Ok pnl has a chapter where it talks about what your target flop spr should be for different hands. With tptk and over pair type hands you want a spr of around 3-4. With sc and set hunting type hands you want an spr of 15-1 or more. The author acknowledges that we may become easier to read by varying our bet sizes by hand strength. but says we gain more then we give up.

He concentrates on hands that will flop tptk and over pair hands for most of the chapter. Shockingly or at least it was to me he says we should bet 6xbb with these type hands. This assumes a 100xbb stack. If we understand pot commitment he says it will be impossible or very difficult for us to make a mistake when we hit our hand. Once we raise pf then c-bet the flop we are committed to calling a reraise by the villain because of the spr that we have manufactured.

Now with set hunting type hands we want a big spr to allow our opponent to make a big mistake when we hit our hands. easy enough to understand but don't we become super exploitable by varying bet sizes by hand strength ? I always thought that was worst sin in poker.

How do you guys feel about this style of poker ? I guess we can call it vbs or varing bet sizing poker. I thought sklansky also talked about this in one of his books.

I would be shocked if this was a viable strategy against observant opponents. It opens you up to getting 3bet in position for example.

Yea but pnl is like the most respected nl book out right now so the strat must have some validity ? I assume you mean a opponent can say hey this guy bet 2x the bb and that always means a drawy type hand so let me just put in a big 3-bet and kill his odds. Obviously we welcome a 3-bet when we have one of our 6xbb type hands.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. They probably don't need to make it that big either, the 3bettor doesn't risk his whole stack effectively. I don't think it even matters that we sometimes balance with big pairs. Just look how tough it is to fight positional 3bets, even when we open with fairly strong ranges like from the hijack.

I also win more than 1.5BBs with JJ+, AQs and AK (but not AQo), so turning my hand face up and asking everyone to fold doesn't sound appealing to me, especially if it makes the rest of my range tougher to play. BTW, I think this is true for most small stakes players.

And I disagree with the notion that TPTK plays best at SPR=3-4. First it highly depends on how the ranges exactly look like, i.e how likely your opponent is to have a better hand and even on how likely you are to have a better hand. Having monsters in your range allows you to go for fairly thin value in some spots without worrying about getting bluffed (because while a checkraise sucks for your hand it might be terrible vs your whole range).

I'm also somewhat suspicious about the claim that spr=15 makes set mining magically work. What makes sets so powerful is often the fact that you can turn up with weak hands: hands that your opponent might want to bluff you off of, hands you could be bluffing with or even hands that you might be going for thin value with.

TBH, I haven't read the book: probably should just to figure what conditions do you need to do make it work. But I'm very confident it's not optimal in online games with a lot of preflop aggression and probably not great in any game where almost all of your opponents are paying attention.

With a few fish at your left you can maybe get away with it because your weak raises are protected better. If you get a lot of calls and a squeeze you're winning a much bigger pot with the occasional monster you were balancing with. But this is very table dynamic specific and depends on a ton of assumptions (like how calling/squeezing frequencies depend on your raise size).

The author whose name i can't remember say that with tptk we should play in a way that we gets us all in by the turn.

Thinking about SPR and planning your hands around commitment is super important. However, as with any advice you get from books, you need to make adjustments according to your game conditions. Here are my thoughts about adjustments that need to be made w/r/t SPR and pot committment, based on playing at the microstakes.

1) Against the many players who play super straight forwardly and passively, your committment threshold should be much higher. Putting in over 1/3 of your stack and folding to a raise is really bad when there is a decent chance that you could be ahead, but against a fish who won't raise w/o the nuts, you can safely fold after putting even more of your stack in. Furthermore, playing pot control against such a player will prevent you from getting gobs of value from your hands.

2) Following from this, hitting a target SPR of 4-5 is not as crucial. Basically, your plan when you think you have the best hand against a passive fish is to bet bet bet and if you get raised, apply the Beluga Theorem. Obviously, if you can get an opponent to call a big preflop raise and lower your SPR, that is great, but you don't want to raise so big that you don't get any calls preflop.

Some things I would definitely take from the book in the micros are:

1) Understanding that in 3-bet pots or against really short stacks your SPR is going to be low and that you are going to generally be committed when you hit top pair/overpair.

2) Saying that you need a high SPR in order to play pocket pairs profitably is just another way of saying try to see a cheap flop (4xbb or less) against full stacks so that you have proper implied odds.

3) Understand when your opponents have committed themselves and don't try to bluff them. If you are getting a good price to draw and your opponent has put in 40% of his stack, you may have excellent implied odds.

4) Understand that there are more ways to win with pocket pairs than just hitting sets, particuarly when you are in position and the SPR is around 10. This is just one example of when you can leverage your stack to put an opponent who knows how to fold into a committment decision.

5) An SPR above 8-9 does suck for top pair, and that is basically the crux of the Beluga Theorem.