I see a lot of posts on here that advocate raising pre-flop to a size that gets 1 or 2 callers at most when we have a premium hand. In some of the loose passive games I'm sure a lot of us play in, this can lead to raising drastic amounts and "risking" all folds.

I just want to question whether this is truly +EV or just variance avoidance. Let me just pose a hypothetical to put some tangibility on the example:

Typical loose passive 1/2 game. 4 limpers to hero w/ KK OTB. My standard raise is 4x + ~1.5bb per limper, so I would make it $20 here and often get 2-4 callers (including blinds). If I were to make it 25 - 30, I think I more often narrow to 0 to 2 callers but I wonder if this is optimal.

Not only is it bad if everyone folds, but when I make it $20 I honestly hope everyone calls. Sure the probability of my winning the pot goes down significantly, but I see 2 major advantages that more than compensate .

(1) A bit obvious, but when I win the pot, it is a bigger pot and I should be winning well more than my share with this hand strength advantage.

(2) Having more players in the hand increases their RIO. If I hit my set against 4 opponents, there is a much better chance that one of them has hit a set, two pair, or TPTK and I can play for stacks than if I narrow the field to just 1 or 2 opponents.

This approach requires that we not get married to an overpair as when we "let in" more players our overpair is less often good. It is easy to kick ourselves when we bet and get checkraised and have to release our hand, but we can't forget about the times that we can get 3 streets of value against loose passive fish who may have folded his TPTK (like ATo) had we raised dramatically.

It just seems to me that people on 2+2 might be raising so much because they feel like they deserve the pot and don't want to risk getting outflopped, but if we are properly rolled my guess is allowing for increase in variance also increases our EV. Am I not thinking about this right?

Congratulations, you have passed level 1 poker. You are in the minority here though.

I predict 300 post thread.

You may be on to something, however, every NL Hold 'Em book I've ever read, says aggressive play is optimal & all higher limits revolve around 2-3 players to the flop & quickly HU. There's a Hold 'Em Axiom that goes: "If more than 3 people see the flop, someone played their hand wrong." That doesn't mean if someone opened for $6, got 2 callers & you call otb with 76s, with the blinds yet to act, that you played your hand wrong.

This concept probably helped me the most when I was starting out. I was definitely not rolled properly so oftentimes I was avoiding variance and missing value on premium hands.

However I don't think that's necessarily a cardinal sin of poker if you're a rec player who puts in less than 500 hrs a year. If high variance puts you on tilt and makes you play worse overall, is avoiding it really that big of an EV loss? That's gonna be the mentality of a lot of players you have at the table, which is, again, exploitable in some cases.

But that's level 2 poker and I'm not quite there yet.

I won't comment on the rest of your post, because it makes a lot of assumptions that are casino/table dependent.

I think the two keys that would make me agree with you are "in position" and we have to be more willing to as you say not get married to an overpair. I think this method is good for playing smaller pots or really big ones.

But I kind of disagree on the getting 3 streets of value. If the hand goes 4-5 ways and you have KK and the flop is the driest flop you can imagine, are we going to feel comfortable going for 3 streets? Let's say you go $20 and get 3 callers. Unless the table is deep, that is playing for stacks if you are betting all 3 streets. Even if heads up after the flop and you're betting small, the pot will be about 200bb after the turn.

EDIT--Something else though, a 10bb raise is still considered on the large side in most games. So it's not like you are saying raise small, you are saying don't really really oversize your raise.

I don't think it's quite as simple as Big! No, Small!

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're right and there exists a range of hands that does better with a smaller raise. I would argue there's a range below this range that does well narrowing the field -- for example, big unsuited cards. The ability to cbet and move one or two V's off their marginal hands adds value to this range. Against multiple players, we're forced to essentially play more fit/fold most of the time. I believe we gain more from bluffing than we do from capturing extra bets those times we do hit something like top/top.

If we can vary the size of our raises based on our actual holding without being exploited, then we should. In at least some games, however, V's will catch on to that eventually. At that point, we either have to use narrow range of sizes or mix things up. Since we'll have more hands that want limited opponents, that tends to suggest a larger bet size on average.


If we're playing exploitively, we want opponents to make the most costly mistakes they can. Typical LLSNL V's call too much pre and are not aggressive enough post. Giving them a small price to enter the pot, and then setting up a multi-way situation in which there are fewer opportunities to be aggressive may actually tilt the game more in favor of opponents' natural tendencies.


Adding players doesn't decrease opponents IO; it increases them -- just as it increases ours when we're the ones set mining. It may increase your IO when you're gunning for set over set but that really doesn't happen very often. If you raise to 20 with KK, and there are multiple callers, calling with a small PP is more profitable than if you raised larger and there were fewer callers.


In the same vein, raising smaller to garner multiple opponents can actually make some callers correct. By the time there are 4 players in the pot for, say, 4BB each, speculative hands that can flop huge multi-way winners can become correct to play. And, of course, bad early calls can become correct if enough people enter the pot.

Opponent tendencies also obviously play a role. If V's are too loose pre for bigger raises, but then play fit or fold post, it's highly exploitive to build a big pot that they'll typically abandon. If V's tend to play tight pre and loose post, then it makes more sense to keep the preflop pot small.


There are many reasons to raise (value, deception, bluffing, isolation, pot size manipulation, positional adjustment, and some others). Those reasons, and the hands behind them desire different sized raises. I don't think it's necessarily wrongthink to raise large with a super-premium. I don't think it's necessarily rightthink. It depends on how you're trying to exploit your opponents and what you're trying to accomplish with your raise with an over-arching information hiding requirement.

If it goes 4 way to the flop you will win more then 1/4 of the hands. The question is will you win more then 1/4 of the money? It's very easy for your flop bet to just isolate you with the opponents who have better hands and good draws. You will end up winning the majority of the hands unless most of the table is in, but only when it ends on the flop. When you build a big pot you will be losing more often then winning unless your opponents are terrible.

For it to work in the long run you need a table where the majority of villains are really bad and there are few or no good players at all. It takes only one good player in the hand to bluff raise the turn or slow play his set the whole way to the river to wipe out your profits.

Yes I think I've assumed we play at least as well-- if not better-- than our opponents. If that is true and we have better hand strength and better position, I still don't understand why we should be worried about playing these kind of pots when we have all the advantages and can fold overpairs.

There are countermeasures that we can take against your nightmare situations above if we suspect a solid reg capable of making moves (checking turn for pot control/induce river bluff, betting our sets the same way we bet our overpairs, etc.).

I think this hinges on your hand-reading skills. If you're confident that you won't stack-off nor fold incorrectly then by all means raise small.

I guess there are a couple negatives to going into a big multiway pot and some positives.

I thought of a couple of extreme cases. 1) You are shortstacking. You shove 20 BBs with AA. Now, you definitely want the entire table to call.

2) I sometimes play limit Omaha high only, which is probably even crazier than you think. 9 ways to the flop is not unheard of, as many people play more than half their hands and some play almost all.

Anyway, AA is a favorite against any other hand. But I don't think it's usually right to ram and jam a naked AA in this game because it is so hard to realize your equity without flopping a set.

In the rare event that you are heads up, you certainly play any AA as aggressively as possible. Probably 3 way. After that, it starts to get questionable, as you're going to have to fold too many of your winning hands. Or, if you get stubborn, pay off too much. Because almost any non-A flop is scary and it gets worse from there.

So depending on the game and situations, non-short stack hold em is somewhere between those two extremes.

A secondary problem of going in with tons of people is it might be harder to get paid off big post flop when you are ahead. Straightening cards, for example, are scarier not just to us, but to most other players. I think with AA in particular, we hope to play against other big cards that will pay us off. And if we raised big pre and it's HU another pocket pair is not going to be as scared of a 678 board or a river flush. Or even a paired board. How much money is going in on a 599 board in a 5 way pot if someone doesn't have 55 or a 9? Yet, heats up or 3 way this is a fine board to get action from worse.

So, while I don't think you want to force people out of the pot for it's own sake, and I actually do like getting several people calling 10%+ of their stacks when I have AA, I don't think you want to be 4xing it over five limpers from the BB because you are a favorite over all of them and want them all to call.

Very interesting post. I used to be a guy who only 3! with AA, KK, AK
then it was QQ and
now it's JJ and 10/10 and sometimes 9/9
I know you guys are way past me with skill on this forum but I hate 4 players to a flop when I have JJ.
I probably could be more passive with AA, KK than JJ. I'm going to reread these responses though and try to improve.

Thinning the field is only one of the reasons for raising large with premiums at live low stakes.

Even for someone with a very tight range, you will be dealt AK/AQ far more often than you will be dealt a premium pocket pair. And we'll often want to take down the pot with those hands post-flop (which is easier to do vs only one or two opponents and when we can threaten getting stacks in by the river).

So a key reason for raising large at live low stakes no limit is to create a stack-to-pot-ratio that will punish opponents for calling light pre-flop (the most prevalent and consistent leak). It can be very hard for them to continue against a tight aggressive player without TPTK. Their marginal hand might still be good on the flop or on the turn but against a tight aggressive player they have to worry that it might cost them their entire stack to find out.

There might be circumstances where playing premium hands deceptively pre-flop could be beneficial. If you're going try this I suggest doing it with effective stacks of 300bb+. You're often going to lose a small to medium pot because you're multiway and you won't know where you stand in the hand because of the irregular pre-flop action. When you hit the nuts against their second nuts and you'll need it to pay off for all the pots you lost playing the premium hand deceptively pre-flop.

At around 125bb or less, I find it hard to think of a winning strategy which doesn't involve playing premium hands aggressively pre-flop.

I think the reason we do this with super premiums is often because we are also doing this with good but not super premium hands. I'm pumping it up with up to 25% of hands on button after limpers and unless opponents are truly bad this isn't possible if I don't also do this with my top hands.

Also, when you are limiting the field you create a scenario where opponent ranges can be predicted accurately a high percentage of the time. Oppoknents will make strong TPTK type hands and be confident to co ntinue. Letting in a weaker range means people have more TPMK hands that probably won't commit large amounts of chips.

It’s not that we want to narrow the field. When we have a premium we would generally like the whole table to call. However, if we get so much action we probably are missing value as people would have called more.

Some good points here:

Interestingly a lot of poker literature advises playing a high Stack-to-Pot-Ratio multiway in position with middle pairs and suited connectors precisely for the reason that weaker players will often over-value TPTK.

Definitely some good points made here to consider... I think one bias, though, in a lot of the analysis is that we tend to emphasize the tough situations because they more readily come to our minds even though they occur infrequently. Yes if we let more people in the pot by raising moderately instead of massively, there is the greater chance that we will bet and get check-raised, or that we will bet the flop, get called in 4 spots, and have a dicey turn card. But I think we underestimate the fact that a larger percentage of the time against our passive opponents, by letting in more people we allow for an opponent to hit a TPGK type of hand and get 2 streets of value off of him with a hand like QJ that he would have likely folded to a massive raise pre-flop.

I raise the same in almost all situations; it doesn't matter what hand I have. It is table/opponent dependent.