We open from late position, BB defends.
Flop 742 rainbow.

First, I'm not really sure who has the range advantage here.
V has more low cards, but we have more overpairs.

I would cbet this very frequently, hence with a small sizing.
But with a small sizing, V can profitably call with 2 overcards, right ?
So the bet doesn't accomplish much equity denial.
Also depending on villains, we are exposed to being check raised a lot.

Does betting frequently with a big sizing make more sense ?

You have all the overpairs, you both have all the sets, and villain has 74. So generally, you have a strong range advantage.

Most of villains air is either overcards or a straight draw so villain can call a small bet easily with pretty much his whole range.

Because of this you probably want to bet less often but with a bigger sizing, to put villains range in a tougher spot.

But you could use the small bet strategy exploitatively if you think villain/population will overfold for some reason.

I like 2/3 to 3/4 here. Seems to gain the desired protection ev with my strong 7s.

OK so we agree it makes more sense to bet big.

I'm very happy to make him fold his equity when I hit a pair.
And also when I don't actually

So I'll end up cbetting 3/4 pot with all my range (and maybe cbetting small only with sets and AA-KK to keep villain in).

Is it the best exploitative strategy ?

(obviously being unbalanced is not an issue at my stakes)

I don't mind slow playing the AA and sets sometimes, but I think in this sort of spot it might work better to check those when you want to slowplay them, and give your opponent a chance to bluff into you on the turn (that seems higher EV to me). If you bet small with them, you are usually not getting much value with hands that are very strong in a spot where it makes sense to bet big anyway.

Although if your opponent is a nit that never bluffs then you probably want to bet small with most including AA/sets.

If you are worried about "keeping players in" when you have strong hands then just bluff them relentlessly until they start calling you out of frustration.

Villain has the range advantage (probably slight) here if we are considering all types of straight draws and suited 7Xs, 4Xs, and 2Xs hands. Not to mention 2 pair advantage (74/42 even 72s).

Since I am cbetting virtually 100% of the time here I prefer a smaller bet like my pre-flop raise size or 33% pot. Villain will be c/r at some level and I would rather be able to call than have to fold with hands like AK/AQ/A5/A3.

I am surprised at how frequently people fold to a small cbet. But I play mostly in live tournaments that range from $300 to $1,100.

I wouldn't count medium strength hands (middling pairs/straight draws) into a range advantage. Button has 24-36 combos of overpairs that BB won't have and BB has maybe 9 combos of 2 pair that button won't have, if they call all suited combos preflop. BB range is also so wide that strong hands make up a smaller proportion of it.

Whether you bet small or bet large it doesn't matter too much, though you can add a few extra hundredths of a bb to your winrate by adding in a really large sizing.


You're deploying qualitatively similar strategies on turns regardless of what you do on the flop.

• 88+, turned overcard pairs, sets are basically always unexploitable barrels
• sizing down on spade turns
• similar air combos you can barrel (K-high, Q-high, turned SDs, FDs, etc)

If you bet flop small then use a lot of large turn sizings then you still have no issues getting stacks in on rivers.

So the two sizings are pretty close substitutes.

But certainly it is superior to have a really large sizing.

Yeah, 742 is actually a pretty high frequency check, mostly because on low card boards equities between IP and OOP run pretty close together. However, we do have the nut advantage because as the IP player, we have all of the overpairs and sets and villain doesn't by and large.

That's where the idea of having large bets on the flop as the IP player comes in - whenever we have a nut advantage, but not a big range advantage, we want to bet less frequently but with a bigger size.

The reality is that in practice, you probably can still range bet this board versus most players and be fine, because most players will not find the requisite bluffs and/or fail to continue often enough. It is a gap in my game that I need to get better at, as I know I need to check these boards a fair amount, but I tend to undersize my bets.

Thanks guys, it was less trivial than I thought.

I guess at low stakes I'll go with a small cbet range, as a general rule.
And use the big size / low frequency approach against thinking players.

How deep are you to start the hand? The answer to the question is different at 100, 40, 20 BB.

After reading the thread-- in general on this kind of flop if I'm deep I would use a bet big or check strategy. Betting big is useful here since the board is going to change a lot and you can really pressure one-pair hands, straight draws, overcard hands and lighter floats. And you make more money when they have a hand that can call one street but not two and you fire again.

If stacks are more shallow then I'm c-betting more often but smaller.

Part of this is because with shallower stacks, I'd be comfortable getting it in with an overpair or even top pair depending on villain and stack depth. The deeper we are, the less less likely I'm going to be comfortable with that, so I'm going to want a certain percentage of overpairs in my check-back range. (Although I'd be more inclined to check AA-QQ, decreasing frequency of checks the smaller the overpair is, and bet 88-JJ.)

That's off the top of my head, anyway. If I give it more thought I might be able to come up with more in-depth reasoning.