4-bet Stealing For Fun & Profit

Stealing should be a big part of your cash game strategy. There's free money there for the taking if you've got the guts to nab it. Whenever it folds to me in the CO, Button, or SB, my default mode is: Steal until told otherwise. In fact, I use my HUD numbers (i.e., villain's FTS stat) as a warning *not* to steal. In other words, I steal unless and until I have valid reason not to. Many players take the opposite tact; they look for a reason to steal. They think, "The opp is weak or tight, therefore I should steal."  In contrast, I'm usually thinking, "I'm going to steal. There isn't a reason that I shouldn't steal, right?" This is a subtle, but important difference.

Now, you also have to realize that when you get 3bet RR'd from the blind that you're attacking, you are very frequently beat* and should just fold.  "Live to steal another day" should be your first instinct when you run into resistance. Don't get stubborn....

...unless there's a valid reason to get stubborn. Take today's $25NL session. In this particular hand, I had just sat down, but I had a color code (yellow, in case you're wondering) on the BB villain from previous skirmishes that signaled to me that he likes to defend. This made me pause when he RR'd me from the BB:
 

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold'em, $0.25 BB (9 handed) - Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com 

BB ($27.50) UTG ($9.05) UTG+1 ($24.70) MP1 ($33.60) MP2 ($38.67) MP3 ($29.22) CO ($10.70) Button ($13.62) Hero (SB) ($25)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 8♣, 5♦ 7 folds, Hero bets $0.75, BB raises to $2.75, 

The yellow tag made me slow down and hit my HUD pop-up stats. The villain's 3bet number over 380 hands was 5%, which is relatively high. These two factors (the yellow tag and the 3bet stat), allowed me to do this:

Hero raises to $8.25 

Which resulted in this:

Outcome: 1 fold, Hero won $5.50

Poker is a game of incomplete information. Taking notes, color coding, and using HUD stats helps fill in the knowledge gaps, and allows you to make better (but not perfect) decisions. Sure, the villain could have come back over the top of me, which would have caused me to fold PF. But my play here in this situation is +EV in the long run against this type of opp....

...unless and until he starts using color codes, notes, and HUD stats on my stealing tendencies.

All-in for now...

-Bug
*This is very true at micro-stakes, but less so at the higher limits, where 4-bet bluffing PF is much more common.