Preflop sizing is not terrible by any means. You’re <=40bb effective against all but one player at the table. Min-raises were the norm in tournaments for a long time, and I think its only been ~3 years since most players have started preferring larger opens. The old line of thinking was that min-raising your entire range allowed you to steal with a wider range, and this was really profitable because almost everyone was habitually under-defending the BB. Eventually, people realized they could defend a really wide range from the BB. Long story short, min-raising only went out of fashion because some good players decided that making the odds worse for loose blind defenders was more valuable than saving chips on their steals, and most other players eventually followed their lead.

You can still build an effective strategy around min-raising your entire range below a certain stack depth (<50bb might be a good threshold). It’s not how I prefer to play, I rarely go less than 2.25bb until I’m on <20bb effective stacks, but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a min-raise. That being said, if you’re frequently seeing flops contested multi-way after raising, you’re probably better off sizing up. You’ll usually find it more profitable to play heads-up pots post-flop and, if many people still call, you’ll benefit from the pot being bigger since your range should still be ahead more often than not. I think anywhere from 450-500 is reasonable, probably don’t want to go any bigger. 

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think you played this well postflop. Multi-way, you’re not really incentivized to build a pot when you have a weak made hand combined with a weak draw. One card OESDs are much worse than two card OESDs because the implied odds are a lot worse, and they only draw to the nuts on Broadway boards. You’re not really value betting but you’re not really expecting any better hands to fold (unless you turn TT into a multi-street bluff). Only a small fraction of hands are drawing to more than 3 outs, so you don’t gain a whole lot by denying equity. I think all of the villains could still have Jx on the river (less likely for MP3 but still possible), not to mention earlier in the hand. JTs would be a much better bet on the flop or turn, but I wouldn’t be in a rush to bet that hand either.

rppoker said
This has me a bit rattled. In the TPE training videos, everyone seems to be min raising across their entire range. When I watch present day twitch streams, the 2.0 min raise seems to be the norm for almost everyone. My thinking has been based on my acceptance that this is the way people are playing. Many of the training videos are several years old. Are you saying the min raise is no longer the norm? If yes, what is the common preflop betsizing?

You’re absolutely right that min-raising is still relatively prevalent today, I didn’t mean to say it was rare or completely out of fashion. What I should have said is that more players are choosing to raise larger and that after hearing their reasoning I think it is slightly better than min-raising in a lot of situations. Not all great players would agree, and some of the biggest online winners (CDarwin is one that comes to mind) still use a lot of min-raises. Still, I expect that larger raises will continue to gradually become more popular, at least until other factors in the mainstream strategy shift. What I mean by mainstream shifts is exemplified by the transition in the mid-2000s to a much more aggressive strategy which could dominate more passive/conservative pros, how the best strategies have since become less about hyper-aggression and more based on attempting GTO play, and the transition I highlighted in my last post where people started to defend their blinds a lot wider.

The best players get some of their edges by developing counter-strategies to how most people approach common situations, which eventually tends to trickle down and become how most serious players play. This, in turn, leads to new counter-strategies. This is a never-ending (albeit relatively slow) process, which will continue until Hold’em is solved (if that ever happens).  Especially at the higher stakes and more prestigious live events (ie. $1050+ WCOOPs, Super Highroller Bowl, Poker Masters, One Drop, etc), most opens are larger than min-raises, although it is still far from universal even in those games.

Ignoring trends and just focusing on strategy, I think it’s a mistake to min-raise at stack-depths >50bb, but I can’t prove that mathematically. My thinking is that we’re presumably raising relatively strong hands or raising from strong positions, so we usually increase our EV by getting more chips in the pot preflop. It also makes it harder for players to flat wide ranges from later position, which reduces how often we are playing out of position postflop (and builds a smaller SPR when we do get flatted, which tends to lower the importance of positional advantage). If villains are still making overly loose calls preflop, it is a bigger mistake for them to do so when we make a larger raise. We’ll reduce how often we get into multi-way pots, which is usually a good thing even with the top of our range. Finally, it gives the BB a worse price for defending, and getting more folds increases the EV of most of our mid to late position open raises.

My personal approach is to raise 3.5x at stack depths >120bb, 3x @ 120 – 80bb, 2.75x @ 80 – 60bb, 2.4x @ 60 – 40bb, 2.25x @ 40-20bb, and 2.15-2.00x @ <20bb if I’m not open-shoving. It is an overly complicated strategy until you get used to it (I’ve gotten to the point where it’s probably too automatic), and I can’t definitively say it is better than making smaller opens, but I really like building slightly bigger pots at deeper stack depths.

The two potential downsides I see to making larger preflop raises are that a) it can make it harder to play against 3bets and b) lowering the postflop SPR can reduce our ability to benefit from a post-flop skill edge in some situations. Another thing to consider is that making larger raises probably becomes less advantageous as we add more hands to our preflop range but, if I’m not mistaken, you could also make a theoretically sound argument that the opposite is true.

I’m not certain if there are players who have put enough work in to develop definitive mathematical arguments for preferring one raise size over another. If someone has one, please share!!