Small cbet / flop bet sizes

Small flop bets are great in mway pots because they deny equity very cheaply, but in a live game you also want to size up with your value so unless ppl are paying attention just go small with bluffs and big with value.

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I have a super face up approach at my drooler games where - when I have a hand like AA on a K-5-3 I bet chonky because they still call with 77 and even A-high sometimes. When I have a hand I want to hit and gii with like AQss on Ks-Th-4s I bet small like a little juicer, they'll call and check to me OTT and so a small bet buys me two streets. If I hit I print and if I whiff I get out for cheap.

Small bets on the flop help define our opponents' ranges more than big bets, and allow them to continue wider, but capped. They'll make more mistakes again smaller bets than they will against bigger bets.

They're going to mostly raise off their big hands and call with their weak hands when we bet small, but raise less with their big hands and fold more of their weak hands when we bet big.

If we see specific V's who don't check raise when we bet small, then we can deviate and bet bigger with our value, and smaller with our bluffs as an exploit. But that's easier to do heads up, harder when multi-way. It also requires the discipline to not value own ourselves against these V's who will show up with a much stronger range when they check-call. It sucks when we bet big and they check-raise, probably with a nutted hand.

We're not losing a ton of value betting small on the flop if we go bigger on the turn. We're just gaining valuable information.

Like, say we c-bet $45 into $90, and barrel $90 into $180. The pot is $360 if V calls. If we c-bet $30 into $90, we can barrel $105 into $150 and end up in the same place.

Even better, if we cap our opponents by c-betting small, we can over-bet the turn, and barrel $200 into $150, allowing us to get more value with our strong hands, and more folds when we barrel off on the river with our bluffs.

To be clear, denying equity with a small bet in a multiway flop isn't so much about getting someone to fold a GSSD to the nuts as it is about betting small with 98s on 9s3d3s and getting 3 players to fold T7hh, Ks7d and 54dd, improving our equity by almost 50% from 45% in a 5-way pot against all those players to 66% heads up against ATo.

I think the first action in the postflop decision tree is the most complicated to discuss even on an individual basis, so talking about it in any general sense is impossible.

I'll say a few things:

1) To be clear: small bets often aren't "GTO", but rather are a way of coming up with a reasonable proximal strategy that isn't easily exploited. That's almost always what's going on when people are arguing about downsizing and range betting. To take your betting small against a BB defender example: it's true that you can more often bet at higher frequencies when villain defended their BB preflop, and it's true that when Hero can bet a high enough frequency range betting becomes a very reasonable proximal strategy to actual GTO, and it's true that when you make a proximal strategy of range betting then you should downsize so that you can depolarize your range; hence was born the 1/3p (or less) range bet.

In spots where it's ACTUALLY GTO to range bet, 1/3p isn't much more likely to be the preferred size than 1/2p+ (in reasonably deep-stacked spots). You're pretty much as likely to find spots where you have SUCH a strong advantage that betting 1/3p misses out on more EV than someone with a polarized range for a large size. It's even easier to think of VILLAINS where you miss out on gobs of EV by downsizing in order to range bet rather than using a mixed strategy for a large amount.

2) As others have pointed out, I think it's a mistake to use multiway pots as an example where smaller sizes don't make sense. This is because of the reasons others pointed out, but also because I'm much more skeptical of people's deviations from GTO in early tree multiway spots. I think it's much less common that people have ACTUALLY discovered ways of exploiting multiple players at once who all have different divergencies from equilibrium, and much more common the spots are just complex and they're falling back on old habits and heuristics.

2b) Another area where it's easier to lump a lot of spots together and say something broadly applicable is that as stacks get shallower relative to how many rounds of betting are left (eg: a 4b pot 100bbs deep or a raised pot 20bbs deep or what have you) the less reward there is (exploitative or otherwise) in sizing up.

3) All sorts of bet sizes make all sorts of sense in all sorts of scenarios (given all sorts of strategies), and I think the sooner you stop classifying any bet that's less than 1/2p as "small", anything bigger than 3/4 pot as "big" and anything in-between as "standard"--and loose all the associated stigma--the better served you'll be to evaluate these spots.

Fair enough. That makes a lot of sense, and is something I need to consider for such pots.