2/5, 8 handed, $700 effective. Villain is a complete unknown; hero just got back from dinner break and villain was new. He chopped the blinds in his first hand, then folded to a +1 open and +2 3 bet in the second hand so I have zero information.

OTTH

Hero opens K Q $20 LJ, only villain calls CO.

Flop ($47): K 8 6. Hero bets $15-villain calls.

Turn ($77): 4. Hero? If we were IP and villain checks I bet this with no hesitation. Do you still bet here OOP?

I think you're overdoing it with the 1/3rd pot bets. This isn't the type of texture where I'd use that sizing.

I'd check and go for value on a non-club river if he checks back. I feel like many of the hands we get action from have us dead or have pretty good equity, and may put us in a bad spot even on a brick river. If you do choose to bet, I'd like a small size again. You don't want to be folding out a dry Kx.

Don't bet 1/3 against random (mostly fish) live players on this board texture ever. Half pot at the minimum. Using balanced and smaller sizing against weak players on wet boards is not good. Turn is a check and see what he does.

I agree that there's merit to using different flop sizes, and for all I know, maybe it is better to have 1/4, 1/3, 2/3, pot, and 1.5 pot sizes that you differentiate with.

There are a few reasons why I use 1/3 as my flop sizing:

1.) It sets a super cheap price on our bluffs. Next to nobody is defending enough versus this sizing, so we just print by using this size.

2.) We get called by a wider range of hands when we do have value than if we bet bigger

3.) I understand the strategy behind the 1/3 sizing better than any other sizing. Essentially, I have a greater understanding of what turns to barrel when we use this size, and I would make more mistakes if I started using different sizes because I'm no where near as familiar with turn play for different sizes

4.) When you use 1/3 and bigger sizes on the flop, people start to play more correctly versus the 1/3 size when you do use it. For example, in equilibrium, you are supposed to be raising some top pair hands when your opponent uses the 1/3 size. When they see me betting 1/3 all the time and regularly getting to showdown with flopped nutted hands, they're often afraid to play more correctly. However if they see me using bigger sizes occasionally, they'll often (incorrectly) view my 1/3 size when I do use it as weakness and start playing more correctly versus it.

Without knowing anything about villain check turn is your best option. If villain bets seriously consider folding.

If you knew something about villain you could plan better here. With no information you need to just assume villain is loose/passive and if he is willing to bet after the flush hits then the odds he has it is high. Part of your problem here is being OOP makes it very expensive to find out so you need to be willing to give this up a lot with no outs vs the flush.

If you want to use this sizing, there are plenty of better combos to choose for that betsize. It’s a mistake to only be using a small sizing or checks on this board. You should definitely have some larger bets on this flop and this combo works well for that. Just because 1/3rd works well as a blanket strategy works well against the average 2/5 player doesn’t mean you should stagnate your progress as a player and not go for higher EV lines/betsizes.
Turn is a small bet or check, mostly check with this combo imo.

Lol, betting 1/3 on this flop is perfectly fine here. The whole "bet big because the board is wet" is just a bad way to approach betsizing. Fact is villain is gonna flop a meaningful draw somewhere between 10-15% of the time. The majority of his hands are gonna be air or some marginal pair, and getting him to put in money with any of those is a pure win for us. If he raises flop with Kx or a draw, good. We get to put more money in with the best hand.

I'm betting 1/3rd again on the turn, or whatever i think Kx will call. Again, he still should have way more 1 pair hands than draws.

If you are gonna check turn, we really should not be folding much.

I never said we should have no 1/3rd bets in our range, for the record.
I just think not splitting bet sizes here is generally going to be lower EV.
And we’re probably supposed to check more than most think as well.
So, we have fewer bets in range. Can’t just 1/3rd everything all the time and think you’re playing the best possible strategy on a variety of flops.

@XtraScratch8 Nice to have you back. I know your guy DooDoo has said, and I've seen the same thing when running sims, that the EV in different bet sizes otf is usually within 1%. With that being said, why would it be necessary to try and complicate the strategy? I know my coach, who plays 1000nl and 10/20 live suggested this strategy originally.

@Viral25 If you bet 1/3 on the turn and get called and the river is a brick, do you go for a super thin value bet or x-f? I'm surprised you said we shouldn't be doing too much folding if we x the turn, considering how MUBS villains are postflop.

I prefer 25 otf but 25 vs 15 in this spot is w/e. Betting 1/3p with 100% of betting range on 100% of flops seems terrible to me tho. I do think it’s better practically speaking not to split your flop betting range into multiple sizes (adds a lot of complexity to the game tree for little benefit imo), but your sizing should vary by flop.

I would bet turn around 1/2p here but don’t mind checking (to x/c reasonable bets).

I haven't done much study on this topic, but i would assume the EV differs within 1% only IF villains are playing ~optimally. If we bet small in GTO, we win money more often but have less equity, If we bet big we get a bigger payday with high equity, but way less often. So the average EV is always gonna be close to equal.
All of that is assuming we are playing in a mythical GTO paradise of course. In typical LLSNL the EV difference is likely to be significant.

Tbh all this theory is way above my paygrade, so feel free to ignore the above.

Fwiw I ran this hand through PIO with some rough ranges, and GTO basically splits it's ranges between a LOL 20% and 120% PSB (using AA/66/88/assorted FD's for the large bet, checking some A high SDV hands as well, using 20% on the rest). EV was indeed pretty similar, all within ~5%.

Depends on the exact river obv, probably betting K/Q/2/3, x/deciding other blankish cards.

However there are a lot of rivers that are gonna put oneliners or 4 to a flush out there. Which is another reason to bet turn now, imo. There is no guarantee we are gonna be able to bet again, or even get to showdown if we check here.

As far as x/calling turn, when we bet 1/3 on the flop we have to be aware that villain gets to the turn with a lot of weak hands/floats, most of which SHOULD bluff this card. Needless to say most villains will underbluff here, but still often enough to not fold a hand this strong. The problem with x/call vs bet is that if villain barrels river, we are almost always folding, which seems problematic.

My main thought regarding solver outputs in a spot like this is that they will be misleading for how much EV we’re truly missing out by always sizing small OTF on a flop similar to this. And ya, not surprised solver likes super small or pot/slight OB here.
Most V’s are going to calling almost the exact same range against 1/3rd and larger sizings in a spot like this and a solver definitely will not.

Additionally, solver probably doesn’t mind small on a flop like this because it wants to be able to call lots of raises from worse. V’s just aren’t raising worse against small sizings very much at all in this kind of spot.

@viral25 I just don't get how we can ever x-c turn here live unless he goes really small. You even said it, villains way under bluff live. I'd also much rather have Q here to x-c. That's an interesting sim though, thank you for sharing the results.

@XtraScratch8 I think it's villain dependent, but I think for the most part there is a large difference in what hands someone is calling for 1/3 v 2/3 here.

Oh, and I'm definitely not range betting here OOP. I'm actually doing a lot of checking.

i dont think this is quite right. in general (theory wise), we want to 1) bet larger when we have a polarity advantage (smaller when not) and 2) bet more often when we have a range v range equity advantage (less often when not). these concepts are (generally) going to drive hand selection when splitting a betting range into a large and small size (ie the large size will get most of your nut hands), but they dont really imply the bolded statements (i would expect the large size to often have >ev, increasingly so on later streets).

would also add that in terms of evaluating having 1 flop bet size vs 2, the comparison we really want to look at is ev of our full range when limited to 1 betsize vs limited to 2, rather than comparing the ev of the large vs the small when we have 2 sizes.

when applying this to llsnl, it is kind of a philosophical q. if you have a specific exploitative reason to split your flop sizing (like, V will call 3 streets w any pair but folds everything else to 1/4p bet so we blast value and bet tiny with bluffs), it is kinda definitionally gonna be higher ev. if you dont, then you have to decide whether there is any ev benefit and if it justifies the added complexity (becomes more difficult to keep track of your own range as you do the same thing on turn/river, esp if you want to play a mixed strat with any hands). basically if we know they are *not* playing optimally, but we dont know how, we might just want to design are ranges like they are and then adjust later when we get more info.

i think vs an unknown we should be checking and mostly folding river after getting called ott- its gonna be pretty hard to get called by worse, most of his 1p hands will be happy to check back, and he doesnt have many natural non-pair bluffs.

also think we should mainly x/f river if we x/c turn. i think a turn x/c is based on the assumption that ppl will actually stab this turn a decent amt vs a check, and then give up on river (which imo is often reasonable when an oop pfr bets flop and xc a flush completing river).

Seems like it's pretty hard to bet the turn here. We can have AK with a club, KQ with a club and sets of kings, 8s and 6s that are all better. Check call and probably check fold a lot of rivers if V bets turn. If they check back turn we can make our river decision based upon what comes.

For those calling this a wet board, what do we think the standard cutoff calling range is here? I don't see V having many straight draws other than T9 for the gutter. So are we calling all boards with 2 to a suit wet?

GTO is really only helpful for your own ranges. If you are running sims - GTO vs GTO ranges are only helpful if you are playing against world class competition.

Otherwise it is straight theoretical.

A CO range here is going to be mid-low pocket pairs/a bunch of suited hands/off suit broadways/Axs hands. Even hands as strong as KQs/AJs because population under 3bets.

So if we input a more realistic CO range. Then LJ is only betting small on this board. Which is a good sizing. Then OTT. It only bets small again.

The theory behind bet sizing - it's goal is to put the highest percentage of your opponents range in 0 EV situations.

Small sizing does that the best for obvious reasons.

Also we want to mostly be cbetting flop - even ranging is fine. CO has a bunch of air hands + K high boards are very good for us.

If we changed this board to J86tt we would check a bunch more.

And we do value bet OTR if we get called and the river blanks. Flushes will almost always raise us so when he just calls they are severely discounted.

re the bolded: disagree with this as a general statement, although there are some spots where this will be the appropriate heuristic/rule of thumb. im not breaking any ground here by saying there is only one goal/rule for decisions, which is to maximize ev - the problem with the bolded is that it does not really account for the (potential) loss of ev to our top of range hands that comes with a smaller sizing. if we elect to bet a small size with a lot of our range, we do force V to defend a lot of really weak hands at marginal ev, but we also dont get to build the pot as quickly with our strongest hands. this is (ofc) not to say that smaller sizing is inherently worse, but imo its important to also weigh how your strong hands want to play (imo this idea is also one of the reasons supporting having multiple bet sizes).

i dont disagree that we should be betting flop often and i prefer (a little over) 1/2p but think 1/3p is fine.

i think betting river when called is a little ambitious, but as you said its basically an evaluation of how many flush combos flatted the turn vs how many worse Kx combos will call a third bet (+ a little ev from v folding chops sometimes).

Well, you can use multiple sizings. The more inelastic an opponent's raising range is with respect to sizing, the less incentive strong hands have to bet small. So a good exploit for live poker IMO is to use bigger sizes with stronger hands against opponents who don't adjust to smaller sizes by raising more often.

I don't really get what Doodoo is getting at though. You can just use 20x pot sizing with the nuts and air and make 100%(minus the nuts) of the opponent's range roughly indifferent. Doesn't mean that's a good sizing to use with the nuts.

Since OP already bet small on the flop, does anyone else like the idea of a smallish blocking turn bet (with a fold to a raise) followed by check calling (a reasonably sized bet) on a brick river?

Check folding here versus a random seems weak. Our hand still beats all sorts of crap random villains show up with here. Are we sure it’s the right move in these types of situations?

You can't disagree with theory since it is a fact.

You are talking about maximizing EV which is exploitative by nature.

That wouldn't make them indifferent though. Folding would be clearly superior to raising/calling with almost all our range vs a 20x nuts/air toy game.

We want his calls to be zero EV if we set folding to zero EV. Solvers always set folding to zero EV so that is the logical starting point.

sounds like the same reasoning GG won't change

what are you talking about? your statement "The theory behind bet sizing - it's goal is to put the highest percentage of your opponents range in 0 EV situations" is not a fact. the only goal in poker is to maximize ev, and sometimes the way you do that is by making bets that put the highest % of your opponents range in 0 ev spots, and sometimes it is not. if you are saying that statement applies 100% of the time, then what you are saying is wrong.

i dont follow what point you are trying to make by saying that maximizing ev is exploitative by nature. maximizing ev is a critical part of theory (or gto) as well, if that is the distinction you are making.