus image and hand mean a four-bet is optimal. I think this situation is a clear four-bet and would snap-call a shove with the expectation of facing a range of T-T+/A-Q+ 90% of the time, with some junk on rare occasions. Calling would also be okay if you had position but that’s another story.
The four-bet as a bluff
A big reraise largely has to be viewed as a sign that you're holding a monster and it gets enormous respect in most circumstances. Generally you want to assign a frequency to your four-bet bluffs and this will very much vary depending on your table make-up. Against a relatively good TAG player you want to be four-bet bluffing him at least once for every three four-bets you're making for value. Having a balanced four-betting range will make your overall win-rate go through the roof and make you far tougher to combat, and in order to achieve this you need to bluff occasionally.
Let's say you open from middle position with 5-6 suited, the TAG on the button three-bets and the decision is back to you. This is a spot where you should definitely four-bet bluff on occasion.
Hand ranges for four-betting are very much player-dependent. Generally you want some sort of value to your hand so that you have some chance of winning the pots in which you are called. You might elect to four-bet with A-5 suited because you have an Ace, reducing the chances that your opponent is holding a hand like A-Q or A-K that he can five-bet all-in with, as well as the fact that the hand that can flop big.
Heads-up, A-5 suited fares pretty poorly in three-bet pots, so calling is not an option. Four-betting allows you to win preflop a good chunk of the time, or flop a decent draw and make some moves with equity post-flop.
Supposing the villain calls and the flop comes 3-4-8 rainbow (with one of your suit), giving you a backdoor flush draw, a gutshot and an overcard. You can definitely check-raise all-in here in a four-bet pot.
Cold four-bets
Cold four-betting is a really neat way of increasing your win-rate, but should be used relatively sparingly. The idea is that aggressive opponents who are trying to steal the blinds get into a three-bet dynamic, then a player with no investment in the pot elects to four-bet as his first action. This play looks incredibly strong and has a pretty decent success rate when your image is clean. The opponents you can use this on are fairly specific. Generally you want a loose-aggressive opener and a tight-aggressive three-bettor and you want to be four-betting from one of the blinds. You should definitely not be doing this against a monkey who will not notice the fact that a conventionally super-narrow/strong range has just entered the pot. To an aggressive fish A-Q looks like Aces and you'll get yourself into trouble.
So who should you target? Four-betting players that can think will have much better results than weak-tight robots and fish. With weak-tight players and rocks in general, their three-betting range is narrow already so four-bet bluffing them should be very low on your list of options. Instead you should be looking to play a wealth of small pots and steal their blinds at a prodigious rate. Fish, on the other hand, like to see flops, and once the pot gets big (as it will in four-bet pots) they will have issues folding. There are far easier ways to exploit these guys than four-bet bluffing.