[SplawnDarts]

I would advise that with a spread that's small relative to the blinds like that, you always bet and raise the max. While there are psychological reasons to bet other amounts, I think there's never a technical reason to do so. So ABC poker here is to study your limit game and bet the max. If you want to feel like you're making use of the spread limit, bet 4 instead of 5 on the end randomly one time in 2 or one time in 3. The pot will already be so big that the odds you're laying are effectivly the same, but you'll find your opponents will ascribe meaning to your different bet sizes and use it to make decisions. Since there is no meaning, those decisions will often be mistakes.

There is one BIG difference between spread limit and no limit though: the bet size does not double on the turn. That means that two classic tactics of limit, namely the turn check-raise and buying a free card, don't work. I reccomend you never checkraise unless you improve your hand on the turn or river. If you flopped the goods, lead it out no matter how big & drawproof it is.

The spread limit strucutre also means that the same players will take a river card more frequently than they would in standard limit, which means if you fail to thin the field there will be more suckouts. On the other hand, your initial raise is to 7 rather than 4, so you CAN thin the field in an almost NL way before the flop sometimes if the limpers haven't already given eachother pot odds. Those two effects can more or less cancel eachother out.

One other thing to do is watch when your opponents make use of the spread limit (ie. bet or raise less than 5). Oftentimes, a donk's choice of bet size will be directly proportional to how much they like their hand. This springs out of the "This is a $N hand" line of flawed thinking, and is most common on the flop. If you find someone doing this, it's a goldmine because it effectivly reveals the content of their hole. I find that bluff-raising against players who have just bet the bottom of the spread is a very effective tactic for psychological reasons (assuming there are no other players in the pot to get in the way). Since villian has already decided that their middle pair or whatever is a $2 hand, raising to $7 usually triggers an insta-fold.