Quote:
Originally Posted by BroadwaySushy
I think you misunderstood my post. My fault, I should have explained it better. I wasn't debating the merits of raising (which I agree are not debateable), I was referring to the raise sizing.
The core reason to raise pre-flop is to gain the initiative and to rep a good hand, not to bloat the pot imo. A good hand pre-flop is not necessarily always a good hand post-flop. AK for example.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BroadwaySushy
Really?
I thought OP was losing money in raised pots because he wasn't hitting the flop hard against multiple callers. And by making big pre-flop raises but still getting multiple callers, he is losing more money than he would have with smaller raise sizes.
Smaller raise sizes would also allow him to open up his pre-flop range and play more hands that may hit the flop hard.
There's a bit going on here. Let's break it down.
First, the reasons to raise with a good hand is not to 'gain initiative' or 'rep a good hand'. At most, these are minor side effects of raising with a strong hand. 'Initiative' is not a reason to raise...does it even exist? What if they donk the flop, do they now have 'initiative'? 'Repping a good hand' is not a reason to raise with a good hand. It's a reason to raise when you are bluffing...a bluff is very much a valid action but not what we're talking about here.
The main reason is to value bet i.e. make a bet when we are probably ahead, hoping that our opponent will make a mistake by calling. In other words, we are both continuing to play with a larger pot, but he is probably behind. This is the single most important aspect of winning poker, if you are not making the pot bigger when you are likely ahead, you are a losing player, end of story.
There are other side effects of value raising. One is that you force opponents to fold their equity. 65o has some equity against AKss. By raising, if your opponent is not terrible, he folds that equity. Another is that, as mentioned by the above poster, you force your opponents to define their range. This can be very helpful when hand reading and it's a hell of a lot easier to hand read in a raised pot.
But that's not why we raise with strong hands...we do so because we are value betting.
Now, raise size is definitely something that can be discussed. Fundamentally, when we're ahead, we'd like to get the most possible into the pot that will still get called. However that needs to get tempered with various other considerations such as disguising bet sizes and how much we have left behind - it's probably better to get it all in rather than 60% of our stack for example. Some players advocate smaller raise sizes because they want to play a lot of pots in position against weaker players and they make it a consistent size so they tend to get callers.
But we should not want a smaller raise size when we have good hands just because we have not seen the flop yet. We don't want a cheap flop, we want an expensive flop, because that maximises the size of our opponent's mistakes. He is putting more money in when behind, that means a bigger share of the equity goes to us.
OP is not losing money due to correctly getting more money in with a strong hand multiway. This is winning poker. Yes he will miss a lot of flops, yes he will have to check-fold a lot of the time. Sometimes he will hit and have to check-fold due to action and that's fine. But he gets paid more when he wins because the pot is bigger preflop.
Think about this logically, either OP is a winner in pots he raised with strong hands or a loser. Now if he's a winner, he wins more if the pots are bigger and less if they are smaller. If he's a loser, he loses more if the pots are bigger and less if they are smaller. So the problem of losing is not to do with raise size, it's something else. If OP is losing, then he has a winning problem, not a raise size problem.
TL;DR value betting is poker 101
Last edited by WereBeer; 03-20-2018 at 05:03 PM.