First, the term: when somebody has 3-bet and you raise again, that raise is a 4-bet.
Early on, most people do not realise that a strong hand wants to raise and build the pot. Holding AA or KK against somebody’s 3-bet, the instinct is: the pot is big enough already, I will call and trap him and let him do the betting.
Then an ace or a king lands on the flop, you bet 20-30%, and he is gone.
So the next thought up is: with a monster I should be 4-betting. Good instinct, right direction — but if a 4-bet only ever means a monster, then once people work that out, they get to fold everything marginal without a second thought.
Which turns into the question in the title: do you need AA or KK to 4-bet?
You do not, but what else you can add comes with a condition, and the condition is stricter than most people assume. The 3-bet post explained why so many players 3-bet so little: in their heads that button is not a tool, it is a way of announcing “I have a big hand”. If that is true of the 3-bet, it is only purer at the 4-bet — other people’s 3-bets are almost all strong hands, and bluff 4-betting into one is throwing money away.
So this post answers two questions, and the order matters:
- Which hands can 4-bet — what the value range looks like (second section), and why it cannot be big hands only (third section)
- When a bluff becomes an option — what the opponent has to satisfy first (fourth and fifth sections), and which hand to use when he does (sixth section)
The conclusion first: if you play low stakes, the answer to the second question is usually “not yet”. That is not being timid, it is correct. The back half of this post is about how you know the moment has arrived.
(The other two roads through the same spot: the 3-bet post covers the third button when you face a single raise, and the fold-to-3-bet post covers how often you simply pay up when it comes back at you. This one is about the road where you neither folded nor called.)
What Counts as a 4-Bet: Facing Two Raises
The definition at the top needs to be stated more precisely for data purposes: when the action reaches you, you are facing exactly two raises, and the last of them was not yours.
That is the condition RushCraft applies when it parses your hand history (raises_faced == 2, and you are not the last raiser); the numerator is “you raised”. The definition is broader than most people assume:
| Situation | In the denominator? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You open from CO, the big blind 3-bets you | Yes | The standard 4-bet spot, and the only one with a practice drill |
| UTG opens, CO 3-bets, action reaches you on the button | Yes | You have not put in a chip yet. This is a cold 4-bet |
| You 3-bet, he 4-bets, and it is on you again | No | You are facing three raises. That would be a 5-bet |
| Somebody opens and you are behind him | No | One raise. That is 3-bet territory |
| Somebody opens, somebody calls, action reaches you | No | A call is not a raise. You are still facing one |
The second row deserves a pause. This number does not only count the hands where you opened and got raised back; it also counts “somebody else opened, somebody else 3-bet, and here you are”. You fold almost all of those, but they are in the denominator — which is why the percentage on your screen sits lower than “how often I 4-bet after opening and facing a 3-bet”.
One more technical point, useful whenever you compare the two: 4-bet and call 3-bet share a denominator. Both are recorded off the same condition in the same place in the parser, so the two percentages plus your fold rate divide one whole into three pieces.
That is not true of fold to 3-bet, which requires that you raised and therefore runs on a narrower denominator — which is why it never adds up tidily with call 3-bet. Two denominators live inside one set of concepts. Check which one you are looking at before you compare anything.
Which Hands Can 4-Bet: QQ+, AKs, AKo, A5s
Back to the title. The first layer of the answer is: not only AA and KK, and not only QQ and AK either.
When RushCraft’s fold-to-3-bet drill scores your button press, the default 4-bet range it judges against is:
QQ+, AKs, AKo, A5s
Broken out, that is 38 combinations out of all 1,326, or 2.9% of starting hands:
| Hand | Combinations | Share of all starting hands |
|---|---|---|
| QQ, KK, AA | 18 | 1.4% |
| AKo | 12 | 0.9% |
| AKs | 4 | 0.3% |
| A5s | 4 | 0.3% |
| Total | 38 | 2.9% |
Three things to say about it before the interesting part.
One: the range does not vary by position. From UTG to the small blind, against a 3-bet from anyone, it is the same table. That is a first-pass approximation, stated as such in the source — the calling range in the same drill does split by seat (BTN widest at 2.7%, SB narrowest at 1.2%); the 4-bet range does not. In practice a 4-bet in position can run a little wider, for exactly the reasons position matters everywhere else, but that is not what this table currently does.
Two: it is a value skeleton, not a complete strategy. Same as with the opening and calling ranges: the table tells you which hands qualify for the action, not “press this and you are done”.
Three: 4-bet wins ties. A hand appearing in both the 4-bet table and the calling table is scored as a 4-bet. As it happens the two tables do not currently overlap, so that rule is a safety net rather than a live fork.
The first three rows are hands that make your pulse jump. The fourth is not. What A5s is doing there is the sixth section’s job — but before that, there is something else to settle: whether you need it at all.
Why It Cannot Be Big Hands Only: What He Saves Is What You Lose
Start with the negative case, the one the opening described: what happens when the table is nothing but QQ+ and AK.
Your 4-bet becomes a face-up card. He sees you 4-bet and he knows you have QQ+ or AK — so he does two things, and both of them cost you money.
He folds the awkward hands instantly. JJ, TT, AJ and AQ are genuinely difficult against a 4-bet range that might contain bluffs: calling feels wrong, folding feels worse. Against AA, KK, QQ and AK their equity is low enough that mucking costs him nothing at all. You have saved him his thinking time, and you have saved yourself your income.
He only puts money in when you are behind. You 4-bet with queens, he shoves aces or kings — are you calling? You 4-bet AK, he shoves, and you are holding a hand with a bit over 30% equity against his range. A transparent value range only ever gets called in the worst case. You think the 4-bet is protecting your big hands. What it is actually doing is guaranteeing they only get action when they should be folding.
So skip the 4-bet and trap with aces instead? That is where this post started: the pot never grows, an ace or a king on the flop sends him away, and your strongest hand ends up earning the least. The two roads leak in different places, and there is only one patch for both — stop letting your 4-bet range be big hands only.
With bluffs in the range you buy two things:
- He can no longer just throw JJ and AQ away. He has to pay to see a flop
- His own 3-bet steals with A5s and KJs start to hurt, because he cannot assume you are always holding a monster
All upside, apparently. The next two sections are about the precondition — both of those benefits require an opponent who understands what you are doing.
When a Bluff Becomes an Option: How Much He Has to Fold
The 3-bet post worked out that a pure bluff 3-bet breaks even at 69%. Run the same arithmetic on a 4-bet and the answer comes out lower.
Using the sizing this site uses throughout (the table in the preflop guide: a 4-bet is about 2.2 to 2.5 times the 3-bet):
You open to 2.5bb from the cutoff, the big blind 3-bets to 10bb, you 4-bet to 24bb.
- You are putting in an extra 24 − 2.5 = 21.5bb
- The pot you are attacking is 2.5 + 10 + 0.5 = 13bb
- Break-even fold equity = 21.5 ÷ (21.5 + 13) ≈ 62%
(At 2.2x it is 60%. The full version of this “how often does it have to work” arithmetic is in how to work out pot odds.)
60% to 62%, seven points below the 69% a bluff 3-bet needs. The reason is direct: he built that pot. His 3-bet took it from 4bb to 13bb, so the prize grew while the amount you have to add did not grow in proportion. The harder somebody swings, the cheaper your bluff gets — the least-used property of this action, and the most counter-intuitive.
Which sounds like a bargain, right up until you ask the next question: is he actually going to fold six times in ten?
Put the two ranges side by side and you have the answer:
| His 3-bet range | He folds roughly | Your pure bluff 4-bet |
|---|---|---|
| 3% (QQ+ and AK only) | Almost never | A pure loss. Do not do it once |
| 8% to 12% (normal) | Six to seven times in ten | Break-even to a small profit |
| 13% and up (he is stealing) | Seven in ten and up | Clearly profitable |
The middle row landing right around the break-even point is not a coincidence — a healthy 3-bet range is supposed to make an opponent’s bluff 4-bets unprofitable. The two sides price each other.
The first row is the norm at low stakes, and it is the most important sentence in this post. A player who has not yet learned to 3-bet as a bluff has a 3-bet range of strong hands only: QQ+ and AK, around 3%. Not one hand in that range is the kind that has to give up when raised again — when he 3-bet, he had already decided the money was going in. You need 60% fold equity and what you get is close to zero.
This is the reverse face of the one defence in the fold-to-3-bet post: there, “when he only 3-bets 3%, folding 85% costs you nothing”; here, the same fact says bluff 4-betting a man who only raises QQ+ and AK is handing him money directly.
So neither benefit from the last section is available against this opponent: he will not call you with JJ, because he does not have JJ — he only has QQ+; and he is not stealing, so there is nothing of his for you to punish. A bluff needs an audience that can read it.
What the Opponent Has to Look Like Before a Bluff Earns
The last row of that table is the player you are hunting for: a 3-bet of 13% or more.
Normal is 8% to 12%, and anything above it means his range has A5s, KJs and small pairs stuffed into it. Those hands 3-bet to take the pot down, not to go to war — raise once more and they cannot continue. The 60% fold equity you need comes off players like that.
Only, most of the time you will not have a number telling you he is at 13%. A few concrete pictures read faster than a frequency does:
- He keeps 3-betting the late-position opens from the blinds, button opens especially. That is the seat that gets stolen from most, so an opponent fighting back there knows you are stealing — and is not necessarily holding anything
- He 3-bets, then gives up on the flop whenever there is resistance. Betting the flop and folding to a raise means he never intended to go far with it
- He 3-bets the same player two or three times in a row. Picking up QQ+ three times in a session is possible, but it is far less likely than him adjusting to you
Turn it around and these are the signs to put A5s back in the fold pile: he has 3-bet once or twice all session, he never gives up after 3-betting, he is the type who agonises for a while over a single AJ.
And one more thing that runs against instinct but matters: read his 3-bet, not his 4-bet.
The 3-bet statistic accumulates about 35 opportunities per 100 hands. The 4-bet gets 3 to 4. Trying to read somebody’s 4-bet tendency off one session gives you a random figure that looks precise (the section on sample size does that arithmetic). Judge from the statistic that accumulates fastest.
(What if he 5-bets all in? That is a separate question, and the product’s default ranges stop at the 4-bet — practice mode has no fifth raise. In practice the range of people who 5-bet at low stakes is startlingly narrow, and A5s’s answer there is usually to fold, not to stand its ground.)
When the Condition Holds, Why the Hand Is A5s
Say you really are sitting next to somebody who 3-bets very wide. Which hand does the bluff 4-bet?
Back to the fourth row of that skeleton. A5s does two jobs:
First, the ace in your hand cuts down his strongest combinations. The hands he will never fold to a 4-bet are AA and AK — hold an ace and his AA drops from 6 combinations to 3, his AK from 16 to 12. You are not guessing whether he has it. You are reducing what he can have.
Second, it still has a life after being called. A5s makes flushes, makes the wheel (A-2-3-4-5), and comes with an ace kicker when it pairs. It is not a bluff that has to give up the moment somebody calls.
So why not 87s, or the more natural-feeling AJs?
87s does neither job. It blocks none of his strong hands, and once called it is a small suited connector against AA/KK/AK, where nothing it makes is quite enough.
AJs is the more interesting case, because it is the hand most people would pick. The problem is that AJs is already in the calling range (the default continuing range is JJ-TT, AQs, AJs, KQs). Move it into the 4-bet and you are mining your own assets for a bluff — your calling range gets weaker, and the blocker effect you bought is roughly what A5s gives you anyway.
A5s is different: it was in the fold pile. Using it as a 4-bet costs nothing at all.
Bluffs come out of the fold pile, not out of your assets. That sentence was about A5s in the 3-bet post, and it is still about A5s here, because the logic did not change.
One clarification so this is not misread: A5s is not there to lift your continuation frequency. The fold-to-3-bet post worked out that to make his pure bluffs unprofitable you must continue with a third of your opening range — open 46.9% on the button and that is 15% of all starting hands. A5s is 0.3%. It does not fill that hole. The hole gets filled by opening tighter or calling wider; A5s’s job is to keep your value hands from being read, and the two jobs should not be blurred together.
Play the Default Ranges and Your 4-Bet Is What, Exactly
Everything so far has been about what goes in the range. This section converts it into the percentage you will actually see on screen.
The fold-to-3-bet post did the same exercise and concluded that the entire spread in the fold rate came from the opening range. This is the same mechanism seen from the other side — the 4-bet range never moves a single square, and your 4-bet percentage still varies by a factor of four across seats:
| Where you opened | Opening range | 4-bet hands inside it | Your 4-bet % |
|---|---|---|---|
| UTG | 11.2% | 2.6% (no A5s) | 23% |
| MP | 18.9% | 2.9% | 15% |
| CO | 29.1% | 2.9% | 10% |
| BTN | 46.9% | 2.9% | 6% |
| SB | 46.9% | 2.9% | 6% |
(The UTG row differs because the default UTG opening range stops at ATs+, so you never hold A5s there in the first place — from UTG you have no bluff 4-bet available. That is the position doing it, not a choice you made.)
Weighted by how often each seat opens, those five rows average about 9%. The figure on screen will be lower still, because as the first section covered, the denominator also carries a batch of cold 4-bet spots, and playing the skeleton you fold nearly all of them.
The use of this table is not to check your answer against it. It is to understand one thing: the same player, the same 4-bet table, and a change of seat moves the number by a factor of four. Which means “my 4-bet is 7%, is that normal” is unanswerable until you say which position, and how much of the denominator is cold 4-bet spots.
What This Number Cannot Do for You
Every statistic covered on this site so far comes with a line: VPIP 18-25%, 3-bet 8-12%, cold call 5% or below, fold to 3-bet 65% or below.
4-bet has none. It is absent from the target-band table, no diagnostic card ever flags it high or low, and the AI coach’s leak explanation library has no entry for it.
It is computed all the same, and it surfaces in three places — all three of which show you your own play:
| Where | What you get |
|---|---|
| The detailed stats table | Your overall 4-bet % |
| Each seat on the table diagram | Your 4-bet % from that position |
| The 13x13 hand matrix tooltip | Your 4-bet % for that one hand |
And there is one place where it is conspicuously missing: the opponent profile window. That window lists nine numbers — VPIP, PFR, 3-Bet, F-Steal, F-3B, CBet, F-CBet, WTSD, Call 3B — and 4-bet is not among them. The slot is empty. That blank is not an oversight, and there are two reasons for it.
The first reason is the section above: a total that gets dragged around by your distribution of seats would only generate false verdicts if you drew a line through it.
The second reason is the sample, and it is the harder of the two. For you to face two raises, somebody has to open, somebody has to 3-bet, and the action has to reach you while you are still in the hand. The fold-to-3-bet post worked out that “you open and get 3-bet” happens 2 to 3 times per 100 hands; the 4-bet denominator adds the cold 4-bet spots on top, so it runs slightly higher — about 3 to 4 opportunities per 100 hands.
Then there is a second problem, the deadlier one: the base rate is low. The lower the base rate, the less precision a given sample buys. Assume a true 4-bet of 9%:
| Opportunities | Roughly how many hands | Observed number lands at | What that interval is good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | ~900 | 0% – 19% | Telling zero from non-zero, nothing else |
| 100 | ~3,000 | 3% – 15% | Still cannot separate low from high |
| 400 | ~11,000 | 6% – 12% | Barely enough to bracket |
| 1,500 | ~43,000 | 7.5% – 10.5% | Only now does tuning mean anything |
(Normal approximation of the 95% interval; the orders of magnitude are right.)
The third row is the point: eleven thousand hands in, the interval still runs from 6% to 12% — from “value only” to “twice as wide as the skeleton”. Every value in that range corresponds to a completely different way of playing, and you cannot tell them apart.
Set it against the rest of the series:
| Statistic | Opportunities per 100 hands | Hands to separate high from low |
|---|---|---|
| 3-bet | about 35 | around 3,000 |
| Cold call | about 20 | around 5,000 |
| Fold to 3-bet | 2 to 3 | around 13,000 |
| 4-bet | 3 to 4 | 40,000 and up |
More opportunities than fold to 3-bet and slower convergence anyway — the difference is the base rate: something that happens 9% of the time is far harder to measure than something that happens 65% of the time. This is also the full reason behind “read his 3-bet, not his 4-bet”: one session’s worth of his 4-bets is noise.
Which makes the line nobody drew the correct decision. A target band of, say, 6-10% would do nothing but flag a crowd of correctly-playing people as leaking at ten thousand hands.
And there is something more awkward still: this percentage cannot tell whether you bluff. Of the 38 combinations in the skeleton, A5s is 4 of them — take it out and a pure-value 4-bet range still holds 34, or 89% of the skeleton. On screen that moves the percentage from roughly 9% to roughly 8%. The entire difference disappears inside the narrowest interval in the table above with room to spare.
A player who only ever 4-bets AA, KK, QQ and AK produces the same number as a player doing it well. Everything this post covered from the third section to the sixth is invisible to that percentage.
So what is left? Two things, both coarse:
- A 4-bet of zero: no sample required, that is already the conclusion. You are only ever calling with queens and ace-king, and facing a 3-bet you have two buttons instead of three
- Clearly high, fifteen and up: check the seats first (the table above; UTG is 23% by construction), and only once that is ruled out start suspecting you are 4-betting carelessly
The brackets stop there. Across the whole middle of the range — six percent to the middle teens — this statistic has no opinion, nor should it, and that is where most players live.
There is exactly one place those 4 combinations become visible: the per-hand tooltip in the 13x13 matrix, showing which hands your 4-bets are actually made of. Whether the A5s square is empty or has a number in it is a far more honest question than the percentage — that view shows a range, and the range is the part you can genuinely change.
If You Play Rush & Cash
On fast-fold tables folding moves you to a new table, and the effect on this action runs both ways, more sharply than for any other statistic.
The bad direction: the last two sections on bluffing rest entirely on knowing how wide he 3-bets, and on a fast-fold table you never play ten hands against the same person. The condition cannot be verified, so your bluff 4-bet has nothing to stand on. The sensible response is to lean on the skeleton — play QQ+, AKs and AKo, and save the A5s for the times you have actually seen somebody playing very wide.
The good direction: the biggest cost of a pure value 4-bet is being read, and being read requires an opponent who has accumulated data on you. On a fast-fold table nobody is building your profile. That is the same effect the 3-bet post described, only more extreme here — a 4-bet is one of the rarest actions in the game, and even at a regular table somebody has to sit beside you a very long time to see you make several.
Put plainly: “he will notice I only 4-bet aces and kings” does not happen on a fast-fold table. But do not take that as permission to ignore the range — of the two costs described earlier, “he only puts money in when you are behind” has nothing to do with whether he knows you. That one is a property of the range itself.
As for the sample, this is the one piece of good news: at 3 to 4 opportunities per 100 hands, fast-fold speed is the most practical way to reach a number that shows you anything. Export your hand history from PokerCraft first (six steps, see downloading your Natural8 hand history); import it into RushCraft and your 4-bet, your call 3-bet and how both distribute across positions are already computed.
Back to the question in the title: you do not need AA or KK to 4-bet, but what you add depends on who is sitting across from you.
- What counts as a 4-bet: facing exactly two raises, cold 4-bet spots included. It shares a denominator with call 3-bet, so the two plus your folds make one whole
- The value skeleton: QQ+, AKs, AKo, A5s. 38 combinations, 2.9%, and the same table from every seat (a first-pass approximation)
- Why it cannot be big hands only: he mucks JJ, AJ and AQ in a second, then only puts money in when you are behind. But trapping instead is no answer either — that is your strongest hand earning the least
- When a bluff becomes an option: it breaks even at 62%, below the 69% a bluff 3-bet needs, because he built the pot. But that only holds against opponents who 3-bet wide, 13% and up — against somebody at 3% whose range is all strong hands, it is handing him money
- How to spot that opponent: he 3-bets late-position opens from the blinds, he gives up on the flop after 3-betting, he 3-bets the same player repeatedly. Read his 3-bet, not his 4-bet
- Which hand, when the condition holds: A5s. It removes half his AA combinations and a quarter of his AK, and it still makes wheels and flushes when called. Pick it over AJs because AJs is already in your calling range — bluffs come out of the fold pile
- Do not expect the number to tell you: 3 to 4 opportunities per 100 hands at a 9% base rate, and forty thousand hands to tell high from low. A pure-value range is 4 combinations short of the skeleton, under a point of difference — only the matrix shows it
Next time somebody 3-bets you and you are holding A5s, do not reach straight for the fold pile, and do not fire it in either. Look at who he is first.