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I Find it off that the fundamental distinction between No Limit Hold’em and other poker games is the players’ ability to bet any amount they want; yet very little attention is given to bet sizing in the poker community. People often discuss whether they should bet, check, fold, or raise, but little is said beyond that. However, once you decide to put more chips in the pot, you should give at least an equal amount of thought to how many chips you should put in there.
Why is this so important? Well, one of the key differences between novice players and good players is their ability to consider a hand on future streets before the hand gets there, allowing them to plan for what they want to accomplish and use their actions on early streets to achieve that goal. Want to get all your chips in the middle? Then you have to think of the best way to build the pot. Sure, just pushing all in will occasionally work, but most of the time you have to start building the pot early.
In a way, it’s like a beginning chess player against a grand master. The grand master is already thinking fi ve to six moves ahead, while the novice only thinks about that very moment. This allows the grand master not only to adjust quickly when things don’t go exactly according to plan — since he has already considered many of his options earlier — but also allows him to construct multiplemove maneuvers that his weaker opponents won’t see coming.
I’m going to use a recent and fairly simple example of this from an online tournament I recently won. The blinds were 200/400 with an ante of 50, and it was folded to me in the cut-off with Ac 3c. I had 9,000 chips left and I raised to 1,100. The button fl at-called my raise with 11,000 chips total and both of the blinds folded.
The fl op was Kc 9c 2d, the pot was 3,150, and I had 7,900 left. This is a great fl op for me and I have no problems getting all my chips in the middle here with these stacks. I want to maximize the chances that my opponent will make a mistake on the hand, though. I could have made a strong bet, say the full pot size of 3,150, which would often take down the pot when he missed. But he’d rarely make a mistake on the hand since it would be fairly obvious I was never folding; so he would only continue with hands that were well ahead of mine.
Conversely, I could have checked to him. Then if he bet, I could raise all in. However, that presents a few problems since the player was fairly passive and would frequently be checking behind; and then I’d have to make an awkward decision on the turn if I missed, since a turn bet would look a lot less strong when I don’t bet the fl op. Also, to many players, the check-raise all in here really looks like a semi-bluff with a draw — which is exactly what I have — so he may fi nd a way to call with hands like A-9 that I would like him to fold.
But, if we choose a bet size of say 1,600, we can have a lot of good things happen. First, our opponent could fold, and we’d be happy to add that 3,150 to our stack right now. Second, he could call. This is fi ne, because our bet size will make the pot 6,350 and leave us with 6,300, enough to push all in on the turn if we miss — and our bet will be big enough that he will have a hard time calling, but not so big of an over-bet that it looks like we want him to fold. Notice that if we’d bet the full pot, or 3,150 on the fl op, the pot would infl ate to 9,450 on the turn — leaving us with only 4,750 behind. This means that if we were playing a novice player who might call with a marginal holding on the fl op, he’s likely not going to fold on the turn because the price the pot we’ll be offering is too big.
So we don’t mind when he calls here because we could hit our hand and then check (thus looking like we were just continuationbetting a miss and giving up on the hand), or push the turn when we miss and get our opponent to fold his weaker holdings that might be ahead of ours, although we will still have outs when called. The fi nal thing that could happen is he could look at the 1,600 bet as being weak (it’s barely over half the pot) and bluff-raise us! It would be the best of both worlds not only to get our money in ahead, but to have our opponent do it for us on a stone-cold bluff. Now, it’s quite possible our opponent does have a big hand and isn’t ever folding, but in those cases the hand often plays itself, so it’s important to make sure we maximize our winnings against those hands he has that aren’t so strong.
In this particular hand, my opponent called, and when the 5h came on the turn, I pushed all in. He thought a while before folding and typed “Th 9h” in chat. We’ll never know how he would have reacted to other bet sizes, but by sizing our fl op bet properly, we induced our opponent to call with middle pair and then fold the best hand on the turn, most likely maximizing our profi t for the hand and using those chips to go on and win the tournament.
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