Learn to size your bets correctly in poker

The reason I decided to write this little piece about correct bet sizing is a simple one. Making incorrectly sized bets is quite probably one of the most frequent mistakes poker players make, and yes, it is more frequent than the playing of too many starting hands, and the chasing of draws way too far. The way to tell the difference between a good player and someone who is a decent TAG but not quite there yet is through the size of their bets. Beware of the player who always seems to make the right size bet in every hand in which he’s involved.

Now that you know what a plague incorrect bet sizing is: don’t fall into the same trap yourself. Here are a few tips to help you avoid losing money on incorrect bet-sizing, as well as ending up looking like a donk.

The most important thing when you’re about to make a bet is to know thy goal. That’s correct. You need to know exactly what you’re looking to achieve with that bet. Are you making a value bet or are you trying to make your opponent(s) fold. Sometimes a bet can be a probing move too, one meant to make your opponent reveal his true colors through his reaction. Weird as it may sound, most players think little in terms of goals when it comes to betting. Online poker interfaces make all those half-pot and ¾-pot buttons handily available, so all players have to do is to mash some buttons, which is exactly what most of them do indeed do.
Once you set your goals and establish the bet sizes you deem correct in certain situations, it is time to spare a thought or two on mixing up your game. Don’t focus so much on your bet sizing that you forget to mix things up a little. That’ll only make you easy to read and in the end: quite predictable.
Suppose your goal is to make your opponent fold. While you aim to be as intimidating as possible through your bet, you need to keep other things in sight too, like potential damage control. Your opponent may have a hand, in which case you will not be able to intimidate him regardless of the size of your bet. Therefore, the rule of thumb here is to bet as little as possible to get the job done. How much is just enough to result in a fold from your opponent? That’s your task to determine. Mind you, I’m not urging you to min bet every single time you intend to make someone fold. That would be the surest way of turning you into a fish. What I am saying though is that no matter how enticing that “bet pot” button looks, you may want to tone it down a little and hit the ½ pot button instead. More often than not, opponents who can be persuaded to fold will do so when faced with a smaller than full pot size bet just as well as they do when faced with a full pot-size one. By showing a little bit of restraint, you’ll save money when you do get called.
The other scenario is when you make a value bet: you aim to persuade your opponent call. This one’s a little more sensitive matter. Your goal here is to make the largest possible bet that your opponent will call. How exactly does this translate strategy-wise? In the long-run, you’ll be better off making bigger bets that get called less often than you are making smaller bets with a higher probability of yielding a call.

Your reading skills will be extremely important in this case. Some players find the pot odds offered by smaller bets impossible to resist. Others will always regard a large bet as a sign that the bettor has the nuts. Again, you are directly responsible for determining how your opponents will react to differently sized bets that you fire their way, and for making the right move based on your reads.
The weird thing about proper bet-sizing is that pretty much everyone knows the theory around it – which is far from rocket science anyway – yet people fail to put that knowledge to use time and time again. Knowing something is one thing, putting that knowledge to use is different. Think about it like this: all it takes to take your game to the next level is to spare a couple of extra thoughts on each bet that you make. That’s really not a whole lot of effort and it does indeed pay great dividends.

The shortest way to poker success

Everyone is looking for the shortest way to achieving success at the poker table. Of course, I needn’t even tell you that most every new player who signs up and hits an online poker table for the first time in his life, thinks (or at least secretly hopes) that he is some kind of outstanding poker genius, someone for whom the game and its intricacies will fall into place naturally. Legends and hearsay about people who make it big overnight at the online poker tables abound, but then again, one can’t really hit a poker forum where 99% of the posters are not highly successful players. How reliable is all that information though? Most probably, not very. You see, us humans have a way of creating legends about our overachievers. There are all sorts of clichés about scientists “happening” over their most significant discoveries at a moment’s notice, as if by chance. The same goes for poker players, and because poker is a game with a significant luck factor involved, it’s so much more believable. The problem is though, that the same way those scientists we like consider lucky albeit smarter than average bastards were everything but that, successful poker players don’t effortlessly spring out of anonymity either.

Most of the major scientific breakthroughs throughout the history of mankind have been the results of years and years of study, discipline, hard work and number crunching. Since the analogy I’m trying to draw here is quite obvious: the same is required for poker success.
Like it or not, there are no shortcuts to online poker success. I’m a poker player indeed, but I’m nowhere near the level some of my friends have managed to achieve at the virtual green felt. The reason I never managed to break out of the mold of the recreational player is that I firmly believe I can make money EASIER doing something else, rather than playing poker at the level it requires to reward efforts with success. I can tell you that being truly successful at poker takes time, tons and tons of energy, grit and the ability to take massive downswings in stride and to bounce back from bankruptcy time and time again.

When you look at a poker player like Daniel Negreanu, all you see is a mostly smiley face, always radiating a weird type of charisma, and beyond that as average a person as you can possibly imagine. The problem is you don’t see the real engine that keeps that system ticking: the thousands upon thousands of hours spent at the green felt, at the online and the live tables. The countless heartbreaks and above all, the ability to take a punch to the face, then ask for another one and keep going. You don’t see that, and that’s the real secret behind the scenes in the case of pretty much every “name” pro you so envy and aim to be like.

Poker is a game built on math and if you sport a superior IQ, you’re probably starting with an advantage, or are you? According to many of the experts, success and IQ are only loosely correlated in life in general and in poker in particular. What that means is that a superior IQ doesn’t guarantee you anything at the green felt. At the end of the day, what it comes down to is grit and determination. You have to be willing to turn poker into your second nature, otherwise you odds for success in today’s increasingly competitive poker world will remain close to nil.

Daniel Negreanu and his online poker antics

It’s quite unfathomable to imagine someone even remotely involved with poker who does not know Daniel Negreanu. The Canadian, also known at the poker table as Kid Poker, has built a career, a stellar reputation and the equivalent of what mere mortals consider “a fortune” several times over, through skill, spunk and stamina. He is one of the best known ambassadors of the game and – unlike some of the other similar-caliber poker personalities, he’s pretty much liked by everyone. Never the one to back out of a crazy live poker confrontation, Negreanu is currently second on the all-time tournament money list, and it’s difficult to even begin to comprehend the amount of money he’d amassed in high stakes cash games. Due to his easy-going personality, the Kid is a fixture on televised poker shows. The bottom line: when it comes to poker, this guy is the Full Package. Apparently. Or maybe not…Every successful person has an Achilles’ heel and online poker is apparently Negreanu’s.

Have you never wondered why you almost never hear anything about Kid Poker’s online antics? Well there was a reason for that. Word has it that that he himself has admitted online poker was not exactly something he excelled at. Apparently, the Kid has problems putting his reading and psychology skills to use at the online poker table.

Nonetheless, far be it from him to back down from a challenge. After working on his short handed skills for a while, Kid Poker took the proverbial bull by the horns and hit the high stakes online poker tables on Feb 25th this year. By high stakes one shouldn’t understand the nosebleed stakes that Dwan and his buddies play over at Full Tilt, but $100/$200 NL Holdem is a pretty respectable point to start, even for a poker superstar like Negreanu.

In the beginning of his high stakes run, Negreanu seemed to have shaken the online poker monkey off his back. He made around $200k from Feb 25th to about March 22nd. This data needs to be taken with a grain of salt though, as PokerStars doesn’t quite endorse data mining, so nothing’s 100% certain when someone tries to track a player at that poker room.

Apparently spring spelt the end of Negreanu’s good online poker run though. From March 22nd, he started slipping, and by 28th, he had squandered all his previous winnings. Writing it all off to a natural downswing, he got back into the fray, and began posting good numbers again. At one point, he was back up around $221k, and appeared to have done away with that monkey once again. Enter Mr. Zahmat. I don’t know who he is either, but Negreanu sure does by now. Kid Poker embarked on a huge losing streak again and dropped all his winnings, most of them to this guy. The largest pot that Mr. Zahmat took off Negreanu was a $85k whooper. Justin Bonomo was involved in that game as well, though he drew the short end of the stick again as he dropped $73k to Negreanu.

By the end of it all, Negreanu had apparently lost not only all his previous winnings, but found himself in a $8k hole too. Now I know the sample size is just too small to call Negreanu an online poker fish based on it. One thing is rather certain though: that online poker monkey is a tough one to beat off for the Canadian. Am I in a position to criticize him for his online poker performance (or lack thereof)? Definitely not. Are those who do so in such a position? Probably not. Therefore I say let’s just wait and see. Time will surely tell.

Poker tells

You’ll often hear that whenever good poker players (those who master the third and fourth levels of poker thought) play each other, they play the player rather than their cards. Past a certain level, poker becomes a game in which psychology takes front seat, ahead of mathematics which is the leading play-guiding factor on lower levels. Poker psychology is based on reads and tells, and on players’ abilities to read the tells their opponents drop while disguising their own hands and if possible, misleading their opponents. As far as tells and reads go, the fundamental concept guiding players’ actions is that keeping their opponents in the mist is not enough: they need to actually mislead them, to cause them to become certain of the wrong thing.

You probably all know Daniel Negreanu and his uncanny ability to read his opponents’ pocket cards. If you take a look at the following video:

You’ll see Negreanu in action against fellow Canadian Brad Booth also known as “Yukon” Brad.
The interesting thing in this hand is how Booth manages to jam Negreanu’s otherwise infallible radar and to cause him to hesitate a bit before making the big laydown. Negreanu does manage to evade the trap, after all, his instincts are among the best if they’re not THE best in poker, but still, Booth’s tactics cause him to hesitate a little before doing the right thing, and making Negreanu actually attempt to talk himself into a call is by no means and everyday achievement.

Many people don’t realize this, but this hand is probably the best illustration of how one should disguise his/her hand and how much potential there is in the mind games behind all the reads and tells.
Brad Booth turns a straight flush, calls Negreanu all the way to the river where he raises him just as the latter rivers a straight. This is when the mind games begin: what Booth is trying to achieve here is to make it look like he’s bluffing to steal Negreanu’s river bet. The circumstances are right, and sets up the trap perfectly: he actually tells Negreanu the hand he’s got, knowing that his opponent will not only not believe him, but might be mislead to think that he is desperate to make it look like he has a true monster in the pocket. What do you know? For a second there it actually seems to work. The play-bluff is so well portrayed by “Yukon” Brad, that Negreanu begins to talk himself into calling him down. He is way too experienced to act on emotion alone though. One can literally feel how his heart tells him to call Booth’s raise, but his mind calls for a time out and begins a cold analysis of the situation. At the end of the analysis, Kid Poker concludes that he could only possibly beat a bluff there, and even though it looks like that’s exactly what Booth has against him, the odds are unfavorable for a call as a flush may well be in the books.
Of course, just to keep his opponents guessing, Booth never shows his hand. Just to add to the confusion, a female voice at the end of the hand claims that she in fact had the nine of diamonds, which sows further confusion at the table. Nobody really knows what to make of it, and Esfandiari’s remarks make it quite clear that he appreciates the way Booth played that hand.
Some people will say that Booth didn’t exactly accomplish anything impressive in this hand. After all, he won with a straight flush, how hard can that be, right? And he did fail to get Negreanu to call him in the end. What these people fail to realize though is that out of God knows how many possible ways, Booth played this hand in the most optimal manner. He singled out a weakness and he exploited it in such a psychologically complex manner (see his “Canadian” comments which were probably intended to re-enforce his play-bluff) that he is worthy of all respect for it. At the end of the day, how many people can boast that they had the great Daniel Negreanu on the ropes like that, even if it was only for a brief moment.

Learning to fold

People usually love the feeling of calling their opponent’s huge raise on the river and finding out they just busted a bluff. It is indeed one of the highs live and online poker offer, but too many people become addicted to this high way too fast. You see, you may bust a bluff every now and then, but turning this into a habit may be extremely counterproductive for your bankroll. Yeah some people do bluff quite often and some of them do make wrong moves like taking their bluff too far, but statistically speaking, that won’t happen all that often. If you make a habit of trying to keep your opponents honest at all cost and if you keep talking yourself into calling in situations which – by all appearances – are not bluffs, you are going to be the one making the mistakes and your opponents the ones exploiting them.

You know what can be an even bigger rush than busting a bluff? Making that huge laydown on the second best hand, especially when your hand is strong enough to be taken to the river under different circumstances. Now, this is where true poker skill and experience comes into play. You may have seen several ‘name’ professionals fold sets or even straights when sensing trouble. They’re capable of doing that because they don’t just play their hands like amateurs do: they play their opponents. In order to be capable of doing that, you need to advance to the third level of poker thought, which is usually out of the reach of most online players and live amateurs.

Take this youtube video as an example:

It’s about Daniel Negreanu locking horns with a couple of amateurs and with John Juanda. Obviously, it all comes down to a confrontation between Juanda and Negreanu, on something that’s pretty close to a perfect hand situation. Both professionals flop a set of Jacks, only Juanda has a K kicker and Negreanu a 3. Juanda shoves all-in and I suppose any other player at that table with the exception of Negreanu (and Ivey) would’ve made the call.
What does Negreanu do though? First of all: he doesn’t get caught up in the possibility of a huge hand developing and he takes a step back taking a look at the big picture. He puts the pieces of the puzzle together and makes a decision in the blink of an eye. Don’t let all the stalling he does afterwards fool you. He is aware from the second Juanda commits his stack that he has the 4th J coupled with a better kicker than his. He laments about how Juanda may also hold something like a Qs,10s – which is quite amazingly nearly the hand that Cheryl Hines folded before to get out of Juanda’s way, but he knows that Juanda has the J. He considers the situation: it is a pro he’s up against and not one of the amateurs who are much more likely to make mistakes.

The bottom line about making the laydown: if every bone in your body tells you that you’re beat, chances are you are indeed beat. Your opponents – regardless of their skill level – bluff much less frequently than you think they do. This seems to be a general truth. If you’re playing online, the vast majority of your opponents will be doing exactly what you expect them to do based on the range you put them on. Don’t be shy to use the feature which allows you to take notes on your opponents. If you jot someone down as a tight-aggressive ABC player, chances are you won’t get any sort of surprises coming your way from that guy.

Certainly, there’s glory in taking down a huge pot and busting your opponent’s bluff in the same time, but saving a huge bet by not calling a marginally better hand is – from a financial point of view – just as big an accomplishment.
Keeping your opponents honest through such hero calls carries another risk factor on top of the obvious one: the heart-ache factor which can easily send you on a tilt.

The differences between live and online play

If you want to hear a pro’s take on this matter, take a look at the following video featuring Daniel Negreanu:

See what differences between live and online play he finds most significant. You’ll notice straight away that the matter of reading one’s opponents through live tells is what he’s most concerned about. Naturally, a pro who’s used to playing the player and who has built a career on reading people based on their gestures, will find it extremely difficult to get by without this extremely important piece of his poker weapons arsenal.
He says these days people muck poker tells, but he also iterates that they still have a place in live poker and that they will probably always have one.
The fact is, the most important poker tell is in a player’s betting pattern. That is one tell nobody can disguise because he just has to take certain actions in order to push his odds, and his opponents will be able to interpret those action in one way or another.
Professional live poker players however, have learned to correlate betting patterns with actual tells and a certain “feel” they get in a situation. Take away the ‘tells’ part and they’ll feel blindfolded even though they’ll still have the betting pattern to rely on.

An interesting thing that Negreanu discusses in the above article is about whether a good live player is a good enough online player too and vice versa. According to him, a good online poker player will be a good live player too, because in order to beat the increasingly competitive online tables, one needs to be adept at poker theory and needs to be a master of the mathematical aspect of the game. The ‘feel’ and ‘tells’ part is less important than being able to play a mathematically sound game in Negreanu’s opinion, as that part of poker proficiency can apparently be added on later. On the other hand – Negreanu opines – a good live player will not necessarily be an equally good online player too. There are good live players out there who rely on gut feelings and all sorts of little tricks to obtain information, who build their game around these strategy-elements. These guys are not so solid when it comes to the mathematical aspect, yet they compensate in other ways only available at the live table.
What does all this mean to you? That being good online is more of a function of learned skill than talent and that being good at a live table has more to do with talent than skill? You be the judge of it. One thing is certain though: there are other issues which drive a huge wedge between live and online poker, issues much easier to point out.
Take the problem of the poker rake for instance. Online poker rooms charge you rake and so do live tables. The difference is that while online rake is a function of the number of hands you play and it tends to be relatively small, live rake is usually taken on an hourly basis (we’re talking about cash games here) and it tends to be much bigger than the online rake.
Add to that the fact that there are a variety of ways to further diminish your online poker rake (like rakeback and poker propping), while there’s nothing you can do in this respect at a live table.
The number of hands played per hour is also an important difference. There’s no comparison between the number of hands you can squeeze into an hour online (especially if you play at several tables) and what you can achieve at a live table. This way, your hourly rate – one of the most important performance indicators – will also be heavily modified. You’ll be able to exploit smaller edges on a more systematic basis online and more often too, which means these edges will become much more lucrative than in live poker. With that in mind, if you’re a live player, it’s quite obvious that you’ll have to significantly adapt your strategy to online play in order to keep things optimal.

How pros read their opponents

According to David Sklansky, whenever you manage to play a hand exactly the same way you would if you could see your opponent’s hole-cards, you generate value and you play correctly. Every time you play a hand differently, you give up value and you commit a mistake. In poker, money is made off the mistakes of your opponents who in turn make their money off the mistakes you make. Staying clear of mistakes should thus be your number one priority. Of course, unless you’re faced with a dufus, you won’t be able to play the same way you would if you could see his hole cards. Most of the time, you won’t have reads useful enough to determine your opponents hand. How do professional players manage to play according to Sklanky’s theorem then? Because that’s exactly what they seem to achieve sometimes…

Take a look at this video:

and see for yourself how Daniel Negreanu makes a perfect read on his opponent and thus puts him into a position in which – according to the commentator – he’d rather be anywhere else than at that very table.
The answer is relatively simple: pros always put their opponents on hand –ranges, and apparently sometimes just for the heck of it, they narrow their range down to a single hand and call it out into the face of their opponents to confuse them.

Don’t let that apparent simplicity fool you though, putting someone on a range of cards is much more complicated than it looks. Also, don’t attempt to follow Daniel’s example in the above movie and put your opponent on an exact hand: most of the time it doesn’t work for Negreanu either, so it’ll definitely be the wrong kind of approach on your part. Try to assign a range of cards for your opponent and then narrow it down progressively. At the beginning of the hand, before the very first action is consumed, you can’t put him on any sort of a range. As soon as he makes his first move though, you’ll be able to assign an extremely wide range. As the hand progresses and you gain more and more information from your opponent through his gestures and most importantly through his betting pattern, you’ll eventually narrow that range down enough for it to become usable information in your decision making process.
Never doubt this: your opponent’s betting pattern is by far the most important read you’ll ever get. He may be a good actor and he may be the owner of the world’s best poker face, but his betting will always give away information just waiting to be decoded by his opponents. Needless to say, the betting pattern is the only tell which is available online as well as live.

In order to be able to determine an opponent’s likely range of hands, you need to have an understanding of his game. I’m not talking about picking up on the table image he desperately tries to project, but rather about picking up his real game pattern. Is he a rock, a loose limper or your average TAG player? Once you understand this, only then do his betting patterns start to make sense.

Again: the video above is actually an example of the wrong type of approach in putting your opponent on a hand. Daniel made his read right after his opponent’s preflop re-raise and that’s not something you should attempt. Negreanu’s most certainly read that young player pretty well beforehand and he called out his read to confuse the guy. Quite obviously, his strategy worked as his opponent was completely thrown off-track and scrapped any sort of strategy to try to milk those aces and thus Negreanu took his pair of Qs all the way to the showdown cost-free.

Also, Negreanu’s decision to put money into the pot knowing his opponent’s hole cards, might’ve made McClean contemplate the possibility of a Q,Q in Daniel’s pocket.
Anyway, it’s a brilliant poker read, not something that you should try at home though.

The size of your bet

I think it’s not that difficult to imagine that some players make more money on the very same hands than others, even as they’re going up against the same odds. Some people know how to “milk” their hands to the maximum, whilst others struggle along and are forever out of sync when it comes to milking their monsters.
The same goes for small and marginal hands: some people are better at keeping their losses at a minimum on such hands than others. The skill that defines how good you are at maximizing your winnings on good hands and minimizing them on bad ones in NL Holdem is called “pot control”. The importance of pot control can never be underestimated, after all, the very essence of the game of poker can be summed up in winning big on big hands and losing small on small hands.
How is pot control achieved? Through choosing the correct bet sizes and through position, of course.

Take a look at the following video:

Beyond the obviously hilarious lecture that Negreanu gives his NL opponents, there’s some pretty serious education in the background. Negreanu cannot believe that his opponent shoves 5,000 chips into the pot to raise his 300, because he knows there cannot possibly be a legitimate reason for someone to act like that. If the guy has a good hand, he’ll want to build a pot on it, or he’ll want to protect it. Neither pot building nor protecting your hand is achieved through a 5,000 chip raise into a few hundred chips pot.

If he has rags, the guy will want to keep the pot small, so again: the 5,000 chip raise is not what he needs to do in this case. Bluffing is never done like that. A bluff is much more intricate and requires loads more information in a hand, so if the guy is in fact bluffing, then he is a clueless donkey, risking his tournament life for 300 of Negreanu’s chips.
The highlight of the clip is when the guy tells Negreanu that’s what poker is supposed to be about, effectively lecturing someone who knows infinitely more about the game than himself.

Let’s get back to pot control though. As I said above, pot control is about sizing your bets correctly and position. Sizing a bet is meant to achieve one of two things: get more money into the pot (to build a pot) done when a player has a monster hand, or keep the size of the pot small when someone has a small hand.
When you’re sizing your bet for pot-building purposes, you need take several factors into consideration. Finding the correct bet size is a knife-edge balancing act because you need to find a compromise between getting as much money into the pot as possible, and keeping your opponent’s pot odds alive so that he deems it profitable to call you. This is why only the best of the best players know how to size their bets correctly. It takes 4th level poker thought to get the maximum out of your hands this way.

Pot control is always easier from late position of course. If you’re trying to build a pot and you get a bettor in front of you, you can always raise him thus escalating the size of the pot, and implicitly that of future bets. If you’re out of position and you fire out a bet, your opponent will get information from you and may only decide to call to keep on the safe side.
Likewise, if you’re trying to keep the pot small, you have the option to just check if you see that no one in front of you has bet. If you’re in an early position, you can still check, but sending out such an obvious sign of weakness may spur your opponent to bet even if he had no intention to do so initially.
The bottom line: correctly sizing bets is the difference between reasonable players and good players. Don’t go for the simplistic approach of shoving all in on every good hand you get and limping on every marginal one. You’ll lose money and end up looking like the guy in the video above.