NLHE Theory + Practice: Week 4

Im confused about your version of calculating a good bluff size and JKDS/Gizomos. I feel like the way I did it before is similar to the way you did it, Carroters, where because you expect him to fold 51% of the time, your bluff size should be 51% or less of pot.

With JKDS's example, lets say he folds exactly 50% of the time, then for every 2 hands you win 1 and you lose 1. So you can bluff bet 1 full pot or less.

So the real questions is, what am I missing?


Also, why did you remove FD from his post-flop range? If you tag his as fairly loose but dont know much post flop would it be wrong to assume he was chasing unprofitably with KcQc?

Yeah I could for sure include a few combos of flush draws but then i haven't included QQ which I think could sure be in there too, so it probably evens out. Besides I'm ahead of flush draws so assuming he lets me showdown my pair when he misses they could even make this more +EV.

These two examples you are confusing are essentially the same thing. Just use that formula I used to work out how often your bet size requires him to fold in order for it to be +EV (assuming you have no pot equity that is, obviously the more pot equity you have, the less fold equity you need so this number will be less than shown by the initial calculation) Then compare this with how often you think he does fold based on analysing his range and how he plays it. Tweak the 2 until you've got the lowest bet that folds out enough of his range to be the most +EV size.

You obviously don't do this at the tables or anything, you're doing these exercises to get a really good feel for how likely a bet is to be +EV. I didn't get my bet size exactly right because that's pretty hard and takes a ton of practice.

Originally Posted by fatguy'06

Im confused about your version of calculating a good bluff size and JKDS/Gizomos. I feel like the way I did it before is similar to the way you did it, Carroters, where because you expect him to fold 51% of the time, your bluff size should be 51% or less of pot.

With JKDS's example, lets say he folds exactly 50% of the time, then for every 2 hands you win 1 and you lose 1. So you can bluff bet 1 full pot or less.

So the real questions is, what am I missing?

The break-even bluff size works out to be Pot*(% fold) / (% call). For ~50% calling range, that works out to be a PSB. In your example, you expected the villain to fold 75% of his hands, giving you a BE bluff size of 3 times pot.

But remember -- that's the break-even point. You still want your bet to be as small as possible that still gets the job done, to maximize the profitability of the bluff.