ChuckTs
Legend
Silver Level
Loosely paraphrasing Ed Miller, "Big hands deserve big pots; small hands deserve small pots".
"Big" and "Small" are relative, and that requires some experience in the game to determine how strong your hand is relative to your opponent's hand strength and their likelihood to stack with weaker hands.
A set is almost always a strong hand and we usually want to build as big a pot as possible with it, whereas a one-pair hand is something we usually want to get a cheap showdown with. There are exceptions though.
Going to one extreme, if we're up against a very loose-passive player, we want to value bet the hell out of AA, TPTK and other similar hands because our opponent will look us up extremely light - those types of hands are considered "big" hands in this situation.
Moving to the other end of the spectrum, we usually want to maintain pot control with those hands against a nit (very tight player) because our opponent in this case isn't going to put a lot of money in the middle without a very strong hand - one so strong that it may have us beat. These hands are considered "smaller" hands in this situation.
Value betting our big hands:
100bb effective stacks, 100nl full ring NLHE.
Hero is a standard tight aggressive player who mixes it up occasionally.
Villain is a very loose player who we've seen call down weak top pair hands.
First, stack sizes: both players started the hand with 100bb stacks, or $100. After the reraises they now both have $86.5 left.
Next, our relative hand strength: villain raised in a stealing position and called a reraise so this means he most probably has some type of medium-big pair, two big cards, or some other weird hand. KK would have reraised preflop, and 22 would probably have folded. K8 is a possibility, but a slim one. We're clearly way ahead of his range at this point as the only hand we're really afraid of is 88.
So what's our goal in the hand? Well we're way ahead of his range, know he calls down light, so all this adds up to value betting our hand and trying to get our whole stack in. The best way to do so is to bet!
Now before just firing out a bet, we have to think about our bet sizing. Primarily we want to look at what sized bets leave us (and our opponent) with what sized stacks on the turn/river, and how committed we leave our opponent. That is our goal after all.
The pot is $27.5, and we each have $86.5 left. If we bet $23 and he calls, the pot will then be $73.5 ($23+$23+$27.5). Our stack sizes would be $63.5 each. So on the turn we shove $63.5, he's now looking at a smaller than pot sized bet, and is committed to call with most of the hands he called the flop with (mainly Kx). That flop bet is called a commitment bet.
I might actually bet more (say $25-full pot) in this situation to commit him more on the turn.
Maintaining pot control with our small hands:
Another example - similar situation, this time we're up against a nit.
Relative hand strength: This time our opponent's hand strength is much more polarized, ie we can narrow it down quite a bit. We're now most probably up against either something that crushes us (Ax, 88) or something we crush (QQ-99, KQ).
This is a perfect example of the wa/wb concept, and is also a perfect spot for pot control.
The basic idea here is that if we bet, we don't get action from the hands we beat, and only give money to better hands. By checking we induce bets from hands that are either bluffing (KQ), or hands that are now turning their hand into a bluff (99-QQ). We also save money against those better hands (Ax, 88). This concept is a little hard to grasp for a lot of people, and I suggest reading the above link to get a better explanation.
Another example of pot control vs same villain:
Using commitment bets for bluffs:
In my experience this won't work too well against weaker (aka bad) opponents since they don't usually think about how committed they are to a hand, but this is a great tool against tight regulars or other thinking players.
The concept here is that basically you're betting as though you had a set or a strong overpair, and that your opponent knows that not only does he have to call a strong bet now, but he'll probably have to call another strong bet on a later street - something that he, hopefully for you, can't do with his current hand.
An example:
100nl FR, 100bb effective stacks, villain is a tag as are we.
At this point we know villain most probably has some type of small-med pair (other hands are in his range but we'll just make this assumption for simplicity).
Now he knows we could have been c-betting with all types of hand (AK, TT, 67s, J9, KQ, etc etc), but that ace hits our range pretty hard since we're raising with a lot of aces preflop.
At this point we can again represent something much stronger than what we have, and put out a commitment bet. We want to show our opponent that we're committed to the hand without actually committing ourselves.
So if we bet $17, villain now has a nasty nasty decision. If he calls, the pot will be $55.5, he'll only have $72.5 left, and could very well be facing another very scary ~$40 river bet. Not to mention all the T/J/Q/K/7/8 cards that could drop for him.
So therein lies the concept - by betting $17 on that turn, we're threatening almost his whole stack, and he'll have a very hard time calling the bet *if* he's a smart enough player to realize this.
I think Ed Miller's Professional No Limit Hold'em goes into a lot of depth with these concepts, but I admittedly haven't read it myself yet.
Anyways thanks for getting this far and I hope the article helped in some way. As always I'm open to any criticism or argument, but please give some reasoning to back whatever you want to say
-ChuckTs
"Big" and "Small" are relative, and that requires some experience in the game to determine how strong your hand is relative to your opponent's hand strength and their likelihood to stack with weaker hands.
A set is almost always a strong hand and we usually want to build as big a pot as possible with it, whereas a one-pair hand is something we usually want to get a cheap showdown with. There are exceptions though.
Going to one extreme, if we're up against a very loose-passive player, we want to value bet the hell out of AA, TPTK and other similar hands because our opponent will look us up extremely light - those types of hands are considered "big" hands in this situation.
Moving to the other end of the spectrum, we usually want to maintain pot control with those hands against a nit (very tight player) because our opponent in this case isn't going to put a lot of money in the middle without a very strong hand - one so strong that it may have us beat. These hands are considered "smaller" hands in this situation.
Value betting our big hands:
100bb effective stacks, 100nl full ring NLHE.
Hero is a standard tight aggressive player who mixes it up occasionally.
Villain is a very loose player who we've seen call down weak top pair hands.
Now at this point we step back and evaluate our situation. Preflop was pretty straightforward so I don't think we need to touch on that.
First, stack sizes: both players started the hand with 100bb stacks, or $100. After the reraises they now both have $86.5 left.
Next, our relative hand strength: villain raised in a stealing position and called a reraise so this means he most probably has some type of medium-big pair, two big cards, or some other weird hand. KK would have reraised preflop, and 22 would probably have folded. K8 is a possibility, but a slim one. We're clearly way ahead of his range at this point as the only hand we're really afraid of is 88.
So what's our goal in the hand? Well we're way ahead of his range, know he calls down light, so all this adds up to value betting our hand and trying to get our whole stack in. The best way to do so is to bet!
Now before just firing out a bet, we have to think about our bet sizing. Primarily we want to look at what sized bets leave us (and our opponent) with what sized stacks on the turn/river, and how committed we leave our opponent. That is our goal after all.
The pot is $27.5, and we each have $86.5 left. If we bet $23 and he calls, the pot will then be $73.5 ($23+$23+$27.5). Our stack sizes would be $63.5 each. So on the turn we shove $63.5, he's now looking at a smaller than pot sized bet, and is committed to call with most of the hands he called the flop with (mainly Kx). That flop bet is called a commitment bet.
I might actually bet more (say $25-full pot) in this situation to commit him more on the turn.
Maintaining pot control with our small hands:
Another example - similar situation, this time we're up against a nit.
Stack sizes: we're left with $86.5 each again.
Relative hand strength: This time our opponent's hand strength is much more polarized, ie we can narrow it down quite a bit. We're now most probably up against either something that crushes us (Ax, 88) or something we crush (QQ-99, KQ).
This is a perfect example of the wa/wb concept, and is also a perfect spot for pot control.
The basic idea here is that if we bet, we don't get action from the hands we beat, and only give money to better hands. By checking we induce bets from hands that are either bluffing (KQ), or hands that are now turning their hand into a bluff (99-QQ). We also save money against those better hands (Ax, 88). This concept is a little hard to grasp for a lot of people, and I suggest reading the above link to get a better explanation.
Another example of pot control vs same villain:
In this spot we should probably aim to only bet two streets instead of all 3 because again we don't get much action from worse hands if we do bet all 3 streets strong.
Using commitment bets for bluffs:
In my experience this won't work too well against weaker (aka bad) opponents since they don't usually think about how committed they are to a hand, but this is a great tool against tight regulars or other thinking players.
The concept here is that basically you're betting as though you had a set or a strong overpair, and that your opponent knows that not only does he have to call a strong bet now, but he'll probably have to call another strong bet on a later street - something that he, hopefully for you, can't do with his current hand.
An example:
100nl FR, 100bb effective stacks, villain is a tag as are we.
This is about a good a spot as you could hope for a double barrel commitment bet bluff (mouthful, isn't it).
At this point we know villain most probably has some type of small-med pair (other hands are in his range but we'll just make this assumption for simplicity).
Now he knows we could have been c-betting with all types of hand (AK, TT, 67s, J9, KQ, etc etc), but that ace hits our range pretty hard since we're raising with a lot of aces preflop.
At this point we can again represent something much stronger than what we have, and put out a commitment bet. We want to show our opponent that we're committed to the hand without actually committing ourselves.
So if we bet $17, villain now has a nasty nasty decision. If he calls, the pot will be $55.5, he'll only have $72.5 left, and could very well be facing another very scary ~$40 river bet. Not to mention all the T/J/Q/K/7/8 cards that could drop for him.
So therein lies the concept - by betting $17 on that turn, we're threatening almost his whole stack, and he'll have a very hard time calling the bet *if* he's a smart enough player to realize this.
I think Ed Miller's Professional No Limit Hold'em goes into a lot of depth with these concepts, but I admittedly haven't read it myself yet.
Anyways thanks for getting this far and I hope the article helped in some way. As always I'm open to any criticism or argument, but please give some reasoning to back whatever you want to say
-ChuckTs
