You're at a LLSNL table, and the game is playing small. Most people are open-limping (rather than opening for a raise), and bet/raise sizing on all streets is small. You may be tempted to go with the flow, in terms of bet sizing. Standard bet sizing (the anchor) influences your own bet sizing.

Anchoring Scenarios

- Over the last 3 hours, no one has gone all in. As a result, most players are primed to have a strong emotional reaction to the next all in.

- Most players have been under-betting turns and rivers, so betting full pot will seem out of the ordinary.

- Most players have been open-limping PF (rather than raising PF), so raising PF will be unusual, and perhaps annoying for everyone who has been limping.


How to Approach Anchoring in Poker

We obviously shouldn't ignore the prices or behaviors anchored by our opponents. In fact, paying attention to patterns and behaviors is key to our edge.

We use these observations to our advantage by countering (rather than copying) our opponents' strategies.

Often the best counter-strategy (at LLSNL) is to deviate from our opponents' comfort zones and basically annoy them with aggressive and tricky play.

The table is observant. They will notice that you're always coming in for a raise PF, and that your bet sizing post flop is pretty large. They will be influenced by your anchor!

You have actually increased your own bet sizing spectrum (while your opponent's bet sizing spectrum remains the same). For instance, you can reasonably bet anywhere from 1/4 pot to full pot on the turn, but your opponents have mainly been sticking to small bets, so if they choose to bet big, alarm bells will go off.

I like this post... but seems pretty incomplete? So much more to say on this.

Straddling is a great way to completely throw a loose passive table off their game. 3betting is too. And raising bigger than the average raise size (like you mentioned).

Tricky part is that at first the V's will refuse to play your game and won't give you any action, so you will need to continue doing these things at a high frequency to get them to start playing back by calling you light. At that point you need some rungood to get your value hands paid off, and need to slow down the cbetting bluffing almost to zero.

We should steal enough so they tire of it.

Now they call us lighter.

And now e have a game.

^ yup!