One of the easiest ways to make more money at the poker table without studying much is to have a solid preflop game. The preflop part of poker seems very simple and, at first look, like something where there is not much space to make significant progress in our win rate.
If we leave out the adjustments we want to make against the pool, there is still one big move most players are missing: cold 4-bet bluffing. When we say cold 4-bet, we are thinking of hands that we don’t 4-bet for value, but the other part of our 4-bet range that we should use to balance our value bets so our opponents aren’t just rewarded for auto-folding against our 4-bets.
How Are We Making Money With 4-Bet Bluffs?
The most straightforward way to make money with 4-bet Bluffs is to make our opponents fold in spots where they have a wide 3-bet range. Most opponents will not defend correctly against cold 4-bets and will fold more than they should.
Example: Player 1 opens from CO, Player 2 3-bets from BTN. We are in SB, and we have the opportunity to cold 4-bet and put pressure on two wide ranges of our opponents.
In this image, we can see that SB’s cold 4-bet range is narrow but still has hands that most players miss, like K6s, K9s, K7s, KTs, A5s, A8s, 99, and TT. Yes, these hands are not at full frequency, but they are necessary to have.
CO has a really narrow range and can only continue against our cold 4-bet with 9.2 percent of his range. The hands we are using for cold 4-bet bluff will generally have good blockers, reducing the number of times CO or BTN can respond. We will pick up the pot of 11.3 big blinds.
BTN has to respond significantly more (39 percent of range) than CO, but there is more room to make mistakes as there are bluffs and hands that want to mix. I would be surprised if we see opponents defending something close to 39 percent of the range, as they tend to overfold and might even have a wrong/wider 3-betting range, which would translate to them having even more folds against SB cold 4-bet.
The second way we make money with cold 4-bet bluffs is that our perceived range will be much stronger than the range on the caller, and we will often win the pot on the flop or the turn. This is especially true if BTN doesn’t protect his calling range by flatting pocket aces. In that case, we can just barrel any Ax and Kx boards, as he will not have enough strong aces and kings to defend and will get exploited.
The third way we make money with cold 4-bet bluffs is when our opponent realizes that we have bluffs in our range and that he needs to call lighter. This will make us money when we have strong value hands by getting us called more often in big pots.
Why is Cold 4-Bet Bluffing so Good?
- Our range looks stronger when we do it, and we can put more pressure on our opponents (it will work exceptionally well on players who do not want to put much money in the pot with hands that can be dominated and players who are new at the stake who might have lower bankrolls)
- We are more balanced, and we get more value with our value hands
- It’s a plug-and-play solution to make more money and force our opponents to make more mistakes (requires almost no study)
Conclusion
Cold 4-bet bluffing will increase our win rate, make our 4-betting range less face-up, and force our opponents to make more mistakes.
The average player is 4-betting only two to 2.5 percent, while all the best high-stakes regulars are doing it from four to five percent, which would make it double as often as the average player. We should try to reach that number and use GTO Wizard to see which hands we should add to our 4-betting range and at what frequencies.
