Mpethy, you assume balancing is necessary at 1/2 when in many cases it's not. Often you can get away with doing both, raising to 3.5x or whatever with suited connecters and raising to 6x or more with premiums.

Mpethy is right, you can't raise big and not think about your "other" range/table dynamics.

Its like those regs who raise to 35 in ep in a 2/5 game. Everyone knows the guy has aces.

I don't want to raise big with premiums. I might minraise from ep with AA. If I know that bet will get raise more often then not.

1/2 is a different beast, your more then likely to get a 20$ raise called by J9s. What I'm worried about is commitment issues postflop. Raising huge blindly will not define your villains ranges because they call with anything.

I'm in the camp of raising smaller in ep and bigger in LP.

I can vary my raise sizes and bet sizes with my hand strength without the fish realizing what I am doing the vast majority of the time.

And it's pretty easy to single out the thinking players who DO notice it because there are so few. At my average table, there are maybe 2 other players who aren't morons by our online standards. These are the guys that happen to be keeping track of pot size and aren't showing up at showdown with ridiculous hands. They stick out like a sore thumb.

The amount of times people have said "you probably have aces because you never play any hands" but call me anyway is very laughable. Hooray for East Coast poker?

And Midwest poker, west coast poker, down south poker and even Vegas poker. Me thinks the MGM isn't the same as it used to be? Friggin Mpethy ruined the MGM game.

Your wrong about vary raise size's and fish don't notice. They notice but don't know how to adjust to you.

Also, you have to realize in poker nobody believes you when you have a hand. That's why you can play only premiums and always get action. Its called playing with donks.

Not sure if you read the original post, but this whole thread started because of table dynamics. The post emphasized that if we are in EP with a hand that dominates peoples calling ranges and its a pretty decent hand like AQ (I wont call it a premium for Lido's sake even though AQs is in the top 10 hands) then there is value with raising more monies pre. This is not a "standard" for every table we play on.

In you "average" 1/2 game, the ones that we all talk about, if you raise to $10 you are get 3-5 callers, if you raise $16 you are getting 2-3 callers (and if we are getting like 4-7 callers with that raise, well my hand selection is going to change by a lot OOP). We are playing the same sized pot either way but its much easier against 2 players then it is against 4 players.

And that's why we raise more and there is no need for EP balance. They all put you on AK anyways, right?

I suppose I should comment on the topic of this thread. Erm...

This topic is no different than any other move you make in poker. Set a goal then make a move to achieve that goal based on the information you have.

AK in EP? You need that to be HU or 3 way. Use the information you have gained from watching the table to raise to a size that will be most likely to get that to happen. Sometimes $8 will do it, sometimes $20. Figure it out yourself.

Why are you bothering to argue about semantics?

Noticing and not doing anything = not noticing

Decide if you want to build a pot or thin the field. (factors like table dynamics, your image, how loose players still to act are, # of limper)

Once you have decided what you want, choose a raise size.

If you are concerned that $1/2 players are exploiting you based on your PFR size, don't worry, because by now you are on the table change list.

I want to believe (not that I want it) that someday in 1/2 we will get to a point that raising 3-4x and balancing in EP is the way the game will be played. But every time I find a new game around here with some new faces I tend more to believe that it probably won't happen in my life time.

I always go with 4x+1 for limpers, but if you are playing against a station who will call 13x with J6o, then by all means get it in there.

I hope not.

Raising large to commit your 100bb stack is very profitable at 1/2 games, and we should all be thankful for that. Turning your stack into a short stack, with the driver's seat, is about as easy as it gets vs fish.

Sure some people notice....they aren't your target for crying out loud. The players that don't notice or don't adjust correctly are your targets. You shouldn't be trying to beat every player at the table. You should target the bigger fish, adjust your game accordingly, and only readjust when an otherwise respectable player enters the pot with you.

Why everyone continues to make 1/2NL poker so complicated blows my mind. It's about disciplining yourself to play a +EV style vs the fish and dodge the others you don't have a huge edge on. Shaking things up for the sake of "poker skills" is -EV for 90% of us.

Ehh not to get off topic here but I think the same game 10 years from now is going to be quite a bit tougher. Just think about how easy the game was 10 years ago compared to now. 2002 was what, the Chris Moneymaker days? Way different game than it is today. What about 10 years prior to 2002, so 1992? Most people in the WSOP, the biggest and largest tournament there is, were loose passives and aggressive styles were taking down those titles. So 10 years from now, in the "information age"...that's going to be a whole new generation of internet wannabe pros. Half the table is going to know about range merging and 3 betting light and polarized ranges. Anyways just my 2 cents.

Still a stranger here, but I'd like to chime in. In the situation under discussion, I am in favor of the $16 raise, expecting the call by weaker in 1 or 2 spots.

What I have to add is something in the philosophy (if I can call it that) of varied play and balancing: When I first began to read about poker strat, there was a magic to the idea of optimal bluffing frequency, optimal % of the time to raise the max with AA vs. a smaller raise, or limping to disguise. I loved the idea of a player checking the second hand of a clock in order to correctly randomize his play.

But the paradox, of course, is that once you understand the mathematical concept of optimal play, you must next integrate that with situational play (table dynamics, really the heart of this thread, IMO). Maybe somewhere there are players with enough hands at tough enough tables with opponents that they know almost perfectly that the % breakdown of their actions in various textbook situations comes to resemble what the textbook prescribes.

But we beat our heads against a wall when we describe a situation to a high level of detail and then say, "In this situation, I want to raise to $16 in EP with AQ, 85% of the time." B/c once we've reached a high enough level of detail, we know the situation will never repeat itself exactly.

It is this paradox, where theoretical thinking meets decision-making in a concrete situation and the shapes are not perfectly congruent –*or even perfectly drawn, that makes me love poker.

I did read op, my point was plan for postflop play. Which I thought I was clearly saying.

Say I raise AQo to 20$ UTG if I get 5 callers if I don't hit I check. I'm fine with that, no problem.

Say I bet 35$UTG get 3 callers, I'm going to cbet almost 100%. I raised bigger, but my stack is in jeopardy. Which brings in my main focus commitment issues.

So its better to make your ep raise size smaller. My main opening size is 20$ in 2/5.

Lp totally different beast.

Edit:

Ill take 11$ raise over 16/20$ in a 1/2 game any day of the week.

Mpethy, I respect your opinion because it is well thought out and well expressed. I will say, though, that it doesn’t ring true in my experience. Many, many 1/2 games run daily in Las Vegas where players are nearly oblivious to previous bet sizing and where balancing is completely unnecessary. And if you happen to find yourself in one of the rare games where players are paying attention and making good adjustments just move to another table.

I’d argue that anyone spending much time worrying about balancing at 1/2 in Las Vegas is focusing on a minor issue and ignoring a major one: your table selection is bad.

Seriously? I'm playing against people who think big raises always mean big hands. The game is unwinnable because of all the defects. I'm giving up poker.

Some other thoughts in a similar thread I started

You are quite fortunate if players in your games will call 3BB with the same range as 10BB, but in most games in general, this is simply not the case.

Honestly it depends what players limped in, how many, and what sort of premium hand u have. A hand that is made like JJ+ or a non made hand like AQ/AK. the thing w the latter is that when we whiff the pot against multiple opponents then we have to c/f or bluff on boards that probably hit our opponents range a lot. So in circumstances where there are many players behind I can see an argument for just completing in the blinds or putting in a normal sized raise rather than an oversized one. With the made hands I like to put in a larger raise if my opponents are calling any size raise. Or if I want to narrow down the field. With nonmade hands and fewer opponents I don't mind the big raise and cbetting most boards with the exception of wet boards that we missed because we don't have to get through half the table with out cbet. Nobody notices ur sizing so don't worry about balanacing.

I don't want to overstate the degree of difficulty in 1/2 games in Vegas. They are pretty soft. However, I have not sat at a table this year at which I would characterize the majority of players as completely oblivious to variations in bet size.

I have hundreds of hours at the MGM and the v, and I have also played at aria, Wynn, trop, ph, and bellagio. The games are essentially the same all up and down the strip. The average open raise size has come down to 4 or 5 bb, raises bigger than that stick out like a sore thumb and are far more likely to fold around than a smaller size.

It is true that there are usually multiple weak players at the table, and that some of them are loose passive. But I would estimate that all up and down the strip now, the average 1/2 table composition contains at most three loose passive fish who you can routinely take to value town with top pair top kicker. I am 100% certain that at my tables this year, in all hands I have seen played, that top pair top kicker loses money in hands that are played for three streets of value.

To be candid, I think there is a lot of ego involved in this discussion. I don't say that lightly. I say that because in my coaching, I have coached a lot superb players who played mid to high stakes. By the time they got to me, they had mastered the fundamentals and most advanced concepts andvwere looking for comparatively small leaks. In nearly every instance, what I found in their databases was that their biggest remaining leak was underestimating the bad players at the table. They would say, "oh, this guy is a fish, he will call with third pair," or whatever, and then, strangely, the fish in their database actually only ever called with monsters. What I learned from studying the play of all those expert players was that their egos sometimes colored their perceptions of what the weaker players would do.

It is the dame sort of thinking I see in this thread. You think you can raise to $16 with AQ, flop an ace, and take some loose passive to valuetown who called you with A3 and will put his whole stack in. Anybody who thinks this sort of thing happens anywhere on the Vegas strip often enough to be considered anything other than a fluke us completely delusional.

It DOES HAPPEN. I'm not saying it doesn't. What I am saying is that if you come to the games I play in and play a strategy designed to exploit the occasional player whose stack you will get in that circumstance, you're going to be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Now, it could very well be that the games here in Vegas are tougher than elsewhere. You guys COULD be playing in games so soft that you are the only player at the table capable of figuring out that big raise equals big hand and small raise equals medium hand. Our games could be that different. I happen to think, though, that our disagreement is one of perception. That we are playing players of comparable skills and tendencies, and describing them differently.

This is no accident. I have way more respect for most fishy ayers than any other comparably experienced player who has not learned it while going through his database with me. The reason I have this respect for those players is because I have come to understand that most people we call fish are:

A. Smart people;
B. Very often smarter than us;
C. Who KNOW that they are making mistakes, and can usually tell you exactly what mistakes they are making;
D. Who purposely make those mistakes in small pots;
E. Because they have different goals than 2+2ers; and
F. Whose quality of play tends to vary directly in proportion to the size of the pot.

<shrug> I don't expect you guys to believe me, I guess (though I hoped) The only people I have ever been able to convince that their biggest leak is underestimating fish are the players I have been able to show it to in their database.

I think your statements do hold some merit and the primary point in the discussion is table dynamics. It very well could be that the tables in Vegas are like that now. I semi noticed it trending that way on a few of my tables last time, but I moved when that was the case.

IMHO I truly do not think we are discussing the same player with different words, at least in my case. I can honestly say that because like I said earlier, the first thing I do when I sit down is watch to see what the opening raise sizes are. When I go to my casino on average its 6-7x, sometimes more, and very rarely less. I play however the table is comfortable playing. In my home game raise sizes are a bit more normal but its also full of thinking players. Casino though... Not so much. I can't even count the times when nit tight old man UTG raises to 18 and gets 4-5 callers, its just too many times to count. In my other home game... Same thing. Hand I played the other night- QQ in the CO. 4 limpers to me... I make it $24 to go... Every single one of them call. Flop is A high and A9 and another raggy ace go to battle. I can't speak for everyone else posting and their games, but I see this stuff a ton.

I play in Vegas frequently with some of the best online regs who had to come to Vegas after BF to grind live low stakes. NONE of them think there is any merit in obvious variations in bet sizing. They all employ the same strategy I employ--they vary their opening range based on table conditions, but their open raises are all roughly the same size.

Don't get me wrong, I will varymy EP raise sizes. If my range at a table is fairly tight, say, AQ+ and 66+, I will go to $7 or 8 with my implied odds hands, and $9 or $10 with my hands that flop top pair. Or if my range is really loose, say, 76s+ and 22+, I might go $6 with the bottom and $8 with the top.

But to think nobody is going to notice that I raised 22 to $7 five hands ago and now I am making it $16 is kind of ridiculous.

As you should know from all isn't posts to date in this thread, I can't answer this question. I have never played at a table where all of the players behind me had the same tendency. Say there are two players behind me in the hijack and the button. If the player on the button is loose passive and the player on the hijack is a tight aggressive player, my raise size will be bigger than if the loose passive is in the hijack and the tag is on the button. You see why I do it that way? If the loose passive is in position to increase the tag's implied odds in a call, then I am more likely to be in a multiway pot with a solid tag having the best position. In such a bad case, I want the pot to be a small fraction of the remaining stacks do I can use my post flip skill to maximize my winnings against the loose passive, and minimize my losses to the tag. whereas if the Tag is in the hijack, I can make my raise bigger, making his IO less attractive, secure in the knowledge that the loose passive will still call with dominated hands.

But now look what happens if the solid tag is in the hijack and the loose passive is on the button. I can't make my raises $7 with medium strength hands and $16 with premiums, because now I am risking the tag calling all my small raises to bet me off medium showdown value, or even potentially 3 betting me light. So even though I want to raise bigger to play HU. Against the LP OTB, I can't make it so obvious that I expose my strategy to exploitation by the solid tag.

So the bottom line is that raise sizes relate to ranges, and both of those relate to the tendencies and arrangement of the players yet to act. It's all a balancing act and a tradeoff. But I can't think of any table conditions I have seen where raising premiums to $16 is the best strategy to employ. I'm not sure I have ever played at a table where that would be the best strategy. Maybe once or twice, but I doubt it.

I agree with mpethy comments. It is not just in LV, the CT room conditions are the same as mpethy describes. The era that people stacked off 100BB lightly is over. There are several reasons in my mind.

The biggest reason is the era of cheap money is gone for now. I know tourism is down in LV, but even in CT the casinos are seeing the same amount of people, but they are gambling less money. The person who used to drop 3 100BB buy ins a night is now either cutting down to 1 or 2 BI of 100BB or is buying in for 50BB instead. Even if they have no clue about relative hand strength, the economics are pushing them to risk less unless they have the nuts because they still want to gamble just as long.

Beyond that, the poker boom is over. People aren't coming into a poker room after just watching Norman Chad on TV without even understanding that the effective stacks were 20BB. The "fish" have some experience playing cash.

It doesn't mean that 1/2 is no longer beatable for decent cash. It is. However, if your game consisted of simply sitting back, waiting to hit a monster and get paid off by someone overvaluing AA, you're not going to profitable anymore.