Low Stakes Live Raise Sizing

Every table and casino has different player pools who raise differently. I've seen 1/3 games where people open raise to $20, while others open raise to $9. Often times when people play a game of calling stations, others suggest raising more and tightening up your range.

By doing this, does that make your range look a bit more polarized? Or is your balanced ranged kind of reduced, where you would have like a smaller VPIP/PFR?


Hope this question makes sense lol.

75% of the time if I raise, i'll raise to 7 in my 1/2NLHE game, and the other 25%of the time i'll raise to 12. I choose by looking at my watch and where the second hand is.

Where I play it seems like $15-18 is the typical raise, sometimes just to 10... $1/3

Of course raising a smaller % of your hands will polarize your range to an extent, assuming you're not literally randomly raising every 20th hand your dealt. Live games are interesting though, you can be playing a really solid game but give off the impression you're playing just as loosely as anyone else, a lot comes down to your demeanor. If you're sitting there wearing a hoodie, listening to music, not talking to anyone or making eye contact, you're going to likely come across as someone just there to make money/exploit the more recreational players. Make the games fun, talk to people, it makes it so much more enjoyable for yourself and the recreational players who you want to have fun regardless of whether they win or lose.

If you're engaging the other players, especially if they're recreational, they most likely aren't going to notice if you're playing 10% of your hands or 35%, just keep it fun.

As far as what % of your hands you actually should be playing, that all depends on you and the players at your table. If you notice someone playing super loose pre but playing extremely fit or fold post then get in there with them with a wide range of hands. If there's one of the aforementioned regs with the hoodie and headphones just grinding away playing a tough game, tighten your range considerably against that player. It's a tough question to answer that all comes down to specific table dynamics.

Styrofoam said:

75% of the time if I raise, i'll raise to 7 in my 1/2NLHE game, and the other 25%of the time i'll raise to 12. I choose by looking at my watch and where the second hand is.

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Can’t tell if you’re bluffing /trolling because your signature is a tell.... (that you’re trolling..)

alkshy said:

Of course raising a smaller % of your hands will polarize your range to an extent, assuming you're not literally randomly raising every 20th hand your dealt

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With live poker being much slower pace than online, if I were to tighten up my range, and end up being card dead, it may look like I’m not playing any hands at all. Do you ever feel this way sometimes and they think you’re the table NIT?

3betfish said:

With live poker being much slower pace than online, if I were to tighten up my range, and end up being card dead, it may look like I’m not playing any hands at all. Do you ever feel this way sometimes and they think you’re the table NIT?

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It's extremely rare that I get called a nit (at least to my face ) but I do tend to play a lot of hands so maybe I can't relate to you in the best way. The best advice I can give you is to have fun and not worry about it so much. If you're at a game with 4 players that just never fold pre and all of a sudden you raise and they all fold and that consistently happens then it may be time to seriously reevaluate your game and think about what you can do to at least give off the impression of not having AA every time you enter a pot. In my experience it's never like that though, either the table is loose enough that I can be tight and get action no matter what exact % of hands I'm playing or it's tight/good enough that I can play the game I'm most comfortable playing which is playing a lot of hands, especially in position and winning my share of hands post flop.


Another thing you might try, that I've occasionally found success with is try to build a game where it's acceptable to just open limp instead of raising. That might create a more favorable game for you in future situations where people are limping instead of raising and you can play more pots with recreational players where they have a better chance of making mistakes post flop, it can also be a way to cheaply build other players' impression of you as more recreational and more loose than you really are.