Raise your hand if you find GTO poker frustrating.

Whether you’ve studied solvers, watched poker training videos, or have simply watched poker in the last few years, you’ve heard of GTO (Game Theory Optimal) play.

The advancement of poker tools brought about the advancement of the game.

If you have fallen behind, it’s costing you.

Not everyone has time to study poker sims for hours each week. For most non-professionals who aren’t surrounded by poker friends and mentors, staring into a labyrinth of solver outputs is a waste of time and brain cells.

Trying to copy GTO play is a recipe for disaster. You have to actually understand the reason for the strategy.

And the truth is, nine out of ten players emulating GTO play don’t even understand why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Today, I want to demystify some of that for you so that you can make more money at the tables.

I promise (I’ll try) not to make your head spin.

Let’s Talk About Bet Sizing

Big bets are intuitive.

You’ve got a good hand that you want to make more money with, or you’ve got a bluff and want to take down the pot. Easy.

Small bets, when used properly, are often very unintuitive.

That is – until you understand their purpose, which should hopefully be in just a few minutes.

Small Ball

Back in my day, small bets, often called “block bets” were used to keep pots small.

Whether it was the small pot, lower variance, tournament strategy made famous by Daniel Negreanu, or the “let me block bet the turn so I don’t check and face a big bet” strategy, small bets have been around a while.

Yet they’ve never been used as much as they are these days, in the post-solver era of poker.

But what is the point of them?

If I 3-bet from the SB and get called by the CO, why would I bet 25% pot on A♦️6❤️5♠️ with most of my hands?

Why bet 25% pot with hands like K♣️K♠️, which needs no protection from overcards but is losing to an Ace?

Why would I small bet K❤️Q❤️ and make almost all better hands call and worse hands fold?

And why don’t I want to bet bigger with A♣️K♣️ to build a nice pot?!

In the “good ol’ days” a player might bet big with hands like A♣️K♣️ and 9❤️8❤️, bet small with hands like T❤️T♦️and J♣️T♣️, and either check or bet small with K♣️K♠️ and K❤️Q❤️ and the like.

If those plays feel more intuitive to you, you’re not alone.

Let’s talk it through.

Small Bets, All Bets

To understand why small bets are used, you need first to understand the point of a bet.

Not a bet with individual hands, but holistically – what purpose does a bet serve as part of an overall gameplan?

If you’d like to pause to think of your answer before reading on, now is the time.

It sounds silly to many of you, I’m sure. But if you asked yourself to figure it out, it may have been more confusing than you expected.

I’d like to define the purpose of a bet as follows:

Get money into the pot with hands that have an equity advantage.

Or, in simpler terms, “to put money in good.”

Now, you need to compliment that range with some bluffs, of course. But stick with me on the idea of starting with value as a reason to bet.

If you use it as a building block for understanding GTO poker, things may begin to make a lot more sense.

Minimum Defense Frequency

If I pot bet the river on K♣️9♦️9♣️ 7❤️ 4♦️ with the following, completely made up, range:

2/3rds 9♠️9❤️

1/3rd 6♦️5♦️

You are breaking even calling with your bluff catchers, and you have to, in theory, call half of them.

Why?

This is a concept called minimum defense frequency, or MDF, which tells you the minimum frequency you need to call (or raise) to stop your opponent (me) from profiting with all potential bluffing hands.

I risked 1 (pot-sized bet) to win 1 (pot). If my bluff works more than one out of every two times, I profit, which means you need to defend half the time.

Kinda-Sorta Good Hands

While I could prove this with pages of text detailing an example, I promised not to make your head spin, so I’m going to ask you to trust me as I simplify this:

The purpose of a small bet is to get money in good with certain hands that cannot get money in good if they bet bigger.

What would that mean? Well, let’s say I have a hand that is best 70% of the time, and I want to value bet it.

(If it helps to make it more concrete for you, let’s say the hand is 8❤️7❤️ on 8♠️3♣️3♦️ 6❤️ K♠️)

If I bet pot, based on MDF, you need to call 50% of the time. That would be with the 30% of hands that beat me, and 20% of bluff catchers that don’t.

3 out of 5 times, I lose the pot and the bet I put in. That’s a bad value bet.

But if I bet 1/3rd pot, you have to call 75% of the time (MDF). You call with 30% of hands that beat me and 45% of hands I beat. That’s a good value bet.

This is why you would want to use a small bet in certain situations.

Think Range

There are many situations in poker where one player has a big range advantage based on the action so far.

Usually, that player does more of the betting. Sometimes they do this with a lot of big betting, and other times, with a lot of small betting.

That decision comes down to the makeup of everyone’s range.

Some people like to look at “targeting a part of your opponents’ range.”

Others think of it as “benefitting a section of the hands in my range.

These are both oversimplifications, which I’m in favor of! They make it easier for our human minds to identify good spots for small bets quickly.

Let’s make this a little more concrete for you.

Back to the Beginning

Remember that unintuitive 3-bet pot we started with? Let’s see if we can make sense of it.

We 3-bet from the SB and get called by the CO.

Using simplified GTO ranges, let's say that we 3-bet with: 77+, A8s+, A4s, A5s, AQo+, K9s+, QTs+, JTs, J9s, T9s. The CO's flatting range is: 22-QQ, AQo+, A8s+, A4s, A5s, K9s+, KQo, QTs+, J9s+, and a bunch of smaller suited connectors and one-gappers that flop a piece, such as 87s, 76s, 65s, 54s, etc. (I was surprised how much GTO wants to flat QQ and AK in this spot, too!)

The flop is A♦️6❤️5♠️

Let’s look at an equity chart of the two ranges:

This shows how much equity the top, middle, and bottom of each range has against the other full range.

The X-Axis is the range percentile – the top 10% of each player's range is on the rightmost part of the chart.

The Y-Axis shows the equity for each of those percentiles for each player.

The SB (blue) has a range advantage throughout – top to bottom.

But do you notice that big dip in the CO’s (green) line around the 75% mark? (I like to read these right to left)

The two ranges are close to similar at the top, but then there is a huge dropoff. In this particular hand, that dropoff occurs when we get to the CO’s hands that are worse than top pair.

The SB has far more top pair hands and has an advantage when it comes to non-ace hands (more KK, QQ, etc.).

Whether you call it targeting this middle section of the CO’s range or leveraging the middle section of the SB’s range, the fact is, the middle of the ranges are where we, the SB, have the substantial advantage.

Tactical Leverage

So, how do we leverage this advantage?

Let’s flip it around:

How could we fail to leverage this advantage?

If we bet full pot, the correct strategy for the CO is to continue with straight draws, an ace or better, the few other board pair hands they have, and barely anything else.

The middle part of the range that we were crushing gets off easy!

If that middle part were stronger and more similar to ours, the CO would still fold most of it. So, to oversimplify, betting big makes it inconsequential that we had that massive advantage in the middle half of our range.

By betting smaller, we force the CO to put money in with around 75% of hands, and we force them to keep playing with that disadvantaged part of their range.

We choose a betsize that specifically benefits the section of ranges that we have the biggest advantage in.

Continuing On

What about those hands that were so unintuitive to bet? The K♣️K♠️ and K❤️Q❤️.

We’ll cover that, and more on small betting, in next week’s newsletter, where I hope to get a little less mathy and more conceptual.

If you stuck with this one til the end, congratulate yourself for putting in the time to improve!

New Kids on the Block Bet