The lesson about sizing bluffs learned from No-limit Hold’em - Theory and Practise is that we should bet enough to “get the job done” but not much more. In theory, I could end this post on sizing bluffs on that note, because there really isn’t that much more to say. If you decide to bluff, make a bet that’s big enough, but not too big. For instance, if I want to bet into an opponent who will fold everything but the nuts to a bet that’s at least half the pot, then clearly betting more than just a little over half the pot is just wasting money. Every dollar that goes in over that ideal amount is a loss, of varying degrees.

Finally, the third and final post on sizing your bets to avoid getting yourself in a sticky situation with your next decision. This time, we look at river play - an area where most people seem to struggle badly. The balance between value bets and avoiding checkraises is not as delicate as it may seem, if you make sure your bet is a good size for what you’re trying to achieve. Most people’s problem seem to come from not really thinking through what they want with their bet before they make it.

Somewhat belatedly, I give you the second of three examples on sizing bets or raises in a way to make the potential decision on whether or not to fold to a re-raise easy. The belatedness of this post has to do with planning and executing a close friend’s bachelor party (or stag party, if you prefer) which took place last night. Great fun, but this post isn’t about men drinking beer and bonding in a sauna.

The main consideration when deciding on the size of a bet is the effective stack. With very deep stacks, the preflop raise decides how big the pot will (or can) eventually become. With very small stacks, you must instead focus on avoiding the trap of being committed with a hand that you don’t want to continue with. Today’s example illustrates the importance of planning the future betting already preflop:

I ended the first post with the teaser of this post being about “sizing your bets and raises in a way that makes folding to a re-raise much easier.” This is only half the truth, really. I should have said, “sizing your bets and raises in a way that makes the decision of whether or not to fold to a re-raise much easier.”

No-limit, by and large, is centered around the big bluff. “Moving In.” “Pushing.” “Shoving.” “Going all-in.” It’s centered around it in the sense that the threat of the all-in bluff looms as a possibility at all times when you play no-limit. That threat, for instance, is what causes people to check behind on the river with decent hands because they fear their opponent might check/raise all-in, leaving them with a horribly difficult decision. So instead, they save (or lose?) a few bucks and just check.

There something that I feel I should add to the last post, for clarification, before I move on to Part II (sizing bets to avoid being bluffed).

It’s the idea behind “big hands, big pots” which may not be obvious to everyone. If I have AK and the flop is A-9-5 and there’s one other guy in the pot with me, why does his hand suddenly get much better if we go all-in? His cards can’t change, so how can the size of the pot change how likely I am to win? This is not a terribly difficult concept, but it’s important enough to warrant a separate explanation.

This blog hasn’t been strategy-oriented for quite awhile, which was a direct consequence of me realizing that there was a lot of better strategy content out there on the web than what I, a small stakes hangaround, could offer. However, there are a few things to be said about that, and they are

* my strategy views aren’t “bad.” I’m not Ed Miller, but I do occasionally think something through and can make pretty coherent arguments for them. Or so I’d like to think.
* I like to keep book on poker theory “discoveries” I make, as it helps me with my learning process, and
* perhaps people like occasionally getting tips and pointers from someone who plays at their own level.

ChuckTs - who I just noticed is approaching 9k posts, which is pretty sick - had done a very good job of explaining pot control in NL, and with examples.

Last year, I spent a lot of time on the road (or, rather, in the air) travelling mostly to Beijing. Most of these (business) trips, I went on my own and therefore spent some time in the hotel room playing online poker. Not having access to PokerTracker and my notes (as I didn’t have that on my work laptop) meant that I was playing “blind” versus my opponents. Since I was going to play blind anyway, I figured I might as well play a style of game that I didn’t usually engage in, so I started fiddling with NL cash games, and intended to write about what I perceived the differences to be. As I stopped travelling to Asia, the experiment “ran out in the sand” (do you have that expression in English? I’m sure you know what I mean, anyway) and this blog was left with just a few posts on the topic.

I play 6-max, and the play tends to be very loose, varying from extremely passive most of the time to maniacally aggressive the rest of the time. I do see tighter tables occasionally, but they’re a rarity and I like to avoid them. In a nutshell, I’m either hammering at pots with my big pairs and big connectors, or I’m getting in cheap with smaller pairs or smaller connectors to try and flop a monster and win a big pot. I’m learning to outplay certain opponent profiles with postflop play, but in general keeping it simple and sticking to a very straightforward TAG style nets a nice profit.

Well once again I apologize to all (or any, rather) of my readers for not updating my half of the blog for so long. Things in my personal life have been all over the place, and I haven’t had much to write about up until recently. Me and my would-be roommate ended up having a lot more trouble finding jobs than we’d originally thought, and obviously haven’t gotten an apartment yet with no income to pay the bills. We ended up getting some help at a youth employment center, and can hopefully have an apartment and a place by January, if not sooner. On top of all this, I ended up missing some classes in my college course and have been viciously trying to catch up with what I missed.