Sweetening The Pot In No-Limit

Seth,

That’s definitely a pitfall of pot-sweetening, and you have to be circumspect. Pay attention to the UTG player and use pot-sweeteners less when he likes to limp-reraise.

(You can also play tricks to use the UTG’s limp-reraising against him and/or others in the hand.)

As for getting your opponent not to raise… well I can’t help you there.

Greg,

We’re about to flip a coin. I give you two great bet options. I’ll pay you 11-to-1 on heads if you bet $5. Or I’ll pay you 5-to-1 on heads if you bet $25. Which should you take?

EV($5) = (0.50)($55) – (0.50)($5) = $25
EV($25) = (0.50)($125) – (0.50)($25) = $50

The $25 bet is worth twice as much, even though the odds are much worse.

Same thing is going on with pot sweetening. You’re right, often your implied odds are somewhat worse after a raise… but the pot is also much bigger. Often the bigger pot makes the raise worth it.

Also implied odds in limped pots can be deceiving. It’s easy to look at someone’s $500 stack and your $5 limp and think 100-to-1. But in reality it is much harder to stack someone in a limped pot than in a raised one. So your implied odds don’t drop in a raised pot by as much as they might appear to upon cursory reflection.

Samsa,

Well, there’s no hard-and-fast stack size where I begin to think about pot sweetening because every player has a different implied odds profile and/or willingness to fold postflop.

But I find that I begin to make sweetening type raises at around the 50BB stack mark. Sometimes these sweeteners are designed to sweeten the pot for me to steal it postflop, however.