Let me try to re-center this a little, since I think this is really relevant to the theory OP is trying to discuss, but got lost in the shuffle.

CIE seems to be claiming that if you limit your opening size to 3x, you would rather be playing 5/10 with $500 effective than 2/5 with $500 effective. I'm not sure I agree, but let me raise a different question: assume you have a skill edge on the field. Would you rather play a 2/5 game with $500 stacks where you could only open to $30, or a 5/10 game with $500 stacks where you could only open to $30?

I think the answer to this question is "it depends," but what it depends on sheds a lot of light on this debate (in my opinion). To me the single biggest question is this: how often, when we open, are we going to take down the blinds preflop? Notice that how often we get 3bet (and have to fold) doesn't matter in my formulation because our (absolute) open size is the same.

If the answer is that we will take down the blinds a fairly large percentage of the time, then it seems to me that we would prefer larger blinds, so that we win more when this happens. However, as all experienced live players know, this is not what happens at live low stakes. Instead what happens is that we take down the blinds almost never. We almost always get action.

The more action we get, the smaller a percentage of the pot the blinds are, so they matter less and less as the pot gets bigger. Also, if we know we are going to get action, we need to remove the hands from our "normal" opening range that derive a good deal of their value from blind steals (or from opponents folding tightly behind us), which means we are folding more hands preflop. That means we want to play in the game with smaller blinds so that we lose less when we fold them away. We make up that value by taking down bigger pots when we get a playable hand in this altered scenario.

So basically, to get back to the original point of "why open bigger," if you are in a 2/5 game and you open to $25, just pretend you opened 2.5x in a 5/10 game. Your opponents will not react as if you're laying too high a price to win the blinds; they'll still play loosely. If you're so hung up on "correct theory," you can think of it as your opponents defending too wide because they don't realize the blinds are too small.

I'd rather just limp then blow up the pot post-flop when you hit big if you're playing against a bunch of droolers. If you raise big pre-flop with AK for instance and they call what are you going to do when you miss the flop 2/3 of the time and the stations are gonna call your c-bet no matter what??

We fold... That's part of poker. The object of the game isn't to win every hand or lose the absolute minimum every hand we don't win.

The goal is to win the most money possible long term and if you're doing that then you're going to have to deal with variance

Yeah that's always the TAGFish excuse for value cutting themselves..."gotta bet top pair for value!" then proceeds to get trapped by someone who flopped a set - that's why yall are stuck at 1/2 LMAO.

Lol if you say so champ

If you don’t know how to play AK multi-way bcuz you cbet too much when you whiff, it doesn’t matter whether the pot is 20BB or 5BB. If you can’t play the hand you can’t play the hand. Just fold pre.

Thanks for raising the point. Actually, I think this wasn’t entirely relevant to all of OPs points. Much of my post was just raising the question “assume that calling/raising ranges are entirely inelastic from 3x to 4x. Then would we rather open to 3x or 4x?”. This is in response to several of OPs points claiming that we’d rather raise to 3x because raising to 4x “bloats the pot” or “causes us to have a harder time defending to 3bets”. In my view these comments by OP were reflecting the difficulty of playing spots with smaller SPR.

Personally I’d rather lower the SPR and raise the stakes of the game, if possible, but others may disagree. Similarly, if calling ranges are inelastic from 3x to 4x, I’ll always pick the 4x open sizing option with my entire range.

I could see either answer depending on assumptions. Assume a fixed $30 open sizing and assuming players are flatting/raising with equal ranges on both blind structures — IE their reactions aren’t “logical” wrt to size of blinds. Maybe I’d rather play in the 2/5 game because I lose less money paying blinds each round. Or maybe I’d rather play in the 5/T game because the pot will be $8 bigger every time I enter the pot and am not in the blinds. Probably paying less money in the blinds is a better deal, so I’d prefer the 2/5, but I’m not sure.

What about the the point that you will be reducing game to max 2 street game due to low SPR.
Also, if you study 100bb GTO but constantly 5x in 1/3 or 2/5 capped(not talking about 300bb games), you will end up playing in unstudied teritory.

Of course, we should study low spr, high rake, variable stack sizes(almost nobody autorebuys)9 max cash if we play it but who does it?

This is spot on. The advantage of sizing up (esp on the BTN) is that we build a bigger pot the times we get called. We have excellent potshare being in position against a wide and capped range, and we want to maximise EV by bloating the pot as much as possible.

The only thing stopping us from doing this is that BB will call less and 3bet more as we size up, and at some point we would be going so big that BB would just play 3b or fold. When that happens, we want to size down again, to lose less the times we get 3bet.

In a live game, players often call the same range even when you size up, and some players even 3bet less as well. This makes bigger sizes much better in practice.

If you agree that we should raise bigger with a fish in the blinds, then you should be able to see why we want to raise bigger in live games. No disrespect to live players--I'm one myself lol.

If that's the case because there are lots of <50BB stacks at the table we might have to adjust the strategy.

With 100BB+ stacks against most opponents in (good) live low stakes games, the decision if it's a two or three street game should be ours most of the time. We're opening larger to exploit players who call too much and raise too litte preflop. Against somebody who is loose-passive, we also decide about the pot size post flop most of the time, especially IP.

Is 2/5, $500 max still a thing? That just sounds brutally terrible

If they're stations they're gonna call you no matter what you bet dumba$$. If you wanna play Ace high in a bloated multi-way pot have at it TAGFish! Then when you flop top pair, you'll get stacked by someone that flops a set or two pair lmao - when I call you I guarantee you I'll have you dead in the water.

y u so mad?

I'm not mad but if someone talks smack I'm gonna give it back.

4 what its worth your smack talk is almost as bad as your desire to limp AK pre

Your whole post history ITT is literally "show me you don't know how to play poker without telling me you don't know how to play poker".

And on top of that you started insulting people for no reason at all.