What variables do you consider when picking the size of your cbets?

My range vs theirs, flop wetness, how many players, SPR, the lunar cycle, etc

I think the lunar cycle's an underrated reason to pick a size. It's rarely, if ever, talked about.

I agree with all of what Renek said. Multiway pot where you're not going to bet often = bet big. HU pot where you're going to bet often = bet small.

Let me be more specific.

On flops where we have a range advantange, I've seem people arguing that we should be betting big, which makes sense, cause we have more very strong value hands that can get value from a lot of hands in villain's range. Latelly, though, I've seem a lot of people arguing about betting really small and really often in these spots, which also makes sense, as villain shouldn't have many hands that can call big bets with and therefore we don't get much value.

So, what is more important, our range or villain's range?


Flop wetness is also an issue for me. People usually cbet bigger on wet flops for value/protection which doesn't really makes sense to me. If we bet big for value we're inflating the pot in a spot where our value hands have a relatively high probability of being outdrawn by villain's call range, if we're not behing already. If it's for protection it also doesn't work cause villain shouldn't be fold, at least on the flop, any of the high equity hands we want to protect against. The idea of protection when villain isn't folding anything that has equity against our hand doesn't really seems to be right to me.

you open utg and bb defends
flop comes AK2r
you should have two sizes here in theory - 30% and close to pot/70% doesnt really matter

its up to you to decide which hands fit in where e.g AK would be a small bet for me whilst 22 wouldnt
89s would be a small bet and QJbdfd wouldnt

However, it does indeed make life simpler to bet small with ALL OF YOUR HANDS sinc ethe loss of ev vs. having two sizes is probably tiny
weirdly, pio seems to bet huge on 2broadways flop ip and does little small cbetting...

I think that considering villain's folding frequency vs various sizes is a good start. On boards like AJ6r when I'm in position (e.g. BTNvBB), I often c-bet 2x pot for lolz. What is villain gonna do about it? He never has the nuts, and his Broadway draws don't want to pay a large amount to see the turn, so I try to pick the size that villain's range least wants to face.
It's the same principle with river spots. If villain seems really capped, then he hates to face a big bet... so you should often make a big bet. If he's got lots of hands (bluff-catchers) that will "sigh-call" a small bet, then you can bet small for thin value at a high frequency.

Naturally there are boards that villain can continue on more often (e.g. the middling/wet flops). On those, villain can continue even vs a big bet, so you should often do the opposite and bet small.

A quick shortcut is to work out what size the bulk of villain's range doesn't want to be faced with, and use that.

All that said, poker is much more complicated than it looks. A QT7r flop might look pretty similar to a Q96r, but - at equilibrium - the strategies for each board can be radically different. The bots/solvers often pick sizes that make hardly any sense to me and I can't work out why they bet big in one spot and small in another, if they look pretty similar. :/