If this has been adequately covered my apologies please direct me to an applicable thread.

Do you (and how often) adjust your bet sizes Preflop to avoid rake?

For example, we are in BB at 1/2 and there is one limp and rest fold to us. Let's say we feel the proper bet is 15, but we instead raise to 14 so we only lose $2 instead of $3 ($14×2+1=29) if we take it on the flop.

Is this +EV in the long run?

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Never even think about rake. Where I play rake caps at 5+1, and it is extremely common for it to cap out. No point in worrying about it. If you aren't beating the rake at 1/2, then you aren't beating the field and you have bigger things to worry about.

Rake matters and it's good to think about it. However, how I adjust is not by sizing smaller.

Instead I believe that what we should do is avoid marginal hands preflop and razor thin actions postflop. If our EV for a given action is like ~$5 and pot rake is $7, well we should probably try to avoid doing that in the first place.

Obviously it's much harder to quantify what's marginal live vs. online. But thinking about it is a valid approach to the game.

I completely understand what you're saying, however, I feel that the effects would be quite miniscule, since:
1) You will often get multiple callers which will ruin your sizing plan.
2) You will often have to play more streets and the pot will end up passing the rake cap anyway.
3) The dealer will often f**k up and take $3 rake out of a $29 pot anyway.

The best thing you can do to adjust to the rake structure in your room is to try to take down the pot preflop as often as possible. This means you should be looking to either 3bet or fold marginal hands, as opposed to flat calling them.

Yes I adapt to the rake.

Folds to me on button I will raise to $8 or $9 depending on which blind is more likely to call.

Keep the pot under $20 here and save $2 at most rooms.


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Some players have higher expectations of how much a blind will call.

And some players don't like being sucked out on by Villains who "only have to call six more" to see a flop.

And some Villains will call 11 or 12 more as readily as they will call 6 or 8.

And some Villains will call 6 or 8 more even more often, if anyone else has already done it first. Which makes a pot bigger, which most players want if they have a better range than the callers.

I don't worry about it. Most of the time these spots occur in HU or 3 way pots where you raise PF and take down the pot with a flop C-bet. I'm not going to size down my openings just to avoid $1 (sometimes $2 I guess) of rake. By sizing down to avoid the rake you're often losing more just by allowing your opponents a cheaper price to enter the pot, and that's before we even think about how the smaller pot on the flop can compound and leave you making less money on future streets because the pot's smaller to begin with.

I get it, we all hate rake and would like to avoid it as much as we possibly can. Adjusting your PF sizing solely to avoid a dollar here or there is just a bad idea IMO, and it's can lead to costing you a lot more money when these hands go two and three streets than what you're gaining by trying to save rake with a method that mostly applies to hands where you're c-betting flop and taking the pot when you're getting no action OTF.

Yes you should size your pfr raises to avoid rake. To not do so is foolish. You're going to pay quite a bit less juice on uncontested pots and that matters. If you don't think a few % in juice is important, I'd like to be your bookie.

It might not be the only factor in your sizing but you should never open for ten and you should have default raise sizes that often result in lower rake. 8 and 12 work well most of the time.

If a smaller, but still adequate raise causes v to make a bad call that is good!

Im literally shaking my head reading this thread. How about just playing better and make 10X more money than you "might" ever save by trying to adjust preflop raises to save rake?

In a 5 hour session, how many times do you raise preflop, get called only once or twice, and then take it down with a Cbet? I believe that's the only way this could come into play. Maybe it happens 3-4 times? So you're going to worry about $3-$4 in rake? That's less than $1/hr at the most.

If rake is even entering your mind, you aren't playing very well and have much more important things to worry about.

The way you become a losing player is to think that your $1/hour leaks aren't worth fixing. They add up. It is the same attitude that has people calling in the SB with 93o. It isn't as if this is occupying a tremendous amount of brain power. It would quickly become automatic.

It is very rare for me to run cross a thread where I go, "Gee, that is actually a leak I need to fix." Thank you.

1/2 game and it folds to you OTB with A9, KT, J8s or whatever. You decide to raise to $8 to save some rake instead of raising to $10 or $15 even though you think $10 or $15 is better.

Ive done enough research and actually tracked hands like this to know that in a "no flop no drop" room, you will make more per hand by stealing the $3 in blinds (or more if there was a limp or 2) than you will when you get called. Even if you play really well post flop, you will not make more than 1.5 BBs per hand with hands like KT / A9 or even KQ/ AT.

Raise bigger and take it down preflop and you will make more money and pay zero rake.

I believe most LLSNL villains are inelastic in their calling ranges. If they are going to call $8, they are going to call $10 or even $15 in the blinds. Besides, what is really rare is it folding to me on the button.

Thanks everyone. I had never thought of this before until I saw a few 2p2 replies that mentioned sizing to avoid rake increases.

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> For example, we are in BB at 1/2 and there is one limp and rest fold to us. Let's say we feel the proper bet is 15, but we instead raise to 14 so we only lose $2 instead of $3 ($14×2+1=29) if we take it on the flop.

That's a great thought. And I think it's a good example to work with in exploring whether it makes sense to take rake into consideration.

Ultimately, it's just math. Say betting $15 provides +$0.25 EV relative to betting $14 without taking rake into consideration. And say that 50% of the time you take it away on the flop. With $15, you lose $1 in rake compared to $14 50% of the time, so the EV relative to $14 goes down by $0.50 to -$0.25.

However, there is a lot of things to think about in poker. And you have limited mental resources. I feel like your mental resources are probably better spent thinking about other things.

Although I think it could be worth considering for some short stacked all in decisions. With rake, you need to have a bit more equity to justify calling. For example, let's say you have JJ and you think you're against a range of 88+ and AK. And suppose that your opponent goes all in for $25. Without rake, you have about 52% equity. But with, say, a $5 rake, now you only have about 47% equity (settings / equity calculator / rake and tip). This becomes a lot less significant in bigger pots though. More like a 1% hit on equity. So ultimately, I think it is only really useful for the closest of calls.

Great, then lets make the raises bigger so they will call and make bigger mistakes. If they call $8 or $10 or $15 with A8s or K9 or Q3s in the blinds like tons of the fish do, I'd rather them call $15. Im not worried about the extra $1 or $2 in rake.

Like I said to start with, if you are even thinking about an extra $1 or $2 in rake, you are thinking about all the wrong things and losing out on a lot more than $1 or $2 in value.

Again Mike Starr has a broader perspective IMO.

As if we don't have other leaks to worry about.

I agree with him.

***

Here's another way to save EV.

Why give the dealer a betting disk now and then?

It's -EV.

Or the cocktail waitress?

I agree that your should strive to plug all of your leaks, big and small. I just think that you're often losing more value from your opponent than the $1 you're saving in rake by sizing down to avoid the next threshold for added drop.

All solid points, imo.

Surprised Z hasn't poked his head into this thread, this seems right up his alley?

I'll admit that I don't worry about tailoring my raise sizes as OP suggests. However, I'll often simply go way bigger preflop if I'd really like to take it down preflop (which in my room is rake free preflop), although I also realize this is somewhat inconsistent with my thinking that there is no difference in calling frequency to any reasonable raise size (but I'll lean to the top boundary of "reasonable" in a perhaps feeble attempt anyways).

GcluelessrakenoobG

Tipping is paying people who do work for you. I tip because I'm not a crook. I also have the leaks of not sneaking chips out of other people's stack when they go to the br and not Welshing on bets.

Paying rake needlessly is like choosing to make a sports bet at -115 when -110 was easily available.

Obviously if people are calling $50 opens it all goes out the window.

I don't really think this is a matter of opinion. Run through a bunch of scenarios and you will see that a lot of players are paying crazy rake on those marginal dollars.

You don't have to stop analyzing hands to focus on rake. It takes like, i don't know, 2 hours to figure out which raises frequently lead to pots of favorable sizes and which are the worst. Set your defaults accordingly. Adjust when people are calling bigger sizes.

It's a very good point about taking it down pre. No flop no drop vs getting called and winning on a cbet.

This leads straight to trimming your cbet bluff sizes to the minimum.

I tried messing with this for a long time. The one that I've stuck with is if it folds to me on the btn and blinds are unknown in 1/2 I open to $4. it still gets more folds than you'd think, and if you start to get people who are sticky then you adjust and size up.

I tried a lot of stuff, $6 opens (to avoid BBJP drop at $15) $9 opens (to avoid pushing pots over $10 intervals) all kinds of stuff. what i've figured out over time is that if you're in the type of game that this type of thing is going to matter than it's probably just better to game select to another game where you can make it $15 pre after folding for an hour and still go 4 ways to the flop.

If you want to mess around with this concept I'd recommend using OpenOffice or Excel. I had a sheet somewhere which broke this all down. But basically you would take you various opening sizes, multiply them by various numbers of callers to get the pot size, subtract rake tip and BBJP and then divide your opening size by the final pot size to figure out what your equity needs to be to open (to go further down the rabbit hole you also need to predict flat ranges and 3b ranges for remaining vils, but not necessary for ideal opening sizes) Pick the highest equity return based on the most common outcomes.

I don't know that some of the math people are using here is adding up.

Sure, you can raise X-1 instead of X to save $1 in rake, but how often are those scenarios coming up where it's applicable? Are you on a table where people are loose pre and overfolding the flop? Sure, that might be a good situation where you just gave the house another $1 in rake, but if that's the case, why didn't you raise X+3 instead?

How about when you do this, and you end up with a smaller pot post-flop. Now you're betting $13 into a $19 pot instead of $18 into a $27 pot. How did that rake control work out for you when V would have called both? You saved $1 1 out of 3 times and you lost how much the other times?

I think the way to avoid rake is to, as mentioned, 3b more pre, but more importantly, to play BIGGER pots, not smaller ones. Increase your bet sizings post-flop and play a higher variance style of play for bigger pots.

fwiw I spent over a year testing various sizes and really only had success when I went back to almost consistently just raising big. I'm not saying that incorporating the $8 and $6 raises won't win you extra money in some spots, but it's WAY WAY less than I think most people here are imagining. If you want to go ahead and try it then be my guest; but Mike's completely correct, diverting the amount of brain power that it takes to properly incorporate these sizes will end up being a pretty big leak (read opportunity cost) for most people. Let us all know what you figure out in 400 hours.