I'm trying to finetune my ranges in certain spots and often I read about "hands that play well post flop". A common adjustment to aggressive players in end game poker, who tend to bluff shove vs min raises at 15bb stack depth, is to limp in with "hands that play well post flop" instead of min raising them and risk getting shoved on.
So my personal definition (feel free to comment) of the term is: hands that flop good equity, are strong enough to raise but can't stand a reraise. So hands like 98s, JTo, KQ. KQ plays well as a pre flop raiser in position because you can continue when you get 3bet, you get credit for cbetting ace high boards, and you always have overcard equity on non ace high boards. That makes sense
I also read about hands that don't play well and it mainly said small pocket pairs (because any flop without a set is bad) and weaker aces like A6o mainly because of domination issues and the ace being such a big part of your perceived range and the button raiser, giving you no action when you hit it.
But I don't understand why Ax hands don't play well out of position, for example vs someone who opens 70% or more as a min raise on the button. I always used to assume that someone who just calls a btn raise OOP at 20bb stack depth for example, is very unlikely to have aces in their range because they would shove them over a min raise most of the times.
So that would open good opportunities to barrel off with 89s on A T 2 rainbow boards.
I've tried that a couple of times and my barrels got called down by Ax, apparantly villains know that I'm gonna try to represent the ace. So therefore I believe it is a good idea to have weaker aces in your OOP calling range.
Anyone agrees/ disagrees?
And can anyone briefly explain what hands I should have in my OOP 3bet bluffing range in case I am card dead? This is something I am really struggling with because I don't understand the properties of those hands. I'll rather 3bet bluff suited junk than unsuited but it still is a domain I need to improve on
Ax hands not playing well at all OOP has kind of become one of those "automatic" things for people. Granted, it still makes sense to shove a lot of Ax when being minraised against at short depths, but it shouldn't be as automatic as seeing 22 in the BB at 14bb and saying "auto shove."
For example, any player with decent or better hand reading abilities will notice over time that you never flat call Ax OOP. If they're smart, this means you can't win an Ax flop pot without stacking off (and rarely will you have a hand strong enough to justify it, even if you correctly counter by getting it in with weaker pairs).
Second, there are situations where Ax can play extremely well, even when not pairing. At short stack, it can very easily be correct to call 2 or 3 barrels with A hi in some situations (depends on the opponent and board texture of course, but this is not some rare unheard of thing). While you can say the same about 22, you have to think about the overall value of the hand... Ax and 22 are equally good bluff catchers in pretty much every situation, but Ax had that chance to make a strong top pair and the kicker had a chance to make a pair as well (something like 7x or higher is not a terrible pair on a lot of boards, and A5 or lower has straight potential).
So all in all, while I do agree that A6, for example, doesn't flop particularly well, it is a far cry from 22.
Hands that play well postflop: I think you have that part down pretty well. It's just hands that have the opportunity to flop with good equity/playability (22 often has good equity, but it's not very playable, as it becomes a situation where you raise out hands that are bluffs and get called by hands that are near equity or stronger than you.. you're never crushing a hand that puts chips into the pot when you raise with it).
So if you have a hand like KT, you can make some strong pairs on plenty of boards with either card, and you can make straights. This is a hand that flops very well. 97 vs K2... 97 will flop decent pairs and draws, whereas K2 can only flop a good pair with a King (or the rare 22x board), and straight draws only happen on A35 type boards, where your hand is not very well disguisted (compared to say K86 boards).
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You shouldn't weight your 3bet bluffing range too much to situations where you are card dead. You want to have an overall 3betting range against an opponent in any given situation. Imagine if you could pause the hand before the cards are dealt to you OOP. You should be able to say "if I am minraised, I will 3bet the following hands."
Now, yes, against an opponent, particularly one that is folding to a lot of 3bets, you might 3bet bluff a little wider if you haven't done it in awhile. But this should not be a drastic adjustment, it's a mistake to overdo this, you'll end up playing too many hands that you would normally feel are unwise to 3bet.
If you feel card dead too often, you might consider that you're not playing enough hands. A lot of times people tend to be folding or raising OOP and if they don't get good hands they feel like they need to bluff more OOP. This is because they are literally doing nothing except 3betting OOP. Make sure you're not folding a bunch of seemingly weak, but "better expectation than folding" hands OOP. I don't mean hands like 82o, but hands like K4, even weaker, can be very playable and better than folding. Mersenneary stresses this a lot in his ebook, premium videos and most recently his hyper turbo masters 2 hour video segment. zZzTILT stresses this a lot too, folding too many hands is one of the single biggest leaks players have in this game.