[2-4]: Should you always size up on the Turn in multiway pots?

That is a lot of callers on the flop, and two of them have position on you. I’d consider checking turn and seeing what happens.

If you do bet then I agree with sizing up. The point is to punish people who have second-best hands and are bluff catching. Also, this board isn’t quite as dry as you think; T9 and 65 are both possible open-enders.

I don't know how British 2-4 tables play, but I would go more than 14 after a limp for 4. I know the trend is towards small cbets, but I would go more than 35% pot.

Turn is a brick and we are only behind sets and 87s that is reasonable. I would go 50-70% pot.

But why is this specific to the Turn? Doesn't that argument equally say that you should size up on the Flop?

I would, but solvers looking at HU pots with perfect play usually like small cbets, so everyone thinks that is optimal play.

It depends how bad the villains are. One reason to bet smaller in multiway pots is that even mediocre players realize TPGK should fold against big bets in multiway pots. But that’s not true against a lot of low stakes fish, so if they’re gonna pile it in with QT here, fine to bet bigger.

Well, yes, but there are some differences.

Bear in mind before I start, I’m going from my own understanding and experience, not citing solvers, but here’s what I think the differences are.

On the flop, there are still 2 cards and 2 betting rounds left. That makes draws much more playable. So if you size up on the flop, you aren’t actually protecting against draws since they can still call. You get more value but they still continue.

Meanwhile, the bigger you bet on the flop, the more incentive people have to slowplay big hands and fold marginal ones. So when you get called you can often blunder your way into a turn or river spot you don’t want.

This is especially true multiway. The smaller you bet, the more incentive someone with a big hand has to raise to charge draws before the draws hit and stack them (even if they don’t stack you).

The turn is different because draws don’t have nearly as good implied odds. So now you can bet in a way that folds out draws while putting Qx to a tough decision. And you can be somewhat more confident that you aren’t going to run into a hand that outflopped you.

(In this case, however, I think it is somewhat likely that someone flopped big and chose to slowplay against your small bet. Hence why checking should be on the table.)

Against low stakes players who will call whatever with top pair or whatever, I do not like betting small on the flop and checking the turn with on overpair. You don't get value and get drawn out on by gutshots, etc.

I understand the theory to be able to fold AA to a set or something, but not sure that is the best approach against real low stakes players.

Yeah I can get behind sizing up on the flop. I’m just saying as played we do not want to bet small on the turn.

My general understanding - beyond "well, solvers do it this way" - is that you use a bigger sizing when you have a portion of your range that is more nutted (closer to 100% equity). There's some simple toy games to show that for a perfectly polarized single-street game, the IP player with a polar range (50% equity, half winning and half losing) should always use an all-in size when betting and approaches 100% EV as stack sizes get bigger. When you get to the turn, wet boards provide less broadly distributed equity than on the flop, meaning your strong made hands improve significantly versus live draws. A solver will pair them off with bluff combos and use a larger size to leverage the presence of these high-equity combos.

The solver heuristic is to bet more often with a range advantage (average equity) and to bet bigger with a nut advantage (higher equity at top of range), and the goal is equity denial (EV > EQ). In the OP hand, AA has higher hand-vs-range equity on the turn than on the flop, so goes bigger.

But there aren't solvers for 5-way pots with a lot of loose players. How do we know small on the flop and big on the turn applies to those situations?

If you are getting this many callers preflop then you can size up more. Bet turn always.

Checking only works to bluff catch rivers so you want to fast play value versus exploitable passive profiles. We don’t care about protecting checking ranges and these players won’t bluff river with missed draws.

As far as sizing, bet an amount that doesn’t give straight draws direct odds and also lets you stack Qx by the river. Dont Overbet but don’t bet small, just go geometric.

Did you catch that two of the flop callers have position on us?

I did misread the initial HH I thought we had position.

I would still bet turn to stack strong Qx by the river and charge straight draws.

One population trend that is the same online and live is players are generally too passive OTT with draws so you are incentivized to fast play.

I was looking at some live MDA and xc-xc-xf is underfolded relative to MDF in both SRP and 3bet pots. I am assuming the c-c-f frequencies will show a similar trend.

I "size up" blank turns in multiway pots in that I would go up to B67 here, which is functionally a modest overbet in a 4-way pot.

Yes, this is why.

Vbetting size is a function of how many hands you can fold out and STILL have a margin of equity so much higher than 50% (or, more accurately since it's a MW pot: 1/n, where n is the number of players in the pot) that the amount you gain from increasing the pot size outpaces the losses from having a higher concentration of value owns.

When your opponent has a hard enough time calling to meet even quite low MDFs, the bluffing size also goes up to allow for more bluff combos before reaching the indifference threshold. There is a harsh ceiling on how high this number can realistically go with 3 opponents, though; hence why a perfectly medium-sized bet because a veritable overbet.

Blank runouts also make your own range more concentrated with air relative to heavier ones, so that favors being able to bluff larger.

How much any of this matters varies by opponent, hand combo, gameflow, etc, but this is the most basic answer to your question.

Because it is not true on the flop that your range is polarized or that their range is condensed. Just like how you don't generally size up on runouts that change the nuts, the flop (generally) functions as a big reset button where just about any 3 cards (except extreme cases like 222 and QJT) change the nuts.

Math.

FWIW, the first time I heard that you should size up when your range has more bluffs was from a really smart 1knl player in 2010, long before solvers for NLHE.

Of course it didn't make any sense to my 50nl playing ass at the time and I thought it was only relevant for the 1knl egg heads, but now I wouldn't play a session of 10nl without applying the principle.

It’s the same outcome but that seems backwards.

You don’t size up when your range has more bluffs your range has more bluffs because you sized up.

It has to do with MDF.

If I bet pot I get 67 % value to 33% bluffs and MDF is 50%.

If I bet 2x pot I get 60% value but now 40% bluffs and MDF is 33%

My sizing dictates my bluffs not my range.

There's no forwards or backwards about it. It works both ways.

You demonstrated that "My sizing dictates my bluffs" but you just tacked on "not my range" without demonstrating why not.

Obviously your statement about MDF is true. *And but also* polar ranges use larger sizes than linear or condensed ranges, even in cases where a linear range contains just as many nuts.

You can't talk about polarity without talking about one of the poles. It's called the nuts AND BLUFFS vs the BLUFF catcher toy game for a reason. If it's just Aces full vs Kings full OTR, then the player with aces full can capture the entire pot with a 1000bb or 1bb bet or indeed no bet at all. Betting serves no theoretical function in that construct.

Yeah it’s the same outcome but for people trying to learn I think we can make it much simpler.

So it matters to understand that bet sizing dictates bluffs and not your range because this helps you to understand other important theoretical concepts more easily like:

Alpha (Folding Frequencies)

Value/Bluffing Ratios

MDF

All these concepts are sizing based so it makes more sense to understand them through that lens.

I think this kind of reasoning totally works in your regular pot. You raise UTG+2, BB calls, you get a flop of high cards. You have a huge range advantage, so you bet your entire range. Opponent folds half the time, at least. When they call, their range gets much stronger, so now your range advantage has shrunk a lot.

But here, if I'm betting into 3 people, I'm basically always strong (let's be real, I have no or almost no bluffs 4way; if I had to come up with a bluff it would be 8♦9♦ and I'm not sure I'd even bet that). Calling strengthens my opponent's ranges in the sense that the garbage folds out, but they also weaken them in the sense that 2pair raises (and lots of players raise sets as well even though they probably shouldn't). So I still have a major range advantage on the Turn. And my number of bluffs also doesn't really change, it's close to 0 on both streets.

Yeah like I said, this makes to me. Especially in this case since I think the concentration of value owns is really the only thing that changed.

(I assume you just mean bet 67€ rather than 67BB? BTW we have increments of 2 so you could only bet 66 or 68.) Are you saying this is an overbet because you're dividing by the number of players? Or dividing by n-1? Wouldn't that make the Flop bet an overbet as well?

Sorry, B67 means bet 67% of the pot; ie: 2/3p, or $100, or 25bbs.

That's not exactly the math, but we're getting into paid content territory.

I mean, saying it's not how you would choose to teach a student in your first few lessons with them is different from saying it's "backwards."

(You said a mean thing to me and now all productive conversation has to come to a halt until you apologize 😒)

And understanding how a dearth of bluffs affects bet sizing and frequency is important for understanding practical concepts like playing on extremely heavy runouts and (as already referenced) the different dynamics of linear strategies vs mixed ones.

Oh no, now I feel tempted to try to reverse engineer what the mathematical principle is that makes sense.