A squeeze is a 3-bet made over an open AND one or more cold-callers — named for what it does to the callers, whose position becomes unbearable. The mechanics that make it work are all dead-money effects. The opener has already shown modest strength for a normal-size raise; the caller has announced a medium-strength hand at a cheap price. Neither can like a pot that suddenly quadruples, and crucially the CALLER'S range is the most capped thing in poker — a flat rarely contains the hands that enjoy playing a big pot.

The setup is everywhere in real games. This app's own data: the button opens to 2bb (rfi:BTN) and the big blind flats 30% of the time (vsrfi:BB:vs:BTN) — a wide, capped slab of suited hands, pocket pairs, and dominated broadways. That flatting frequency is the squeeze's fuel supply: every caller adds money that's already in and players who must now either love a bloated pot or surrender it.

Price it concretely (stated sizing convention, not a solved number: SB squeezes to 11bb total). If everyone folds, the SB wins the 4.5bb of dead money at the cost of risking 10.5bb fresh — so a pure bluff needs folds 70% of the time. That sounds demanding until you look at the seats doing the deciding: the opener must call 9bb more into a 15.0bb pot, needing 38% equity against a range that has 3-bet polarized — a brutal price for the marginal part of a stealing range — and the flatting big blind fares worse, squeezed between a capped range and the opener still alive behind. Both folding most of the time is not a failure state; it IS the design.

Sizing follows the crowd: a squeeze runs meaningfully larger than an isolated 3-bet — commonly around four times the original open plus a bit per additional caller — because its job is to end the auction, not to build a multiway pot. And hand selection leans on the same logic as every other 3-bet: value that wants the growing pot, plus blocker-bluffs (suited aces above all — they remove the opener's strongest continuing material) that thrive on the dead money.

An honest scope note: this app's Trainer grades heads-up preflop spots — once a caller sits between aggressors, the heads-up charts stop applying and there is no squeeze drill generator. Treat this lesson as a lens for Play-mode review, where multiway preflop rows carry their own wider-tolerance qualifier.