Let me say this first. If you never 3bet light ever at the micros you will be just fine. The vast majority of my 3bet range at these stakes is big value hands. As discussed, one of the biggest reasons why you shouldn’t 3bet light too much is that they don’t fold to them enough. This isn’t a terrible thing if they have a high fold to cbet but that usually isn’t the case.
Many of your opponents at the micros (even regs) turn into calling stations in 3bet pots and will accidentally correctly call you the whole way with a mid pair if you are in there light trying to barrel them off. However there are occasionally still some good spots to 3bet light. I would look for two conditions.
- You are in position
- They have a high fold to 3bet and/or a high fold to cbet (above 70% in either case)
Make sure you have at least 100 hands on your opponent. And just use the fold to cbet stat for normal pots. Fold to cbet in 3bet pots will require too large of a sample most of the time.
With either of these two conditions in place you should be able to take down the pot before the flop or after it most of the time. And that really is the whole point. We don’t want to be in there with light holdings, especially OOP, against somebody who won’t fold.
And like I mentioned before, choose a hand that is too weak to call a raise but has some decent high card or speculative value and is an easy muck to a 4bet. Don’t ever 3bet with total trash.
