What is a Good Fold to 3-Bet Percentage?

What the stat counts

Fold to 3-bet is the share of the time you open-raised, faced a 3-bet, folded. The denominator is narrow — you had to open the pot, and somebody had to re-raise — which is what makes this the slowest preflop stat on the HUD to settle. It is also the stat most often misread as a character flaw. A high figure is not timidity in itself, because an opening range is wide by design and most of it has no business playing a bloated pot from out of position; what matters is which part you fold, and whether an observant opponent can 3-bet you with anything and profit.

The pot geometry sets both edges

Take a standard spot: you open to 2.5bb, the big blind makes it 10bb, and the small blind's 0.5bb is dead in the middle. Two exact figures fall out of the arithmetic, both from the same calculator this site uses for fold equity:

• •Your call needs 36.59% equity. You are putting in 7.5bb more to play for a 13bb pot, out of position, against a range that chose to re-raise. Plenty of your opening range does not have it.
• •Their bluff needs you to fold 69.23% of the time. The 3-bettor risks 9bb above their blind to win the 4bb sitting there, so if you fold more often than that, any two cards shows a profit against you.
• •The band, 45-65%, sits between the two. Its ceiling is 4.23 points under the frequency that would make a bluff free, which is the sanity check the band exists to provide.

What continuing actually looks like

The band is easier to hit when you know the shape of the response rather than the number. Our curated 4-bet ranges are 1.2% of all hands for the value-only version and 3.2% once bluffs are added — and against a button opening range of 40.0%, that mixed 4-bet range is only 7.9% of the hands you opened with. Do the subtraction: if roughly 8% of your opens 4-bet, then landing inside the 45-65% fold band means calling with 27.1% to 47.1% of your opening range. That is the whole strategy in one line: a small 4-bet range, a modest calling range, and everything else in the muck without a second thought.

Outside the band

Under 45% you are defending too much of a wide range. The expensive version is calling 3-bets after an early-position open, where your range is narrow but the positions are wrong and you will be out of position in a big pot for the rest of the hand. Over 65% you have crossed the bluff's break-even line at 69.23%, and every opponent who notices gets a free roll at your opens. The fix is rarely "call more". It is usually to open a little tighter from the seats where you cannot continue — early position — and to make sure the top of your range actually 4-bets, so that folding the rest costs you nothing you were entitled to.

How long before your own figure means anything

This is the slowest of the preflop stats, and the arithmetic says why. The band is wide, so you only need about 95 occasions of being 3-bet for a 95% interval to fit inside it. But getting 3-bet is rare: at the modelled opening frequency of 14.5% of hands and a 7.5% chance that an open gets re-raised — the band midpoint, applied once rather than once per player behind you — that is roughly 8,900 hands: fewer at a table where several players will re-raise you, more at a passive one. Over a few hundred hands the figure is noise, and an opponent's version of it over a hundred hands is worth nothing at all.

Check your own figure

The free leak report computes fold-to-3-bet from your hand history and marks it against this band next to your opening frequencies, which is the only way to tell whether a high figure is timidity or simply wide opens. For the pot-odds side of the decision, the fold equity calculator takes the same numbers used above.