Hello, I was wondering if anyone knew of any good resources to find out more about bet sizings for soft, low and medium stakes live games.

For example on a J26ssd board and you're holding As7S in position against an unknown opponent and the pot is $100. Around 1/3 pot probably any bdfd or bdsd like Q10 and K10 and KQ with one spade will call, but start to fold around 1/2 pot. Any flush draw or jack-x will call below a pot sized bet but start to fold at or above a pot sized bet. Anything without a jack or a spade will fold at 1/4 pot.

The difference in long term EV of betting $20 versus $85 dollars in a spot like this seems like it would be a lot. But obviously you wouldn't be doing one or the other 100% of the time. But I think there's a potential for a lot of ev to be gained by manipulating bet sizings in softer games where you don't need to standardize sizing based off of percieved ranges/preflop action as much.

Thanks for any help on this topic.

A wildly too broad subject to be discussed in a single thread. I'll leave this open for a bit, but I think looking at general hands against "unknowns" is the wrong approach to take. Either you are playing exploitively or trying to get to balanced play.

Study game theory. Range interactions still matter at low stakes. You don’t know exactly how opponents will respond to different bet sizes. At best you can know in what ways they’re imbalanced.

Most players don’t correctly use or respond to very small or very large sizes, so I’d focus on implementing <1/2 pot and overpot sizing well.

Interesting. I almost never use overbet sizings, but I'm aware this could be a leak. I assume you're saying people overfold versus both very small and very large?

bet pot on every street no matter what, ez game

All else constant, over-betting is far more profitable HU live than online-- yet you see it in tons of tons of spots online.

Even at small stakes online, the pool reacts to ob sizings much better than the 2/5 live equivalent of course.

If people always stationed off vs overbets live at the 2/5 level, then we would just overbet every time we "had it" right? But obv that's not the case, and there are tons of spots where ob both for value and as a bluff make a lot of sense. Especially against players that react super poorly to them, I think an ob sizing should be printing money in a lot of spots live. But it's hard to say without a database/tracker.

This mostly applies to HU pots which happen far less often live. But even in multi-way pots, lots of turns and/or rivers will be HU as well.

OP, keep in mind that when a solver mixes, the EV of all the sizes are the same/similar. It depends how "completely" (less exploitability %) you solve the hand. A solver wouldn't do something less than 100% of the time if it resulted in an EV loss- especially a significant one.

In live poker, there's no way to know what the best sizes in are though. Every spot is completely different.

There are other considerations, and mixing it up is great, but it's helpful to keep that first part in mind. You want to play a strategy that you're comfortable with and that you can execute well.

The correct approach in some random spot is to bet whatever sizing YOU think generates the highest EV imo

Maybe they overfold, maybe they overcall. It depends on the player but they aren’t likely to respond in a balanced way. They don’t have much experience dealing with those sizes.

I’m not suggesting to start implementing them in random spots, though. Study the theory and learn about which sizes are appropriate for which situations.

Learn theory before exploits.

People that "mix it up" don't even know why they are doing it most of the time. You don't just do something for the sake of doing it. You need a very specific reason to change strategies. The best is to have 2 strategies - 1 for fishy/weak players and 1 for competent players.