Cold 4 betting is a great 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. (turst me I’ve made this mistake more than once) 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.

As mentioned in an earlier 4 betting post this move is perfect when targeted at the better end of players. Often they will KNOW what you’re doing but will fold and pick a better spot. Still as I said this may be a once a table bluff. Of course the real bonus will be when you make the same move later with the goods and Alah willing get called light or re-shoved.