For years I have followed a popular NLplayer called BlackRain79, he has always taught to try to extract the max value from the weaker players at the micros by making large bets, but when I watch other players videos these days I constantly see them using the 1/3 pot betsize.

Now I understand the point in it when it is a dry board since villain cant have much to call with, but on a board which is somewhat wet I dont understand this. Here is an example I saw of a "pro player" on youtube:



Here it is possible that villain could have flush draws, straight draws,or just a king with weaker kicker, in this situation for example if he has a flush draw he will call regardless of whether we bet 33% pot or 75% pot, therefore why would you bet any less? I was always taught to bet large here to extract max value, so i dont understand the point in charging the customer as little as possible for their draws.

Thanks for any insight!

it's an induce
in the micros you won't get raised enough so there's no point

GTO means game theory optimal, not optimal in general. I am quite certain that the 1/3 pot sizing is in line with GTO. It may well be true that you can profit more by a different sizing. The risk is that a larger sizing can be exploited by good players whereas the GTO sizing (by the definition of GTO) cannot. If you are playing micro stakes games, you likely will not be playing against opponents who will exploit your non-GTO sizing (or even realize that it can be exploited), so by all means go ahead and bet larger to extract more value.

If you are betting larger on flops you hit, you also should be betting larger when you miss. Good players will notice if you change cbet sizings. If you are betting larger, good players can exploit you by continuing with a tighter range and/or raising your cbet more often. If your actual opponents are not going to make these adjustments then the larger sizing should work

thanks, that was a good explanation!

First off, many sizings and strategies are viable, but the key thing to note is that sizings will directly influence frequencies. As sizing decreases you typically can increase your frequency. You can also think of it as your sizing goes down you're essentially widening your value range--this incorporates more value hands and also more bluffs/equity denial type hands. As your bet sizing also decreases your opponent also needs to call and raise more which people don't typically do very well.

In a situation where you're HU and against a player that called either out of the big blind or vs a 3b in the vast majority of spots all your hands can bet and be +EV. In equilibrium the opponent is supposed to be constructing his range vs. your bet such that your weaker hands have equal EV to checking behind which usually involves a good amount of calling and a good amount of raising. As the opponent it's usually difficult for most players to properly construct their raise and calling ranges in a way that makes that true. What ends up happening is that small bets are usually either ~same ev as check back or even higher and it results in a strategy that is:

1. extremely easy to implement
2. kinda hard to play against for most players

In some spots it will give up EV, but that is a sacrifice a lot of players are willing to make in order to have a relatively simple strategy. As long as players implement larger sizings for turns/rivers after going small on the flop, the EV loss usually isn't significant even if the opponent perfectly exploits it (which they don't).

That being said it doesn't necessarily mean a larger sizing isn't higher EV, especially against a whale/fish, or even vs. a regular player for that matter. It just ends up being a strategy that is very easy to implement and relatively hard to play against.

You can watch a video Keuwai created here about MDF which sort of explains part of this concept.



To go significantly more into detail and provide you with an example, let's use the one in your screenshot. UTG rfi and BB defend, flop comes a two toned K87 board.

Let's run two sims:

1. Sim where IP can bet a variety of different sizings on the flop (30, 75, 125)

2. Sim where IP can only bet 30% sizing

3. Sim where IP can only bet 30% sizing and does so with his entire range at 100% frequency

When we run the three sims lets compare a few things:

a. Frequency of betting between (1.) and (2.)

b. EV between (1.) and (2.) and (3.)

c. highest EV response from OOP when doing (3.) and then sort of decide if the player base is doing that

For (a.) when we're comparing the frequency between (1.) and (2.), the betting frequency should always increase as we decrease the allowed sizings.

For (b.) the EV should always decrease or remain the same when we decrease the number of allowed actions

For (c.) if we conclude that the average player base will overfold and underraise then it's likely we will over realize our equity and our EV is likely higher than what is shown. This doesn't necessarily mean this strategy is better or anything, it's just that I want to show that playing against the small bet is actually kind of difficult to do for most players as it involves defending a wide range of hands and raising quite often.

Here is sim for settings for (1.) and (2.). I've kept everything the same except made the allowed flop cbet sizings for IP limited in the (2.) to only 30%.





Here is the IP strategy after OOP checks range on the flop for (1.) and (2.) respectively.





So for (a.) if we compare the frequencies of betting between (1.) and (2.) you'll see the overall betting frequency of IP with these constraints are ~71% and 76%, so a modest increase.

So for (b.) let's compare the EV's between strategies (1.) and (2.)

The EV of (1.) = 35.317 chips
The EV of (2.) = 35.316 chips

Basically, it's the same EV for a slightly easier strategy to implement-- one sizing vs. three sizings. Okay, let's simplify further and run another sim where we just bet 30% with entire range and allow the OOP player to play the maximally exploitative line and we'll call this sim (3.).

The EV of (3.) = 35.160 chips

This is a loss of ~0.16 chips to simplify our flop strategy down from having three different sizings, to just ranging for a small sizing. This captures 99.5% of the EV compared to the more strategically complicated strategy, so this simplification is very solid compared to the loss in theoretical EV.

This brings us to analyze (c.). Let's just take a look at the optimal response from OOP vs. the small sizing:



This has the OOP player raising quite large 20% of the time and only folding ~27% of the time. These frequency of the raising and calling are both higher compared to the equilibrium strategy of when the IP player has check backs -- which should make sense. Implementing a very high call and raise strategy is difficult and often times even for good players if they do well on this node they still play extremely bad on turn nodes where their range is still wide, so even if they do somehow manage to capture this extra 0.16 chips by theoretically playing the flop well, it's usually just immediately lost on future streets.

Basically what I'm saying is that IP simplifying to a very easy to implement strategy that loses very little EV in theory, and usually none at all in practice *for a large number of board textures*. There are still definitely board textures and situations in which the IP *should not* simplify to just betting range for a small sizing and these would be:

1. various board textures (not going to go into this)

2. at higher SPRs (i.e. as stack depth increases lower flop sizings lose more and more EV as IP will have a harder time getting in stacks with their best hands which is where a lot of EV is derived)

3. as an exploit ---> as you alluded to in your OP, it may very well be the case that simply utilizing a larger sizing with better hands vs. weaker players is simply higher EV.

To go into even more depth you can take a look at the following thread where I give a spreadsheet of the EV's as a function of board texture between the strategies (1.) and (3.):

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...27/?highlight=

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gqs/edit#gid=0

You can download and use the spreadsheet to see which boards would theoretically lose the most EV compared as a function of board texture when simplifying between strategies (1.) and (3.) for these constraints.

Thanks Brokenstars for the very high quality post!

btw the dry board = not much to call with is not really true. Because if the board misses both players, high cards become similar equity to pairs on other boards.

The general idea is correct in your OP, a lot of hands want to bet bigger on wetter boards to fold out gutshots and lower the EV of stronger draws. People like to use 1/3 because it's easy to implement and not a big EV loss.

What i wanna know is what's the point of the 1/100th pot bet. Back in my 2nl days people would literally bet 2 cents into a 2 dollar pot

Believe or not there's still a point for that

An infinitely small bet OOP is just checking. An infinitely small bet IP reopens the action to your opponent. So these ultra-small 1%-10% bets can sometimes be justified out of position to push the value of your equity, but rarely IP.

The basic thing that you need to understand is that every single hand category has an amount of money it wants to get into the pot before the hand is shown down. For some it's 0 for others it's everything or any number in between. The strongest hands want to get a lot of money in the pot. At equilibrium they can achieve this in multiple ways. They can bet big themselves, they can check to raise, they can check to face overbet probes, they can bet small to face raises. All options are viable at equilibrium because no one line is too strong or too weak, thus there (usually) isn't a massive incentive in picking any one action with the strongest hands. The equilibrium is such that all lines allow for building approximately the same final pot size.

However what happens if you are facing weaker passive players? They won't raise if you bet small. They won't overbet if you check. So then the only way you can get the size of the pot to be what your hand wants to be is to build the pot yourself. Your only option then is to bet big. But if they don't raise enough it also means that you can bet small with hands that only want to put a tiny bit of money in the pot, because you won't fear getting punished.

So what are we learning here actually? That the more your opponents neglect certain strategic options the more face up you can be with your strategy and the more you can dictate what the size of the pot will be to suit your exact hand. People who bet 1/3rd with strong hands vs weak players don't have a deep grasp of theory, they just follow trends.

By using the same sizing you keep your opponents guessing as to if you hit or missed allowing them to make more mistakes, and also you get to enjoy the folding power of the c-bet. 1/3 Pot is not super expensive, so it's a good sizing that can be used in both scenarios of hitting or missing. You also have to remember your opponents will miss 2/3 of the time. The video guy was holding the 4th nuts (KK then 88, then 77 then KA. 88s possibly would of 3bet pre, 77s may set mine the flop depending on the villain). 1/3 is good enough where the villian may call their draw, and then you can raise higher on the turn accordingly vs if the guy beat all of a sudden 1/2 pot when he usually does 1/3 which would make it super easy for villian not to want to continue with worse hands like 8x, 7x, Kx, Ax, 56, 45, JT, JQ, and suited spades all of which we are a favorite against.

You definitely don't want to use the same sizing constantly. The situation dictates the sizing.

While yes, you don't want to be face up and betting big on nut hands and small on others........but you don't want to be say betting 1/3 or 3/4 pot every time across the board.


And you should be basing it off position, board texture, and how that board connects with your and V's range.


For example:


You open AK utg and get called by the BB

Flop is 962r

or

Flop is K89sss

or

Flop is K72r


You don't want to be betting the exact same size with AK on all three boards.

Now, you'll want to bet the same size on *each* board with your entire UTG range. Say board 1 is a check, board 2 is 2/3, and board 3 is a 1/3 bet...

You want to keep that same sizing on each board for your entire UTG range. Say board 1 is a check, you will be checking with AA as well as 99, to go along with AK.



But, to bet all three boards with the same sizing, would be a fairly large error.

For the OP, 1/3 sizing is very good in certain situations. There's many to discuss, but for example:


Say you open in UTG with KQ and you get called by the BB.

Flop is A J 3r


This flop is fairly dry and hits your utg range pretty well.


If the BB missed, he will fold to any bet most of the time. So, a 1/3 and 2/3 bet are basically the same as far as getting a fold.


So, you can bet 1/3 and get the fold most of the time. But when BB decides to float or has connected, its only 1/3. If you were betting 2/3, you would still get the same folds, but when he calls it will cost you more.

This also allows you to profitably cbet more dry flops that you miss, but are good for your range. Since you lose less when you get called.