How much to bet?

Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 21 November 2008 / Leave a Comment

Every time you sit down at a poker table you will see people making different bet sizes. Working out what these bet sizes mean, and how much you should bet yourself, is crucial to poker success. Some players tend to raise different amounts with different hands, often raising small with weaker hands and more with strong hands.

Obviously, this playing style is dangerous for the player unless they are very good at mixing up their raise sizes enough for their holdings to not become transparent. Randomising your game in bet size terms is a difficult and time consuming thing to do (due to having to think carefully about your betting history on that table), but there is another way to randomise your game that is much simpler to do - especially when multi tabling online.

Instead of changing your bet sizes, you can change the ratio of hands you raise and make your standard open always the same. Instead of shifting between raise sizes of 2x to 5x of the big blind depending on the strength of your hand, try just raising 3x but do it with a few more junk hands than you were before. If instead of changing your bet size depending on your hand and position, you can simply standardise the bet size and change the hands you are raising in different positions, you still mix up your game while making your life much simpler. A good example of this would be to start raising the odd suited connector from early positions, thus making it hard for your opponents to know whether you have a monster or junk when you raise from early position - making their life much harder.

This not only holds true pre flop, but also on your later bet sizes. If you always make a standard percentage of the pot continuation bet (say between 50% and 75% of the pot), but do it both when you hit the flop and when you miss it, you make your game much harder to read. The great advantage of this technique is that you only have to think about the hand in question, not about the amounts you should be raising. This allows you to free up a lot of your mind and focus much more on the situations and people around you.

Always remember that if you are playing lots of tables it is crucial to be able streamline your game as much as possible. Live it is easy to have enough time to think about randomising your bet sizes (the great Dan Harrington wrote that he would often let the minute hand on his watch randomise his bet sizes on occasion when playing live), but online it is much harder. By randomising the hands you play instead of the amount you bet, you make your game much easier to play and think about - always a bonus when trying to stay on top of a lot of tables.

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