The point isn't to get people to fold. Larger sizings actually get more value with nutted hands because while people fold more often, when they do call or 4-bet, we are still crushing their range and the pot*our equity is bigger.

You also can't really use this sizing with bluffs because there's not enough FE.

I’m just trying to fix your overall pessimistic mindset here. At least you’re not advocating for a flat, so I think we’re grasping at straws when it comes to arguing what a bigger mistake it (as we are in agreement that we want our opponents to face expensive decisions to maximize value and minimize our chance of getting boned)


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Exactly. Like people forget that when we have AK, we want people to fold. If they have 77, they’re a slight favorite; getting that out is a big win for us, for example.


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I disagree, in live you want callers at every opportunity because they're all stations. Fish calls pre with 77 and then snaps your cbet on a Ace high flop because he thinks you're an internet player who always cbets. Then he calls your turn bet because if he binks a 7 on the river he's got you. Finally he calls your river bet 50% of the time because you cant always have it.

This statement is contradictory. When someone makes a play that is different to the play they’d make if they could see your hand, you profit. We should pretty much always want our opponents to take the action that is most beneficial to us.


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I feel fish make bigger postflop mistakes than preflop.

Well, when I was referencing bluffs I wasn't talking about AK, although a 3! can cause hands which have a lot of equity against AK to fold, dominated hands also call.

OP states that UTG raise/caller claims to fold QQ to the single flop bet. His take on the state of the games is much more accurate / believable than yours, imo.

GcluelessstateofLLSNLgamesnoobG

Overrating our postflop skill is basically a hallmark of a fish. Consistent winners aren’t setting out to play street poker in every hand they enter.


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This is something you learn w/ an FL background, but in general, you really just want people to fold since 100% of the pot now is usually more valuable than whatever share of the pot we have after being called. This extends mostly to preflop in NL: when someone raises to 12 and there’s 2 callers, there’s $40 out there in dead money including the blinds. That’s 13.33 big blinds. That’s a lot of value. Meanwhile, 98s for example has 39% equity against AK: it can call a lot of money and not even be making a FTOP mistake against AK, let alone the benefits it has by being able to play deepstacked in position against a far more defined range.

So take a simple example, guy raises to 12, call call. Now we have a decision in the bb. We make it 52. Two folds and it’s on the second caller closing the action. There’s $89 out there and it’s $40 more for him to call. He just needs 31% equity and he’s not even making a mistake to call based on raw equity alone. So when we have a hand where he has 39% equity, we’d much prefer that he folds and we win the pot immediately. Even if we have the best hand now.


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From that line of reasoning, it sounds like never opening until LP / limp/reraising / overlimp/reraising monster hands might be a pretty good strategy.

Gohwait...G

No. Because you allow all of your opponents a chance to realize their equity cheaper.

If they’re calling, make it bigger. If they’re still calling, make it even more.

You’re not incorrect on the premise. But the Rx is flawed, you’re basically hoping someone does the raising for you (because if they don’t, it’s a disaster and hamstrings you for the rest of the hand).

Our monster hands are there to punish people who don’t fold often enough.


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It's bad enough to go off on a general theory tangent in a regular HH thread. When Hero is clearly a novice, it can really confuse them. Please take the very general discussion elsewhere.

This is part of the reason we raise larger. With the smaller sizing opponents are getting good odds to call against our range. A hand like 98s is correct to call our 3-bet assuming we're 3-betting an appropriately wide range, not just QQ+, AK like nitfish do, considering it has decent equity and plays well IP in a 3-bet pot.

This sorta reminds me of the PLO fallacy. A lot of players think every hand is just a coinflip, and sure preflop equities are narrow. Postflop is an entirely different story, where you can routinely have your opponent drawing nearly dead every single time you hit. Who cares about having 39% equity preflop when you'll see a turn every time he spikes a 9 and he now has 10% equity.

He’s also going to play better overall. Boards that favor you as the OOP 3 bettor will be obvious, while leaving our opponent in with a wide range will give him a chance to make many disguised hands.

We also aren’t guaranteed to over-realize versus our opponent. Example: if the board comes T96, we are kind of hamstrung because we have so much AK/AQ stuff that missed, and our “strong hands” don’t even stand up well to their “strong hands”.

Essentially you’re saying that you’d trade a high frequency preflop mistake for a low frequency turn and river one. And yeah, it’d be nice if every opponent stacked off top pair in 3 bet pot for almost 200 bb against me. But that’s really not as common as we’d like. It’s just way easier to execute a strategy that makes our opponents make a lot of middling mistakes constantly, versus assuming we can out-street poker them.


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This has been an interesting discussion and I'm actually enjoying the varying postflop strategies. Thank you all!