Squeezing: raising over an open and a caller

Is a squeeze wider than a normal 3-bet?

No, and the reasons it sounds wider are real. The caller has capped their range: aces, kings and ace-king suited never flat an open in these ranges. And there is more money in the middle, the open plus the call. But a second player can still have a hand, and the raise has to be bigger. Across the twenty spots the solver raises 7.6% of hands on average, against 7.8% when it 3-bets the same opener with no caller. What changes is the mix, which our squeeze guide measures hand by hand: ace-queen and ace-jack raise more, small suited aces far less.

Who should you squeeze against, and from where?

The best squeezes come from the blinds, especially the big blind, which closes the action so there is no one left to wake up behind you, and which has already invested a blind. The charts show the big blind squeezing widest of all the seats. Against whom matters too: a call from a loose seat is a better target than a call from a tight one, and the closer the original open was to a wide, late-position range, the more comfortably you can squeeze over the top.

How wide do you actually squeeze?

Narrower than the phrase suggests. Across the twenty spots the whole continuing range is 6.8% to 32.5% of hands, and the raising half of it is only 5.3% to 12.5%. Even in the widest spot on this page, seven hands in eight do not raise.

Seat by seat, the raising ranges land close together: the cutoff squeezes 6.8% of hands, the button 6.3% to 8.2%, the small blind 5.3% to 9.1% and the big blind 5.6% to 12.5%. The dead money changes which hands you pick far more than it changes how many.

Why does the big blind mostly call instead?

Because it is already half in and it closes the action. From the big blind the calling range runs from 14% to 22% of hands, at least twice the squeezing range in nine of its ten spots. The button raises more often than it calls, the small blind is close to even, and the cutoff never calls at all.

The reason is price. The big blind has posted, so it is being offered the best odds at the table to see a flop against two ranges that are both capped, one by opening rather than 3-betting and one by calling rather than raising. Squeezing throws that price away, so it is reserved for hands that genuinely want the pot now.

Which hands squeeze and which just call?

The split is sharper here than anywhere else on the site. Aces, kings, queens, ace-king suited and offsuit, king-queen suited and ace-queen suited raise in essentially every spot. Small pairs almost never do.

Pocket sixes continue in nineteen of the twenty spots and squeeze less than 1% of the time. Twos, threes, fours and fives continue in eighteen and never squeeze, and neither do suited hands like ace-nine suited, nine-seven suited and eight-six suited. They come along because the caller has left dead money in a pot they can win outright by flopping a set or a strong draw, and they decline to raise because a squeeze folds out precisely the hands they beat and gets called by the ones they do not.

How do you actually learn these?

Not by memorising every grid. The gap between knowing the right play on a page and finding it under a clock is where the money goes, and closing it is a matter of repetition. PlusEV deals these exact spots back to you and returns to the ones you keep getting wrong. The opening ranges these all branch from are in the chart library, and the positions guide explains why seat decides so much.