Bet Sizing

[Gunnar]

Generally I open up with a standard 3BB raise say 6$ in a 1/2 game. I’ve noticed that some people raise pretty regularly to between 10 and 12 dollars or have similar 6+BB raises in the beginning of tournaments. Is there some merit to this? Or is this just kind of a mistake on their part?

[Ernie Morrison]

I think it’s a mistake on your part…. everyone will call a 4 dollar raise, but not a 10 dollar raise… and think of it as a way to protect your premium hand

[Dave Thompson]

My experience is that the bigger the stakes the smaller the standard opening raise in terms of big blinds. In a 1/2 or 1/3 cash game, around 5x (or even more) is very common. If you raise to 3x in that type of game, you’re likely to get 4 or 5 callers quite often. If your intention in raising is to isolate down to heads up or 3-handed most of the time, then you’ll probably need to go with a larger raise size in those games.

When you move to 2/5, the standard raise seems to go down a bit, but 4x and 5x are still pretty common. In a lot of 2/5 games, though, it seems that a 3x raise will often narrow the field sufficiently to be a good sizing.

I don’t play many tournaments, so I can’t speak to standard raise sizes in small stakes tournaments. I know that a raise sizing of between 2x and 2.5x has become very common in the high stakes tournaments in recent years, but I don’t know if that translates to small stakes. I’m guessing it doesn’t but I don’t have any real data to back that up.

Hope that helps. Cheers!

[Steven Young]

3X is the “correct” raise, but sometimes it takes adjustment depending on the table.

[Tom]

This standard raise size in tournaments seems to Change drastically over time. There was an excellent tweet going around for a while this summer that addressed each years change in bet sizing. It was pretty entertaining.

But yeah. The 2.5x seems to be the standard raise this year. That doesn’t mean you have to or should follow this. It’s just the trend right now. My tournament style tends to lean towards small pot poker so I’m a fan of the current trend.

Cash games are a completely different animal and I think a previous reply addressed this very well. It seems in 1/2 and 1/3 the open tends to be higher in relation to the amount of bigs. But it definitely depends on where you play and the table you’re at.

[Don, completely unremarkable and common]

From my limited experience I have settled in with a standard opening bet of $8 at 1/2 and $15 at 1/3. What says the group or am I wrong on this too?

[joel]

Steven,

I’m curious why you think 3x is the “correct size”? If I have AA and open to 5x or 6x and get called in 3 spots isn’t that good? At 1/2 if I see someone open to 3x, I laugh to myself and know they’re a fish. 3x isn’t going to thin the field at all. Anyone limping for 2 will call 6. So you don’t get protection for your big hands or much value from worse hands.

[Kevin Rex]

In general open sizes should be bigger in terms of BB at the lowest stakes live games and merge toward the 3x-ish rule as you move up in stakes. That doesn’t mean that 3x is “correct” but generally it lays the correct price to fold out opponents’ very marginal holdings, narrowing both the field and your opponents ranges. The reason you should be using a larger sizing at smaller stakes is because players are inelastic with their continuation ranges, meaning that – all else equal – it takes larger bet sizes to get opponents to fold.

I generally open with a $10 size in 1/2 games, $20 in 2/5, and $30 in 5/10. These are certainly not hard and fast rules. In Los Angeles, for example, it would not be unreasonable to use even bigger sizings like $25 for 2/5 and $40 for 5/10 as opponents tend to be more action oriented and will continue with wider ranges of hands.

While it’s not “wrong” per say to use a $6 open at 1/2, I doubt that it’s optimal.

[Author]

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