How to Play Ace-High Flops in PLO 3-Bet Pots
Take the most common 3-bet pot in 6-max PLO: big blind 3-bets, button calls, 100bb. On an A-K-4 rainbow flop the 3-bettor's range holds 65.4% equity to the caller's 34.6%. That is about as lopsided as PLO flops get, and it is worth knowing exactly why, because the same logic tells you which ace-high boards are weaker than they look and which flops flip the advantage entirely.
The numbers below are exact class shares and 50,000-pair Monte Carlo equities from our 6-max 100bb solve ranges, the same data behind the range advantage page, where you can run every texture yourself.
Why the 3-bettor owns ace-high
A big blind 3-bet range against a button open is 9.4% wide and drenched in aces: A-A-x-x makes up 26% of it, against 2.6% of a random hand. Put an ace on the flop and that concentration converts directly into made hands.
| A-K-4 rainbow | BB 3-bettor | BTN caller |
|---|---|---|
| Equity | 65.4% | 34.6% |
| Top set | 19.0% | - |
| Any set | 28.8% | 8.6% |
| Two pair | 15.0% | 12.3% |
The 3-bettor flops top set almost one time in five. The caller's range, which folded or 4-bet its own A-A-x-x hands preflop, flops top set essentially never; its sets are kings and fours. Every continue the caller makes runs into a range that flopped the current nuts a fifth of the time.
That is the whole ace-high story: it is not that A-K-4 "hits" the 3-bettor's range broadly. Most of both ranges misses it. It is that the top of the board pairs the one rank the 3-bettor holds at ten times the dealt rate.
The two-tone discount
Add a flush draw and the edge narrows, but less than most players expect. On A-Q-6 with two hearts the 3-bettor still holds 63.1%, top set 18.4%. The interesting line is the draws:
| A-Q-6 two-tone | BB 3-bettor | BTN caller |
|---|---|---|
| Equity | 63.1% | 36.9% |
| Nut flush draw | 9.0% | 6.7% |
| Non-nut flush draw | 12.4% | 17.0% |
The caller has more flush draws, but the wrong ones. The ace of the flush suit sits on the board or in the 3-bettor's ace-heavy range, so the caller's draws are dominated more often than they are live. Calling a c-bet with a bare queen-high flush draw here is how stacks migrate.
The flops that flip
Ace-high tells one story; low and connected tells the opposite one. Same ranges, same pot, on a 7-6-5 two-tone flop:
| 7-6-5 two-tone | BB 3-bettor | BTN caller |
|---|---|---|
| Equity | 48.1% | 51.9% |
| Nut straight | 6.3% | 9.8% |
| Any straight | 8.1% | 17.4% |
The button's calling range kept its middle rundowns; the 3-bettor's range is built from aces and broadway. On the boards those rundowns smash, the caller is the outright favorite in a pot the 3-bettor built. Broadway three-straights sit in between: Q-J-T gives the 3-bettor 64.7% with the nut straight 25.5% of the time, because A-K-Q-J and K-Q-J-T carry the 3-bet range too.
The practical division is clean. As the 3-bettor, ace-high and broadway boards are where your range bet prints; low connected boards are where "I 3-bet, so I bet" stops being a reason. As the caller, the low and middle rundown flops are yours - the equity table above is why - and the hands that flop them are rundowns with suits rather than dominated broadway, which the 3-bettor's range is built to crush.
Every texture here, plus ten more, is interactive on the range advantage page, with the nut-vs-non-nut split per class. For what the 3-bet range actually contains preflop, the exact frequencies are on the range frequencies reference.