But the OP is losing money. That's why he made the post, I assume. Either that or he is lying.

I was merely suggesting a different approach that might be worth trying as the large size raises don't seem to be working for him in his particular game. Instead of waiting forever for a premium hand and making a large raise, why not lower the raise size and play a wider range. Pocket pairs, suited connectors etc. Then value bet hard when he does hit a big hand. Looks like he will get called all the way down anyway. Print money, rinse and repeat.

Also, he gets paid more by value betting a big hand post-flop, not because he bloated the pot pre-flop.

Sure but he's not losing money because of putting large amounts of money in when ahead.

I'm not arguing with the notion that OP can try a different approach. Maybe his range is incredibly tight and he's not getting any action because of it. That's one possibility as to why he's losing, if he is losing - like you I guess he probably is.

I don't have a problem with the idea of playing more pots by lowering raise size, though that's probably not the best solution for a losing player, it's certainly a viable approach to poker. What I do take issue with is incorrect thinking. If your thinking is sound, then the strategy you use will likely be sound. If you base a strategy on incorrect thinking, you are building a house upon sand. That's why I'm taking the time to explain what a value bet is and why it's so important. We primarily bet our strong hands in order to increase the size of the pot when we're likely ahead, not to gain initiative, not rep big hands or even narrow ranges.

This is wildly incorrect. If a pot is $80 instead of $12, then if we get called with a 50% post sized bet OTF, we got the villain to put in $40 instead of $6...boom, that's +$34 which is several hours profit for a winning 1/2 player. Now there is a tendency for players to look at absolute dollars in a bet instead of relationship to pot size so we can make the argument that $40 gets some folds where $6 won't, however there is no way that betting an $80 pot when ahead makes no extra money over betting a $12 pot.

I don't know. I'd rather get my money in when I've got a big hand, not before. By big hand I mean bigger than one pair.

There's a saying which is quite applicable. "One pair hands either win a small pot or lose a big one". That's especially true in multi-way pots. And that's what we are discussing here.

So you don't 3bet with AA preflop because it's only one pair, right?

LOL. Of course I 3bet AA .

But 3bet pots are a different beast altogether than the single raised multi-way pots we are talking about here.

1) You are announcing to the table that you have a premium hand.

2) The flop is likely to be heads up or you take it down pre-flop.

How is an open raise tailored towards the larger end any different from the 3bet then? In both cases we bloat the pot (and incidentally imply we have a strong hand and reduce the number of callers)...you said this was incorrect before seeing the flop with a one pair hand but now somehow it's mandatory and basic. Is it because we have AA? Can we 3bet KK as well before seeing a flop?

So, are you telling me that you don't react any differently to a 3bet than you do to an open raise, even a large one? You would put the villain on exactly the same range of hands?

I definitely don't lose a lot of money in these situations. And this post is very situational as I don't run across this all of the time. But when I do sit at a table with people like that, it seems like when I make a pfr with good hands and don't smash the flop it is a slow bleed all night. I am generally still profitable at these games, but I was mainly curious if sometimes it would be MORE profitable to adjust to the play of the table by raising less and seeing more flops. Basically investing some of the wasted money of raising preflop and check folding, into playing a slightly wider range and getting to see more flops to potentially get paid big on a hand that may fly in under the radar.

People seem under the impression that you cannot open more hands, it's not forbidden to use different sizings against people who don't notice. Nothing wrong with raising to $10 with 89s and to $35 with AA if they are inelastic with their calling.

"but that would make me exploitable"

Do you think they are exploiting you when you get 5 calls preflop for $20+ when you only play good hands? No, they're not. But unlike 89s, AA (or even AK for that matter) wants to get as much money in the middle preflop when it has an equity advantage and so you lose out by not raising as big as gets called.

OK, so you are on a sticky table, holding AA in SB, one raiser and 3 overcalls ahead. Your standard 3! will get an overcall from the never fold raiser and the over-callers will likely come along.

Do you 3! or not? Do you make any adjustments to your 3!?

... Please quote "PHellmuth where applicable for copyright reasons"

Some pretty interesting comments here for sure.

1) Although maybe not as 'integrally' as we look at it, position is something that all low-limit players 'feel' the power of. "He didn't bet, so I will." "I act after him, if I hit the next card I can raise his bet so I'll call here with bottom pair." For whatever reason they feel 'safer' with weaker holdings when they have position.

2) The standard 'bet more-get less callers' can work at some tables, but is anyone at the table really deep enough to play a game where 10x is the opening bet?

3) Whenever I'm in this spot I really consider the limp-3bet a little wider routine. I get a lot of comments like "You don't have anything but I fold."

4) When I sense that no one at the table is opening because they are counting on me to do it for them, I just go into 100% limp mode for about 2 orbits or until someone says something/notices. I might even verbalize 'call' just to get them to notice it faster.

Taking the Nit's approach ... open less and for more ... is just setting you up for beats IMO. If there are even 1-2 players at the table that follow or can pick up on the change in your play they will attempt to set you up IMO.

More to your question ... We don't do anything 'ALWAYS' in poker. You put a plan together than you think is the best way to deal with a spot and/or try to set up the spot you want to be in. If you are more comfortable in HU spots, then you need to do what it takes to create them ... and back off when playing the more uncomfortable mutl-way pots.

Some of the biggest mistakes in poker are by playing your cards 'the same way' and not taking into consideration the spot. More (and quite costly) mistakes are made when a player tries to 'make up' for a mistake on the next street when they actually did play a spot differently and it didn't go as planned.

Although the math says every hand is it's own .. there are just some nights where you just aren't hitting .. nothing wrong with backing down the throttle a bit. GL

Short answer: In the exact scenario you described I'm 3bet shoving all-in. Easy game.

Next question.

And it's a completely different scenario to the subject of raise sizes when you are first to open the pot. 3bet pots are different for a number of reasons which should be fairly obvious, I would have thought.

Thomas Mitchell's "No Limit Hold'em - beating the Micro Stakes" will help one to play those loose full ring games better and with confidence. It is possible or likely that a bigger preflop raise might get more what you might want in live games. I might be a bit more liberal in calling preflop with implied hands if the others (involved) are so loose but mainly if they are also deep (100, 200 big bets), that might not be the case. The no-continuous bet with a miss isn't really an issue even if it would be a heads up flop, if they tend to call loose postflop (I made a calculation of this many years ago and it turns a profit).

OK so we shouldn't raise with a good hand with the objective of making the pot bigger without having a better hand than one pair, because we need to see a flop in order to commit more money...unless we have a very good one pair hand, in which case we should put all of our money into the middle so we can build a very big pot with a one pair hand before seeing the flop.

Seems logical.

The pot is already big in your scenario and we are a favorite against a maximum of four players. Plus we are OOP which makes it harder to play post-flop. So yeah, I'm getting it in.

Like I said, that's a completely different scenario to an unopened pot with an unknown number of players yet to potentially respond to your open raise. But using your logic we should raise big with any hand we think is worth open raising with, or even shove all-in. That's building a big pot. Right?

Say I want to open raise with J10s for example, you are saying I should raise big to build a big pot. Right? How do I know I've got a better hand than the players still to enter the pot?

Right so you agree we should build the biggest possible pot with the best possible one pair hand without seeing a flop but for some reason you don't want to build a big pot with other one pair hands because we haven't seen a flop yet. This is not logical thinking.

I didn't mention stack sizes, so let's say we're $1000 deep in a 1/2 game, and villains opened to $10. Are you still shoving? Are you 3betting or not?

Leaving aside other considerations, when we think we have the better hand, we should open as big as we can possibly can and still get called by worse. This is value betting and it's the most basic aspect of winning poker.

JTss is not strong enough to say we likely always have the best hand when we open so I'm not saying we should always raise big with it. What is our position? Effective stacks? Table conditions? This is a very situational question.

This is flawed pre-flop thinking imo. By opening big we are forcing other players to play correctly by folding everything but their best hands. We want to keep players in with their junk, not drive them out.

I always thought of a value bet as a post-flop term that applies when we have more information on the possible range of hands an opponent holds. How can you value bet when your opponent hasn't acted yet and you have no idea what he is holding? It's more of a speculative bet than a value bet. Especially if we have a wide opening range.

Hence 'call with worse'. If they only call with a better range, then it's not a good raise.

A value bet applies any time we think we likely have the better hand and includes open raising. If we have AQss UTG, we probably have the best hand at the table. If it folds to us on the button and we have KJo, we probably have the best hand at the table. Of course if we get 3bet, we may need to evaluate in the face of this new information, but that's the case any time we don't have the nuts whether preflop or post.

So, you vary your raise sizes according to hand strength then?

I usually, but not always, don’t in order to avoid sizing tells. But because my raising range tends to be strong, I size towards the larger end of the table norm.

Bingo

If a 7x raise gets 4 callers, balance or avoiding tells is really not what you're looking for.

I mean - statistically this is correct - because in the total possible combination of hands out there, AQs beats most of them - at the same time - I consider this thinking very dangerous because pre-flop AQs is still behind any pair and as far as "best" - it's only marginally stronger than TJs, for instance.

If your 3-bet range is so narrow that everyone immediately knows you have QQ,KK or AA with it, your 3-bet range is too narrow.

It’s not dangerous thinking at all. The point is we should raise to build a pot because we probably have the best hand, not that we should get married to our hole cards regardless of future action or board texture. We still have to play poker unless the table folds.

Also AQss is way stronger than JTss...I don’t have access to my database right now but I’m sure my win rate is a lot higher with AQss.

Fwiw, I have a test program that shows me, AI PF, AQs wins 40% of the time against three random hands, and JTs wins 34%.

34%/29% vs four.

Sure, but after you raise big and miss the flop a few times suddenly your stack is not looking too healthy at all.

These guys don't like to fold remember.