Pre-flop Raise Sizes

Interesting discussion on hero raising with nothing (based on bet sizing), and villain calling with nothing (after "spotting" a bluff), including significant discussion on pre-flop raise sizes

PokerStars Game #19573091131: Tournament #101766367, $20+$2 Hold'em No Limit - Level VIII (150/300) - 2008/08/12 - 20:48:45 (ET)
Table '101766367 15' 9-max Seat #3 is the button
Seat 1: badbeatman06 (5900 in chips)
Seat 2: konami33 (2680 in chips)
Seat 3: feli1211 (3645 in chips)
Seat 4: mr.5mokey420 (11124 in chips)
Seat 5: icurpoo (13902 in chips)
Seat 6: ForceHeaven (2010 in chips)
Seat 7: garage13 (4058 in chips)
Seat 8: gonshorek (19826 in chips)
Seat 9: nickmc22 (10167 in chips)
badbeatman06: posts the ante 25
konami33: posts the ante 25
feli1211: posts the ante 25
mr.5mokey420: posts the ante 25
icurpoo: posts the ante 25
ForceHeaven: posts the ante 25
garage13: posts the ante 25
gonshorek: posts the ante 25
nickmc22: posts the ante 25
mr.5mokey420: posts small blind 150
icurpoo: posts big blind 300
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to badbeatman06 [Ah Jc]
ForceHeaven: folds
garage13: folds
gonshorek: folds
nickmc22: folds
badbeatman06: raises 375 to 675
konami33: folds
feli1211: folds
mr.5mokey420: calls 525
icurpoo: folds
*** FLOP *** [4s 6d Qc]
mr.5mokey420: bets 1800
badbeatman06: raises 3400 to 5200 and is all-in
mr.5mokey420: calls 3400
*** TURN *** [4s 6d Qc] [Ks]
*** RIVER *** [4s 6d Qc Ks] [9c]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
mr.5mokey420: shows [Ac Td] (high card Ace)
badbeatman06: shows [Ah Jc] (high card Ace - King+Queen+Jack kicker)
badbeatman06 said, "dsfhusdhflsjkd"
badbeatman06 collected 12275 from pot
badbeatman06 said, "how freaking sick"
badbeatman06 said, "am i"
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 12275 | Rake 0
Board [4s 6d Qc Ks 9c]
Seat 1: badbeatman06 showed [Ah Jc] and won (12275) with high card Ace
Seat 2: konami33 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 3: feli1211 (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet) Seat 4: mr.5mokey420 (small blind) showed [Ac Td] and lost with high card Ace
Seat 5: icurpoo (big blind) folded before Flop
Seat 6: ForceHeaven folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 7: garage13 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 8: gonshorek folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 9: nickmc22 folded before Flop (didn't bet)

This particular hand lead to a lot of discussion on pre-flop raise sizes, and player reads

In fact, you don't HAVE to steal blinds at all to be profitable (not all the time anyway), especially not early. And late in tournaments, your standard preflop raise naturally gets ratcheted down some anyway.

Here's the thing about a smaller preflop raise that is true: you DO have to be involved in more hands. Your average pot size is extremely small.

Let's look at a hand of 3x versus 2.25x preflop raise (personally, my standard raise is 4x, but I play a LOT fewer hands generally, and mostly cash games as opposed to MTT anyway).

Anyway, 3x vs 2.25x with 1 caller. Your 2.25x raised pot has 1.5x less chips on the flop, that's 2.25+2.25+blinds (1.5) = 6. On the other hand, 3x has 3+3+blinds = 7.5.

A 1.5xbb difference doesn't sound like much, but this is just from preflop. Now when we bet again on the turn, in your 2.25x pot, we have to bet smaller because the pot is smaller. 6 is 80% of 7.5, so our bet has to be 80% smaller than if we were to have raised to 3. So where we might bet 5xbb (or 2/3rds pot) in the 7.5 pot, we need to only be betting 4xbb in the 6 pot. If called, this is the difference between a 17.5 pot and a 14 pot. The difference has changed from 1.5xbb to 3.5xbb.

The same math can be continued out for the turn and the river. Essentially the point is, a smaller preflop raise means a smaller total pot. The general thesis being, you have to play numerous small pots in order to equal the income of fewer large pots.

Now, both styles are acceptable and profitable, however play numerous small pots favors the player stronger at post-flop play while playing fewer, larger pots favors the player stronger at pre-flop play.

The general argument here is LAG vs TAG. Generally speaking, unless you're a proven post-flop wizard, you should be leaning a lot more toward TAG than LAG."

. Cash and early MTT are the most similiar because of the deeper stacks. Late in an MTT stacks are way shallower so the smaller raise is just as effective. With average stacks around 20BBs a 2.25-2.5BB raise constitutes 12.5-15% of most peoples stacks. If we are called OOP, IMO flat calling in position with a wide range of hands would be a major leak here on the part of our opponents as their ability to outplay us postflop is severly hampered by a cbet committing us to the pot. Because of this they should be 3 betting most of the hands they are going to play. Flat calling also opens up a squeeze play which our opponent will not want to deal with (this is why flatting a monster in position can be profitable).

This 3 betting idea is even more exaggerated when our opponent is calling out of the blinds because now they dont even have position, and are going to be forced to c/f alot of flops.

In short the smaller raises save us chips when we are not strong enough to call these 3 bets and allow our opponents to make mistakes.

Also, regarding the idea that posting a hand makes chad a bad post flop player is wrong imo. Everyone, even the best post flop players in the world have room to get better and looking for the input of others is just one step to making improvements.

Your comment is true though that as a weaker player its better to keep the pots bigger. I just believe that chad is strong enough that playing big pots is -EV with a an aggro style."

But the whole point of my post was to explain the difference between small preflop raising and larger preflop raising.

Yes, 4x can seem excessive (especially when you're used to 3x as standard). The primary reason I use 4x early instead of 3x is because I've got FAR more experience playing cash game and raising to 4x instead of 3x lets me play the early stages of tournaments far more like cash games and help me build a bigger stack to use as a crutch to make up for my late tournament inexperience (relative to some of our MTT experts here). And it works for me.

But that said, in my post, I didn't say that raising more preflop is better than raising less. I explained the different post-flop and meta-game strategies behind both. I also illustrated why a smaller preflop raise means a smaller total pot.

If your standard preflop raise early in tournaments is 2.25x, you have to win nearly twice as many pots to build as big of a stack as the player raising to 4x (assuming the same amount of callers).

Now, we could also assume that 2.25x will generally get more callers to the flop than the 4x. Now you don't have to win more pots if you're on average getting a pot size of about 9-10x just from preflop action (which is the size after a 4x raise + 4x call + 1.5x in blinds = 9.5x), but you still have to see more flops because there are extra players in the pot which reduces your odds of winning from the flop. Even if you're the best post-flop player in the world, you'll win heads up flops at a greater rate than 3-way pots.

The point I'm trying to make is that preflop play can most definitely not be ignored. It is easier to learn, teach, and employ excellent preflop play than it is post-flop play (post-flop comes mostly from experience, but any great blackjack player can be taught excellent preflop play without having ever played the game before).

Therefore, you should never ignore commentary about your preflop play. And if you feel comfortable playing 2-3 times as many flops as what you have to play with tighter preflop play and bigger preflop raises, then fine. I'm just trying to make sure that we understand that that is what we're getting into when we raise less preflop.

EDIT: By the way, how all of this is even remotely relative to the hand? Generally speaking, the larger your preflop raise is, the narrower villains preflop calling range is, and that helps us read villain's post-flop play, relative to what he could've possibly called with, determine the likelihood that he's bluffing. For all we know, he's holding Q6."

I'll also throw this in. If your standard raise is larger and you're playing fewer hands, this play works significantly better because you can even get a solid player holding AQ to fold afraid that you have QQ, KK, AA.

I'm trying not to harp on this too much.

But contrast the tight player who can buy some big pots with bluffs to the loose player who buys a lot of small pots with aggression. The loose player wins his biggest pots because he's convinced the entire table that he never has anything good so his monsters are more likely to get called. If you're seeing lots of flops, you shouldn't be making this sort of bluff very often at all. As you can see, villain was willing to call you with AT. I hope that means he would've also called you with A4, which would've beat you. And I think that has to be part of the lesson learned here.

Despite winning the hand, look at what villain called you with. If you make this play with AJ, are you also making it with A9 which loses here? And if Villain makes this call with AT, then he certainly also makes the call with AK, which wins here (even if K doesn't come out on board).

The fact that Villain was willing to call you with AT makes me lean far more toward this being a bad bluff on your part rather than a genius play. Yes, you got it all in with the best hand, and yes you had villain drawing dead to 3 outs, but your Ace-high bluff was called. If villain is willing to call you with a mere Ace-high as well, then he should be willing to call you with a hand like bottom pair because he is calling because he believes you are bluffing.

If we made the play sincerely believing villain would have folded, then I guess we can still consider it a good play. But if we sincerely believed villain was going to fold, yet he called us with AT on a Q64 board (no pair, no draws better than runner-runner), then we have made a severely bad read."

This is fine if you've got a lot of poker experience and are great at post-flop play. But if you're not good at post-flop play, then raising small preflop means you're having to play too many hands post-flop, and the worse you are at post-flop play and the more hands you're playing post-flop, the more you open yourself up to making mistakes (like this hand) which hinder your opportunity to advance deep in the tournament.

First, you can't talk about how a post-flop continuation bet would pot-commit you in this situation because you don't even make a post-flop continuation bet. You check, villain overbets, and you shove all-in. You were pot committed as soon as you checked and villain bet, because it looks to me like you decided that you want this pot before you considered whether or not villain would let you have this pot.

Second, I will reiterate and reiterate again that the smaller your preflop raise, the more pots you need to be involved in post-flop which requires you to be an excellent post-flop player. This hand here is quite egregious evidence that you're not such a great post-flop player because Villain called your bluff with only ace-high. You just happened to outkick him by one. As I stated before, Villain should certainly be calling you with A4 here also...which can easily see this flop, since you make such a small preflop raise. You failed to identify a steal-able pot yet tried stealing it anyway. This says to me that your post-flop skills are not good enough for you to be playing in enough pots that a small 2.25x preflop raise requires."

Second, no. You don't have to call every 3-bet preflop. Unless your first raise pot commits you anyway, you NEVER have to call a 3-bet. Never. And if you think that you do, you're not a very disciplined poker player.

Third, you get 3-betted less often. Why do you get 3-betted less often? Because you're playing tighter. The amount you raise preflop and the frequency of your preflop raising should be connected. If I raised 4x but raised it that much 20% of the time, then yes, I wouldn't fare very well. But I play fewer, yet larger pots, and against fewer opponents post-flop.

Forth, half of the time I'm raising 4x and get 3-bet, I'm ready to jump out of my seat, because most of the time I'm raising in the early stages of tournaments when the blinds are still low enough for me to raise 4x, I'm raising with a hand that I really just want to push all the chips in. So after his 3-bet, an all-in isn't that far off, and I've usually got the best hand preflop."

By the way, please reread the above paragraph and note that I mentioned (and bolded) the word early.

I'm also still wondering what evidence of my play skill you have to compare to your own play skill. Kind of curious as to whether you're humble enough to admit that ANYONE on SurfersPoker is a better player than you.

And I'm not sure that I'd call my posts preaching. Why do you? Because they're long and in-depth, and clearly explain my reasoning?

Now I'm getting to the point of asking why you even posted this thread and this hand history in the first place. You admitted that no one is going to convince you that you made a mistake in this hand. If that's the case, you've posted in the wrong section, and I'd like to point you toward the bad beats and wow hands. This kind of is a wow hand. I mean, AKQJ high beats AKQT high. That doesn't really happen that often, especially when the K wasn't even there when all the chips went on on the flop.

The ultimate point still remains: your BLUFF (and if your check-raise all-in is anything but a bluff, please enlighten me) got called.

If your bluff got called by a hand top-pair or better, then I would simply say that you just made a bad read and bluffed at the wrong time. It happens to all of us.

But the important point here, and I want you to read this and think about this, is that you got called by Ace-high. Your re-raise over an overbet all-in got called by ace high. This says more than you just made a bad read and bluffed at the wrong time. This says you did not establish the proper table image in order for this move to have any chance of working except against the biggest of fish.

I'm making this points over and over again not because I've got a big ego and like to prove my points correct. That's not why I post here. Rather, I'm reiterating this points because I want to make you guys better poker players. I want to help you guys think about poker in the right way. If I didn't, why would I spend so much time writing out my posts? Heck, I hardly ever post any where but in the strategy section of these forums.

And it gets frustrating when some kid gets in here thinking he's the next Daniel Negreanu and posts hand histories not because he legitimately wants to better himself, but because he thinks its funny that people try to help him play better because he's disillusioned into thinking he already plays perfect poker.

By the way, please reread that one paragraph where I bolded the word "early," and make sure you recognize that I'm talking about early stages of tournaments when your stack size is quite large in proportion to blind sizes."

This is middle stages. There are actually a couple of things we can do here.

If we want to limit pot size, or our investment, we can actually just limp here. AJ isn't that strong of a hand, and there's nothing to stop us from bluffing at the flop.

If we're going to raise, I think we need to be raising 800-900 here. Yes, I know, 800 isn't 3x. But we're starting to get later in the tournament, it's okay to start ratcheting down some, but 675 is hardly a min-raise. The extra 125 chips from ourselves and opponent, well, that's nearly another big blind in the pot preflop.

It's also important to keep our raise size consistent though, and then gradually start to decrease our raise size over the course of the tournament, so this is a strategy you have to start from the time you're dealt the first hand. It's a meta-game question. Not a per-hand question necessarily.

And when you play the whole tournament playing slightly fewer hand and seeing slightly fewer flops, you get significantly more respect.

I don't mind necessarily limping here, and I don't mind raising to 800, but a raise to 675 is like a limp that costs too much and makes the pot too big."

The difference between raising 3x and 4x early in MTTs usually means about 1-2 fewer callers but a pot of about the same size. Instead of 3-4 callers on average, I get 1-2 callers on average. This makes post-flop play extremely easier, and my aggression means I can win a lot of these pots.

I'm not raising that often though. I don't get involved in a lot of hands early. A lot of table dynamic things can effect my raise size and frequency.

I'd be willing to bet that you haven't ever tried TAG 4xBB raise early in MTTs. On PokerStars, we're talking about the first 20-40 minutes usually.

And we're also talking about only raising with a range like TT+, AQ+, AJs. That range can be expanded depending on the table. If I'm going to expand my range, I'll decrease my raise size.

It's not a question of whether or not it works or if it's a good strategy. It's only a question of style. And the tighter you play, the less emphasis there is on good post-flop play.

And as I already stated, good post-flop play can't be taught as easily as good pre-flop play. Good post-flop play is hard to teach on a hand-by-hand basis. It relies far more heavily on table image and reads. It comes through experience.

And here you are admitting that you sometimes run into trouble post-flop. That's fine. The best way to knock that down some is by playing tighter and raising more preflop. You shouldn't be so tight that you never run into post-flop struggles, or else you're not challenging yourself and not learning to gradually loosen up your game.

But the tighter you play preflop, the easier it is post-flop, and the more success you'll have. And if you play tighter preflop, you have to raise more preflop to make up for not playing as many hands."

Actually, you are 3-bet more often when your raise is smaller. This is for numerous reasons. First, it goes back to the fact that you're raising more often when you make the smaller raise. This means your range of raising hands is wider which makes villain more likely to 3-bet because it means he is more likely to hold a hand which he feels can beat your hand.

However, what evechad is demonstrating is that when you are 3-bet when raising to 675, the 3-bet is smaller (1900 instead of 2400 is his example) which means when you 4-bet all in, villain has worse odds for calling and is more likely to fold and give you the pot.

This is true.

But if we're going to accept the tighter preflop play with bigger raises, our range of hands to raise preflop is just as tight as villain's range of 3-betting hands. When this is the case, we don't necessarily mind a situation where villain wants to call our 4-bet--we just gotta know it's pretty much a coin flip."