These are all great questions, I hope I can give these answers justice. these are of course my theories and not the end all be all of game theory or anything. I'm still learning and improving just like anyone else with a long way to go
Mbrenneman0
On the flop you said the odds are not favorable to call, what about implied odds should we hit our hand?
so he's giving us practically 1:2 odds, in order for this to be favorable, to continue, we need 1:4 odds. that means on average we need to be able to extract another 2k worth of value on on turn and river and also not get hit with any redraws to a better hand he might have. does he always continue on a 7 or 2 turn? what if he checks back turn and folds to a river bet? this is extremely thin. and we probably do not have the implied odds to continue. obviously in this particular hand he does continue, but we cannot be results oriented and assume he always does continue. maybe he only continues here because of the heart or the jack that he thinks is in your range and could get value from... we dont know
Also you say timing tells are irrelevant, would you not consider the instabet to be either a bluff or nutted? Wouldn't middling hands need time to think about what to do more?
keyword "hardly" relevant i believe was my choice of words, not irrelevant. yes, sometimes, timing tells are very useful. in this case, we already can range him pretty well without the timing tell, and also we only have 20 minutes worth of information on him. you cant possibly have an accurate read on the guy in roughly 10 hands to be able to tell if an instabet is truely nutted or if he just overvalues certain hands. of course the nuts would be AA, the second nuts AJ, the 3rd JJ, and the fourth would be KhQh, but does he never overvalue 3 of a kind aces, which is nowhere near the nuts, to instabet here? some players dont think about relative hand strength and only think about absolute hand strength, to a player that only considers absolute hand strength, 3 of a kind aces might as well be the nuts. we simply do not have enough information on the player to adjust the range we can already give him based on this.
As far as range construction and balancing, you say you construct a range and stick to it. You never adjust that range based on the players at your table? Do you always raise a hand that's in your raising range Everytime you see it? I may have said it poorly or confusing, what I was saying is I will throw hands like that in from time to time. But not necessarily raise it Everytime I get it. My theory on that may be wrong, but I'm of the impression that should I look left and see someone ready to raise I can fold, or at a particularly tough table I can fold certain hands in ranges as well.
My opening range stays fairly static. I usually adjust my calling range and 3bet range based on the other players but for the most part, open raising range doesnt have much need for adjustment, although if i do adjust my open raising range, its going to be in late position (HJ or later) theres not as much room to adjust UTG because you should already be playing tight UTG. I am a loose aggressive player but my EP opening range is 22+ / A2s+ / AJo+ / KTs+ / KJo+ / QTs+ / QJo / JTs / T9s
that is a range that is already balanced with strong hands and speculative hands. kerp in mind that this is considered a very loose UTG range, especially my low pocket pairs and A2s, but these are the hands that being balance to my strong hands. playing too many speculative hands means that there are more speculative hands in your range than value hands and that makes it unbalanced. additionally, my speculative hands are still very strong with big potential.
honestly though I would recommend playing tighter UTG until you know you are better at postflop.
ideally, I should already have a plan for postflop with each part of my range, although personally, I need to spend more time in the lab working out those plans. example, low pocket pairs, im looking for sets, or boards that I can bluff well on orA2s Im looking for NFD and wheel draws
also, if you do adjust your range, you want to adjust opposite to your table. if theyre playing extremely loose, tighten up, if they are extremely tight, open up. but your adjustments to your UTG range will be much smaller adjustments than to your BTN or HJ range.
Last question is about raise sizing, do you ever increase your standard raise sizing? Like in this case, this size had been my go to as where the table was 3.75-4, I went a little bigger. Part of my thinking on that is to look fishy and to build bigger pots.
I appreciate your well thought out responses and look forward to what your thoughts are on these questions.
I do sometimes but rarely, and especially not with speculative hands. usially when I do its with a specific purpose and not to get more respect but if I have a specific read on the table dynamic which usually involves having more than one tournament of history with several of the players to act behind me. another problem with increasing your raise size preflop, especially on speculative hands that i didnt really go over that i should have is that it reduces SPR postflop which reduces implied odds and costs a larger portion of your stack on a speculation.