While poker players spend countless hours studying what hands to play in which position, how to calculate implied odds, and what stakes they should be playing, rarely does one dedicate as much time to learning bet sizing. But as you’ll learn, knowing how large to make your bets and raises is just as important as anything else in poker. Keeping this point in mind, here is a quick look at how large to make your poker bets beginning with why bet sizing is useful.

Chances are that when you first started playing No-Limit Hold’em, you determined bet sizes based on feeling. For instance, you might have went all-in before the flop on one hand, then randomly bet 20 chips out of your 1,500-chip stack on the next bet.  In any case, there is no strategy behind randomly choosing bet sizes so you’ll eventually feel lost in the end.

This is where bet sizing becomes important because it adds a strategical element to your wagers. So instead of making a random all-in bet because you think your hand is good yet fear an opponent calling, you make a pot-sized bet to ensure the pot builds with your perceived advantage. Speaking of pot-sized bets, let’s move to the different methods for determining bet size. 

While there are several methods for deciding bet sizes, three common ways stand out above the rest. Using pot size, looking at the blinds, and measuring stack sizes are the three most common things people use to determine bet sizes. 

The most common way to decide the size of your bet is by using pot size. For instance, if there is $100 in the pot and you think a loose player will call a raise, you could throw out a pot-sized raise ($100). On the other hand, if the opponent is tight you could make a half-sized pot raise of $50 in hopes that they will call.

Another common method of bet sizing is looking at stack sizes (both your own and an opponent’s).  To illustrate the stack size method, assume that you hold the nuts and want to take an opponent’s whole stack. If their stack is 2,000 chips, you could raise 500 chips on the flop (one-fourth stack size bet), another 500 chips on the turn (one-third stack size at this point), and another 1,000 chips on the river (a stack-sized raise).

Perhaps the least common way to determine bet size throughout an entire hand is using the blinds. Most players only figure bet sizes using the blinds in pre-flop play because it’s too hard to measure bets in post-flop play when wagers grow larger. A good example of using the blinds to measure your bet size involves coming into a hand with a raise three times the big blind. So if you were playing $1/$2 No-Limit Hold’em, you would come into the hand with at least a $6 bet.

When most players first learn of the different bet sizing methods, they wonder if any one way is superior to the other. So it’s definitely worth diving deeper into the subject to find out if there is a superior way to measure bet sizes.

Poker pros love to debate about what type of bet sizing is the ultimate method. Some experts are adamant that using pot size is the perfect way while others swear on stack sizes or blinds as the measuring stick. But truth be told, any one of the three wager sizing methods can be useful in a given situation.

If you are trying to knock a short stack out of a tournament, using stack size would be the best way to accomplish this goal. On the other hand, if you are in a multi-way pot with other players, you can’t take everyone’s stack into account while betting so using pot size would be a more useful measuring stick. For pre-flop purposes, looking at blinds is a very effective way to bet since the pot isn’t large enough to hinge bets on.

So as you can see, there is no one-size fits-all method for determining bet sizes (unless you ask Daniel Negreanu who frequently bets 2/3 the size of the pot). In many cases, the situation will dictate how large you choose to make wagers. For this reason, deciding what style you’ll use for making bets requires a lot of thought and analysis. In fact, you might want to check out how the pros make their bets in different situations to determine what bet sizing strategy you use in the future.