Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 23 April 2009 / Leave a comment

One of the classic mistakes I regularly see players make live is to change their bet sizes dependent not on what they feel is the correct bet amount, but on the chips available in front of them.

If making the transition to live poker think about how much you want to bet based on the players and the pot size - not on the chips in front of you.

Obviously this never comes up online, where you can simply type in whatever amount you want to bet, but when playing live different players will usually have different chip sizes depending on their playing style.

Looser players will have lots more of the smaller ante chips (due to picking up many more pots than tighter players) and tight players will have more high denomination chips (due to playing big bet poker with their strong hands).

This is also a useful point to think about if you get moved to a new table - what percentage of a certain type of chip a player has can give a great deal of information about their playing history.

As a result of these effects, often a player will not have change available for the exact bet amount they want to make, and this can often lead to them just throwing in a higher denomination chip which can frequently cause problems.

Firstly, this can often scare away weak players who may have called a small value bet but will not want to call a large portion of their stack; and secondly, can make the player vulnerable from a big play from someone behind them with a big hand. Neither of these results is good, and with the huge importance of good bet sizing in no limit and pot limit games, letting a leak like this affect your play can have very serious consequences.

Never be ashamed to ask for change if you feel you want to make a bet size that the chips in front of you will not allow. Letting people draw cheaply or making bad overbets at the wrong time can be very expensive, and doing it simply because of laziness is never going to be a good idea.

If making the transition to live poker think about how much you want to bet based on the players and the pot size - not on the chips in front of you.

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