Message Board : sweetening the pot: why? when? how?

You would think that an 80bb bet out wouldn’t get any callers but you would be suprised.  Someone will decided to play lets flop a set and bust you, and when they do, they will but the remainder of the time you’ll take their 80bb and overall you’ll be way in the positive with this move. 

And make no mistake about it, if you make it 80bb to go preflop with 420 behind you ARE going to the felt one way are another that would give you around a 2.6 spr on the flop.

The tricky part is playing against the 80bb bet from another player with a hand like AKo or KK.  You really have to have your opponents range almost exact to be able to let go of KK.  You still have a significant edge against QQ+,AKs,AKo ~(57%/42%) and only a slight dog if he won’t do this with QQ (47%/52%)

Edit - After thinking about this a little more this might be the only case I can see for a smooth call, flop fold.  If your opponents range is QQ+, AKs, AKo you could call planning to fold an A flop because your equity drops to (40%/60%) when the A hits leaving you beating only the QQ and splitting the other KK, you would be getting way the worst of it against his range for the rest of the chips.

Greyzy said:

Todd, threads13 & BTR,

 

I’d like to steer you back a little bit to the original topic of "sweetening the pot", if I may.

 

In this particular hand that I posted I also wrote that there was no way of achieving an SPR of <5. The guys know me too well and I know them too well to call an 80BB UTG bet with anything less than KK. So basically even though I might get a caller once in a while the "while" would be like once a year.

My question is this: should I have raised preflop anyway and if so: How much & why?

Personally I think that it would only make the hand complicated postflop and give away information about my hand. With those big stacks it’s very likely that there will be betting decisions to be made until the river. Concealing my hand and handing the initiative over to my loose/aggressive opponent allows me to let him "hang himself" if I like the board or fold after investing only little money thus protecting my stack instead of having to worry about protecting a bigger pot. With the 2 big stacks to my immediate left (one of them actually got into the hand) and both of them being quite agressive I would have a great RELATIVE position if I let them "take the lead".

Thoughts?

With 500BB stacks you actually can raise a very wide range of hands for the specific purpose of juicing the pot.  Said another way, you just want to up the stakes.  You want to get the pot a little bigger with any hand you play because you are going to have the bets of it.  So, I think with 500BB deep you should probably be raising any hand that you play just to make the pot bigger.  

Given what I said above, I don’t think raising your AA would have made your hand more complicated or given away information if you were raising a wide range.  Say that you raise 5BB with AA and get 2 callers.  That means the final preflop pot is 15BB with 495BB behind against the deep player.  That gives you an SPR of 33 against the deep player.  That is still a high SPR and your hand players good with a high SPR.  Also, against the 100BB player you have an SPR of ~6.7.  That is a good SPR for your hand against a loose player.  The players are bad, so its not like they will use position against you.  

If the players will call bigger raises than 5BB then I would raise that.  Really I would raise as much as I expect to get called by two players.  The only spot where it gets weird is if you raise 10BB-12BB and get called by both players.   That gives you a weird SPR versus the deep stacked player.  However, if just the deep player will call you then you have an SPR of 24.5 and that is still high and allowed you to get more money preflop.

So, I would definitely raise but my amount would depend on how much they will call.  The biggest amount that they will call is how much I would raise.