There is a new crusher in my player pool that I have been railing and he or she uses small, less than pot size raises vs Preflop raiser cbets on certain board textures.

Lets take a few hands for example.


Example 1.

Hero is UTG and raises AAxx.

Flop is Q23 rainbow. Hero cbets and gets raised for 2.5x his cbet. Hero..?


Example 2.

Hero is UTG and raises QhJhQs2s.

Flop is Qc5h3h. Hero cbets and gets raised for 2.5x his cbet. Hero..?



I've thought about this crusher's strategy all day and how effective it is when employed correctly.

Raising less than pot allows you to add in more bluffs to your raising range, which a lot of players do not have enough of at these stakes.

Doing it on the flop as opposed to the turn is a "cheap" way to threaten their whole stack without you yourself committing a lot of money.

What do you guys think? How would you employ such a strategy? How would you defend against one?

You can take the range I give to you and take a look of the composition of your range: 25% overpairs, 16% toppairs, 18% worse pairs, set and top2 around 5%. Hand that I would put into the check-calling range are toppairs+sidevalue and nonnutted sets, sometimes overpairs+sidevalue like oesd or gs. So cbetting is the rest basically without the total crap part of your range, that goes into check-fold. Interesting would be also, which coldcalling range villains has. In general on dry flops I would just call most of mediocre hands like overpair (preferably with some sidevalue) to the raise and fold to a turnbet. If he is aggressive on turns too you can mix in strong hands into your bet-call like bottomset or toptwopair to checkraise turns. As this board does not contain lots of bottom and middle set, you must expand your valuerange, next category beside top2pair I would bet-call then check-raise is exactly the hand you have: Aces.

I would not slowplay topset unless you are 100% sure he is going to bet the turn after your flop-call. So either you make a small reraise (your range is totally polarized, no sets but topset are likely) or you lead out big on any turncard to deny freecards. On micros I made the experience it can still be better just to pot-reraise and get it in because villains are aware that topset is somehow unlikely and just get it in anyways. But im not sure if that impression is correct.

I would not start to adapt this small raising strategy, in general you gain a lot by folding out hands. If people start to defend against those small raises like just calling, many bad players do so, that'd be bad. Of course be aware of opponents range, if he represents a very polarized range nuts only or nothin(on paired turn ie), you can make small reraises, you need the correct read though to make such moves.

1 : fold

2 : raise pot

depends a lot if you are IP or OOP and from which position villian called.
its quite different if you get x/raised from a BB or a SB on a Q32r board

in both hands i would call, especially if you are IP
1. hand with a 3b you fold out all his bluffs and you isolate yourself vs hands that crush you

2. hand with a top set a Qh fd im just calling, keeping all his weak draws in and jamming Turn

I think this strategy is really good vs most players, especially 150bb+ deep so we have more room to barrel and people will play back less with a bigger stack. Majority of regs cbet way too much and this is a great way to exploit that. Easiest way to defend against that strategy is to cbet polarized, x/C more or xback depending if IP/OOP and call his raise wider then usual

Why raising less than pot allow for more bluffs?

You don't over commit to bluffs with a less than pot sized raise.