kntz said

theginger45 said
Your bet sizing should get larger according to how polarized your range is. When players size down because they want to value-bet thinner, they're betting a less polarized range, so they're betting smaller to compensate.

This is because a less polarized range has some value bets that might lose when called, so it can't afford to value-bet so big that a smaller number of worse hands will call.

A more polarized range has no reason to bet small, because it contains mostly hands that either always win when called, or always lose, and thus it is incentivized to bet large with the intent of maximizing both value and fold equity.  

Thanks for the reply.

What if the range is very polarized, but very heavily weighted towards monster hands, with barely any air? Would it still make sense to bet big?  

Very good question. At equilibrium, the answer is no. If, however, your opponents are too loose and prone to look up river bets (as many are), then it could still make sense to size, if not huge, at least bigger than would be GTO. However ending up with a range that looks like this suggests either that you are in a very rare part of the game tree (one specific river that completes all draws or something) or that you made a mistake on an earlier street. If you are running out of hands to bluff with, then there's a good chance that you could be profitably carrying forward some weaker hands from an earlier street.

theginger45 said
Your bet sizing should get larger according to how polarized your range is. When players size down because they want to value-bet thinner, they're betting a less polarized range, so they're betting smaller to compensate.

This is because a less polarized range has some value bets that might lose when called, so it can't afford to value-bet so big that a smaller number of worse hands will call.

A more polarized range has no reason to bet small, because it contains mostly hands that either always win when called, or always lose, and thus it is incentivized to bet large with the intent of maximizing both value and fold equity.  

Thanks for the reply.

What if the range is very polarized, but very heavily weighted towards monster hands, with barely any air? Would it still make sense to bet big?

This is because a less polarized range has some value bets that might lose when called, so it can't afford to value-bet so big that a smaller number of worse hands will call.

A more polarized range has no reason to bet small, because it contains mostly hands that either always win when called, or always lose, and thus it is incentivized to bet large with the intent of maximizing both value and fold equity.

So, I know that in spots where we can have a lot of bluffs in our range, we should bet big. And in spots where we barely have any bluffs, we should go for a smaller sizing because opponents will rarely call big bets if they know we aren't bluffing for the most part. But they will still have to defend against smaller bets with a relatively high frequency because otherwise they will get exploited badly if they overfold. That just seems very intuitive and logical.

However, I've been watching a decent amount of poker training videos by some quite well-known high-stakes players and there's a certain line of thinking about bet sizing that confuses me a little bit. Basically, they manipulate their sizing depending on the amount of hands they want to include into their value betting range. For example, on the river, on a board where straights/flushes/boats are all possible, the player decides to SIZE DOWN his bet sizing so that he could also bet trips for value (in addition to straights/flushes/boats mentioned before). When I thought about this, I sort of came to the conclusion that since the value range gets expanded, the bluffing range shrinks automatically in relation to it. So this kind of becomes the same thing - betting smaller BECAUSE we now have less bluffs relative to the amount of value bets we have. Am I right here?

Thoughts?