[jeffnc]

Live play is really weird sometimes. You'll see all sorts of strange amounts, like raising to $17 or whatever. Or bets of $16 on the flop when the pot holds $40. Once the preflop raise gets over 4x, just start rounding to $5 chips I say.

Anyway, this strangeness and looseness gives you a lot of flexibility in your raising amounts. Once you see what the raises mean at your table, you can start raising to anywhere between $2 and $20 at a $1/2 table. This gives you a great deal of flexibility in manipulating the pot size, if not the number of players to see the flop. It can be very helpful to know that if you have aces, you raise to $20, and one of your opponents has $80, he can't hurt you no matter what happens on the flop.