Betting the Right Amount
So much of poker strategy is centralized around hand selection and reading your opponents, yet one aspect that goes unappreciated time and time again is knowing how much to bet and when. New and beginning poker players need to be well-versed in correct bet sizes as it plays a pivotal part in all aspects of poker, from protecting your hand to extracting to the most amount of chips out of an opponent. Betting the wrong amount in any situation can and will often have negative effects on the outcome, even if you end up winning the hand overall. Let’s take a look at a few types of bets, starting with incorrect methods.
1. Underbetting: When someone drastically underbets the pot, it normally means that they are very inexperienced at poker, something that the veterans at the table will pick up on immediately. An obvious underbet would be to bet $10 on the turn into a pot worth over $150 in a $2-4 no-limit hold’em game. It sounds ridiculous, but it does happen. This bet does not benefit you whatsoever. Any opponent on a draw is going to call if not raise, and if you’re trying to trap an opponent, you have no bet enough to extract maximum value out of the hand.
2. Overbetting: You’ll see players overbet a pot a lot in multi-table tournaments and SNG events. A common overbet in pre-flop play would be when someone raises to more than 3-4 times the blind big, sometimes as high as 8-9 times. This gives too much info away and limits the effect of the raise. Opponents will only call with the absolute best premium hands such as AA and KK, though the likely scenario is that the entire table will fold, netting you just the blinds and likely wasting a nice opportunity to win more chips as the hand progressed if you had bet the correct amount.
So what’s the solution? It depends on the situation. Typically, especially in a tournament, if you want to put pressure on your opponent and make it hard for them to call with a marginal strength or drawing hand, you want to make about a pot-sized bet, which means if there’s $200 in the pot, you’re going to bet between $160-$200. If you hold a very strong hand and want to continue to extract chips from your opponent, you then want to bet about half the pot, which in this scenario would be about $100.
The vast majority of experienced players following these betting patterns and so should you. The last type of bet you need to know about is the “value bet”. A value bet is when you are very confident on the river that you have the best hand and need to figure out a way to get an opponent to call a bet. The goal of the value bet is to bet an amount that another player would likely call as long as they had a decent hand. Betting the full pot amount or overbetting to exceed that of what’s in the pot will quickly result in most players folding without a very strong hand. However, betting half or a little less than half the pot on the river will sometimes encourage a call by an opponent with a marginal hand, which will help you extract as many chips as possible in the hand, which is the whole point of making correctly-sized bets in the first place.
Chris Iaquinta
