Bet sizing and table conditions

No Limit Holdem / Marcus Bateman / 08 December 2009 / Leave a Comment

Opening bet sizes have a huge amount to do with the table dynamic that you are currently dealing with, and thinking about how the table is playing is crucial to making the best play in terms of bet sizing. Poker is a game where many specific plays are good or bad depending purely on the conditions around you, and nowhere is this more true than bet sizing.

Imagine for a second that we have two totally different table conditions to compare. On the first table, no matter what bet size you make, you get called by at least one person 99% of the time. On the second table, no matter what your bet size, 99% of the time everyone folds and you win the blinds.

The optimal strategy for each of these tables could not be further apart. On the table where everyone habitually folds, you want to just open every hand for a minimum raise. As they are folding 99% of the time, you pick up the blinds all the time, do not risk anymore than necessary the 1% of the time that they do play back, and generally make a fortune picking up the blinds constantly.

On the second table, your strategy is radically different. Here you just sit back, wait until you have a big hand, and go all in. As you get called 99% of the time by someone, you can simply run off your big hands against weak ones in monster pots and win all the money quite quickly.

Obviously no poker games actually run like this, but the lessons we learn from these two extremes can help us when trying to establish the correct strategy depending on how the table is playing. On overly tight tables, raises size should be lowered, while your raising frequency should be increased. This will enable you to pick up more than your fair share of blinds, and lose less on the odd occasion when you are played back at.

In overly loose games, you are better off increasing your bet size, and lowering the frequency of your raises. As so many players are getting involved in each hand, you are much better off trying to pick up big hands, make large squeeze raises, and either pick up all the dead money in the pot there and then, or play big hands in big pots against other players.

One of the things that makes no limit games so skilled is picking up on nuances of it such as these. The ability to control how much you bet adds a whole extra layer to the game which can enable the skilled player to increase their edge substantially. Think carefully about the table dynamic when considering raise sizes - it may be that you are making a key mistake in how much you are betting.

Bet Sizing Heads Up - John Tabatabai
Don't Get Sloppy About Your Bet Sizing Live - Marcus Bateman