Calling a threebet

So yesterday, I raise A7s from the button and the big blind shoves a decent stack. I snapcalled and beat his QJ. He berated me for some time afterwards, to my great amusement. Surely he was right though? Raisecalling A7s must be bad, right?

The thing is, a lot of regs think that they can get a wide raiser to fold most of their range by shoving over and they do it extremely wide themselves. I've seen all sorts: some do it with any two. So I had noted that this guy was a nit, and he had done the same move twice before. After the first time, I'm already thinking about calling the next.

These guys play fairly predictably. If they had a big hand, they'd threebet to something at least callable, so you shouldn't be crushed. They may have something like AT/A9s and that's bad for my hand, but very often I'm going to be facing something I'm ahead of. The added benefit is that I will play this guy a lot and stealing his blinds will be a lot easier. Disciplining regs into playing straightforwardly is particularly important in regular speeds, where there is a lot of blindstealing at middle blinds.

It's a different matter if he's in the small blind. That tends to make restealers more honest.