Poker Events Betting – the Best Bookmakers for Poker Events

Not knowing how to size your bets properly is one of the most atrocious mistakes you can ever make in a poker tournament. Make your opponents think that you don’t know how to bet in a poker tournament, and they will (figuratively speaking, I hope) eat you alive.

Place a wrong bet and you will suddenly turn yourself into the easiest target at the table. That’s because sizing your bets in the correct way is a crucial element of building a solid image at the table.

If you are planning to head to a casino to play your first game against total strangers, and you are not sure about how to size your bets either before or after the flop, have a look at this quick guide that we have prepared for you.

How to Bet in Poker Tournaments: Preflop

The 2x Bet. A 2x open preflop or a min-raise is popular among top pros for a variety of reasons, but opening for the minimum can invite problems, too, including:

1. it does not put that many chips in the pot for you to win when you flop a good hand;
2. it leaves you liable to being reraised.

Min-raising preflop with marginal hands that you can’t call a three-bet with is a major leak in my game, which is why I tend to stick with larger opens.

The 3x Bet. This used to be the standard opening raise size, and in fact still frequently works well during the early stages of a tournament. Often during the first few levels your stack is so large in relation to the blinds in play that it really isn’t worth opening for any less.

It sometimes seems attractive to play looser in the opening stages, and to call lots of bets preflop in the hope of building a monster pot to win at the river, but playing tight and opening a decent range with at least a 3x raise ensures that you aren’t ignoring the early blind levels. As the tournament progresses, however, and you gravitate towards the 25-35 big blind level, it may not be possible to open every hand with a 3x raise, which is why poker players tend to shift down a gear.

The 2.2x-2.5x Bets. If you are trying to learn how to bet in poker like a pro, have a look at this. Normally these opens are between 2.2x and 2.5x, although this sizing usually depends on the player.

How to Bet in Poker Tournaments: Postflop

It seems that post-flop there are an infinite number of bet sizes for you to choose from. I’ve tried to stick to the three main sizings, with examples for each of them.

Small bets (~1/4 pot). The small postflop bet invites the same problems min-raises before the flop do — you simply don’t put enough money into the pot to give yourself a chance to fold out opponents. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t times to use small postflop bets effectively.

Against certain players who you are aiming to check-raise, providing they are aggressive enough and/or view a small bet as weak, you could do so to induce a slightly bigger raise out of your opponent.

[kkstarratings]