I not sure why you do not like the preflop sizing. Could you explain a little more on this?
Surely if the hand is that strong I want more chips in the middle. Especially as you say, this is too strong to fold, I want to discourage getting more than one caller. This is my reasoning for bigger size.
Thanks,
Big Red
When we start deviating away from normal bet sizing we are basically flipping our hand strength face up. If your normal sizing has been 2.5 for the past 40 hands and all of a sudden I see you go 3.5 - I'm going to tighten my range and fold out much more than I originally would. When you make bet sizes relative to the strength of your hand - it makes you exploitable in a sense that good players will not give you action and tho you will win the blinds and antes - you will not be winning bigger pots than that too often and thus you are not accumulating chips.
Preflop raise sizes should be based upon stack depths and should not be changed with hand strengths. If we are raising the same amount with 56s as we are with AA our opponents will never honestly know how strong we are preflop.
These are my own personal preferences for preflop raise sizings so take them with a grain of salt for what they are.
Stack depth -- raise sizing
250bb+ -- 4x
100-200bb -- 3x - 3.5x
50-100bb -- 2.5x
50bb or less -- 2.1x or 2.2x depending on ante sizing.
As I eluded to earlier - keeping our pfr sizing consistent allows us to open our entire range without opponents being aware which portion we are opening - so without villans knowing how strong our hand is, we become much less exploitable.
The second portion of proper bet sizing is that when we get squeezed, 3bet and 4bet - and we have to fold we simply lose less. If we never change and go 3x all game long - well it hurts us alot to 3x off of 20bb and then have to fold...by doing that we raise/fold off roughly 16% of our stack and thats not good. We can't always avoid these spots where we get squeezed and have to fold - but we can minimize the damage with proper bet sizing.
Also as I talked about earlier - when we do raise bigger than usual out of the blue - good players are going to fold some hands preflop they may play against us and will only start calling us with the top of their ranges - so while thinking we are making the correct play here, building a bigger pot with a strong hand - we are forcing our good opponents to only call us with their strongest hands - so we really don't get value from much and we force ourselves to play the strongest parts of their range...this is NEVER going to be the ideal situation.
Anyhow, by raising bigger than normal preflop, you will fold out the bottom parts of our good opponents ranges forcing yourself to play vs the top of their range much more often - and because of this they are going to fold preflop much more often - and because of that increased preflop fold we win a much smaller pot of roughly 2.5bb with antes in play - when we could raise normally preflop - get called, see a flop, cbet and take it down 65-70% of the time to win a 6bb pot.
I hope this is making sense to you. Realize that bad villans will never change and thats why they are bad at the game - so don't focus on what.they do. You want to beat the guys who are good at this game so you can become better than them. So remember, bad players will always make poor choices.
Meanwhile, the good opponents will exploit you when you are changing bet sizing preflop - you will take down many more small pots than you will larger pots and when you do see flops you will most likely be playing the best (top) parts of your villans ranges. Once again - in this specific hand example, even with proper sizing there is no way you dont call off the shove here - your stack is too short and your hand is too strong. Running into an overpair is simply a cooler.
As a final note to this response - we want to have a good solid foundation to our strategy in this game. Understanding table position, preflop ranges and bet sizing is a big portion of this - if you can button these areas up you will surely see some better results and be able to add more to your game.
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