introduction to bet sizing

i had to write an article for a writing course that i'm taking at school, and figured i'd just post it here. comments/corrections/opinions/criticisms are welcome. oh, warning, this is long.


INTRODUCTION TO BET SIZING IN NO LIMIT HOLD’EM
Written by |~|yper

When it comes to writing poker strategy articles, bet sizing is often left out. Typically, people will tell you to bet big with big hands, and to bet small with small hands. This sounds reasonable, and certainly is highly effective at micro stakes, but once you start moving up to small stakes this becomes highly exploitable. Hence, bet sizing properly is essential to earning a respectable winrate.

Bet sizing is a very difficult topic to discuss clearly and concisely because it is closely related with almost all other aspects of playing no limit hold’em. Everything from position, hand ranges, pot size, and stack sizes must be taken into account to size your bets profitably. While each of those aspects can be discussed in great detail, bet sizing ultimately ties everything together.

Your goal for every hand is to maximize expectation. Bet sizing is all about controlling and manipulating the size of the pot, and if done properly, you can force your opponents into very difficult situations. To demonstrate, let’s walk through an example hand.

You are dealt AhKh on the cutoff, and everyone at the table has $100 stacks with $0.50/$1.00 blinds. It is folded to you, and you raise $4. The button, who is a solid player and not very tricky, reraises to $14. The blinds fold, and you decide to call and see a flop.

The pot on the flop is $29.50, and the cards fall Kc 4h 4s giving you top pair top kicker. Since the button is straightforward, you can reasonably expect that his range of hands that would reraise preflop to be heavily skewed towards high pairs and strong unpaired cards such as AK, AQ, and KQ. You are only behind two hands: aces and kings. Now that we have assigned a reasonable hand range for our opponent, our next step is to decide how to get money into the pot since our hand is very strong. We can expect our opponent to continuation bet a large majority of the time. Betting out is a bad option because it allows him to fold hands like JJ and TT, so we check. We run the risk of him checking behind, but that is unlikely because the flop is uncoordinated, and our opponent will expect us to fold to his bet every time unless we have a king or high pocket pair.

Our opponent bets $22, which is about 75% of the pot. We call because raising will fold all underpairs that he might have. The turn comes with As, which is the best card in the deck that could have fallen. It has improved our hand, but that is not important. This is a great card because it has improved our opponent’s range of hands. AQ and AJ just improved and now have showdown value. While the ace puts an extra scare card for underpairs such as JJ and TT, our call on the flop demonstrates strength, and if our opponent had one of these hands, he is unlikely to invest any more money into the pot. The ace also doesn’t improve our hand based on the hand range we assigned to our opponent. We were behind pocket aces and kings on the flop, and the ace on the turn does not change that.

We check again, allowing our opponent to bluff his underpairs, or value bet his pair of aces. To our delight, our opponent bets $30 into the $73.50 pot. We push the rest of our stack, which increases the pot size to $167.50, and it is $34 more for our opponent to call, which gives him 5:1 odds. Unfortunately for our opponent, we have put him in a very bad situation. He is losing almost every time he calls, and he knows this, except that the pot odds are too good to fold, and most players are unable to fold here even when they know they should. Our opponent calls, and flips over pocket kings, which means we were drawing dead the whole time. The river does not improve our hand.

Let’s look at this hand again with our roles reversed. The cut off raises $4, and we reraise to $14 with our kings on the button. The blinds fold, and our opponent calls, and the flop comes Kc 4h 4s. Again, we must assign a reasonable hand range for our opponent. Since our opponent is aggressive, he will raise most pairs, and strong off suit cards. This is a bad flop for us because we cannot get any value unless our opponent hit a pair of kings, and since we have two of them already, it is extremely unlikely. He checks. While it may seem reasonable to check behind and allow our opponent to improve their hand, this is incorrect. Our opponent knows we are aggressive, and if this is the one time we do not continuation bet, our opponent will pick up on that and be much more cautious. Not only that, if we check, we are manipulating the size of the pot. We are keeping it smaller, which will make it far easier for our opponent to fold their hand even if they do improve, because a raise on the turn is a dead giveaway that our hand is extremely strong. Since we should bet, we must decide how much to bet.

We need to bet an amount such that we can force our opponent into putting in the rest of his stack on later streets. The size of the pot on the flop is $29.50, which means both of us still have $86 more to bet. If we bet 50% and get called, the pot size on the turn would be roughly $50 with $71 behind us. If we bet 100%, the pot size on the turn would be $90, with $56 behind us.

If we bet the middle ground of 75%, the pot size becomes around $74, with each of us $64 behind. Once the size of the pot exceeds the size of your stack, any bet or call you make on the turn will likely put you all in before showdown. Even a weak 25% sized bet can force you all in. On the river, the pot size will be $112 (assuming our opponent called the $19 bet on the turn), with both of us having $45 behind. Pushing gives the other player roughly 3.5:1 odds, which means unless you were bluffing the whole time, you are probably calling. We bet $30, which is not weak, and not strong, and the rest is history.

In this example, both players were trying to trick their opponent into putting more money into the pot. Stack sizes were also straightforward, and with the reraised pot preflop, it was very simple for both players to get all in. Bet sizing in reality is much more complicated. Often you will be trying to get your opponent to put money in with a mediocre hand. Also, the example hand would have played out completely different if both players had $200 stacks instead of $100.

Nonetheless, it should be clear that understanding how bet sizes can affect the pot size on later streets is essential to exploiting your opponents for the maximum amount.

i have no criticism of the content, as it relates to poker. but, off topic, and offering criticism, constructively, to the paper's material itself...

always take into consideration WHO your audience is, and how knowledgable they are about your material. it is too common, imo, for a writer to immediately go "over the head" of his audience...leaving them bored. and in the case of a classroom paper, leaving the author with a bad grade...unless the professor/teacher is a poker player. i dont know if this class is NLHE 201, or not, but i assume that no one knows anything about poker.

break down the terminology as if someone reading the paper has never played poker before. explain cutoff, continuation bet, AhKh (and how powerful this hand is). you have the power here to create a possible player, if you make the game sound easy enough.

if you dont have the room in the paper to define the fancier terminology, find a way to leave it out.

you cant take the "gamble" of boring your teacher due to fancy terminology within a subject they have NO interest in to begin with.

all he/she will do is start picking on your grammar, spelling, etc..because he has nothing better to do.

my .02, otherwise, good explanation...for this site, and its more knowledgable audience.

actually, the assignment was
"pick a magazine, and write an article for it"

so...i picked the 2+2 magazine.
and in my query letter (a letter to the editor advertising yourself and what you're going to write about), my prof replied "i look forward to this, maybe it can improve my game!"

and i was like....YES!!!

Originally Posted by |~|ypermegachi

actually, the assignment was
"pick a magazine, and write an article for it"

so...i picked the 2+2 magazine.
and in my query letter (a letter to the editor advertising yourself and what you're going to write about), my prof replied "i look forward to this, maybe it can improve my game!"

and i was like....YES!!!

Before reading this reply I was about to write something similar to chopper. The only thing I'd like to point out is in your example, you say you flopped TPTK, but you actually flopped two pair Ace kicker. Good article.

I don't want to seem overly critical, but I think I lost the point of this article. Sure I enjoyed the example, but appeared to be waiting for you to make a point that you never made.

The AhKh guy doesn't do any of the bet sizing himself, apart from the standard opening raise and his shove, the opponent controlled the betting.

The KK guy sized his bets to get it all in from a strong but inferior hand sure, but he didnt ever put his opponent in a very difficult situation either.

So where has the art of bet sizing come in? What are your thoughts on bet sizing for different purposes. When you want to control the pot how do you size your bets? When you want to play for stacks how do you do it? How do you know the difference? When do we start thinking about bet sizing? Before the pf raise? When 3 betting? on the flop?

All you seem to say is that sizing your bets properly "can force your opponents into very difficult situations." But how does the example show this? What is sizing your bets properly?

Now I'm not flaming you, I think there is potential for a great article here and with a little more work it may be a very interesting/illuminating read.

I asked a lot of questions just now and I by no means think that you need to write an article that answers them all. But it should at least address and work on one or two. If your plan was simply to introduce the concept of bet sizing, then I think you need to choose examples that really excentuate the affects of different sized bets on each street. Much like Sklansky does in NLHET&P when discussing raising more preflop with big pot hands such as low pocket pairs.

I hope you see my point.

hypertamagochi;
great post at least i love to read the 2 parts about how other opponents think. very educational. seem like unfinished article tho.. thers lot more about bet sizes i guess....

nice reply, gingerwizard

Originally Posted by Hyper

Once the size of the pot exceeds the size of your stack, any bet or call you make on the turn will likely put you all in before showdown.

that's the most useful thing you'll get out of my article.

Originally Posted by Hyper

We need to bet an amount such that we can force our opponent into putting in the rest of his stack on later streets.

this is also a useful point, because some people bet without realizing there are more streets to play. this is the reason why everyone screws up on the turn so bad.

i had a word limit on my article of 1200, and i ended up with 1209. it was very difficult to explain everything in an interesting way.

Originally Posted by |~|ypermegachi

actually, the assignment was
"pick a magazine, and write an article for it"

so...i picked the 2+2 magazine.
and in my query letter (a letter to the editor advertising yourself and what you're going to write about), my prof replied "i look forward to this, maybe it can improve my game!"

and i was like....YES!!!

well, you got lucky with your professor, and prolly an easy A, if he sucks...lol.

and, i stand corrected about not "knowing your audience." it appears you would be on the appropriate levels of thinking with 2+2ers.

just trying to help...no worries.