[matrix]

wow - you start a thread - go to work for the day and when you get back it's enormous!

I'm sticking to preflop raising here - there will be another thread in this series soon that delves into C-Betting.

The way I see it we are raising preflop for a grand total of 4 reasons... there are other sub-reasons but I think everything comes under one of the following 4 headings...

i) for value - we have the best or something that is likely to be the best hand at the table and we bet to get money into the pot for us to win.

ii) for protection - we have a hand like Aces or Kings or AK that doesn't want to see a family pot, so we raise to thin the field and hopefully leave ourselves Heads Up after the flop comes down.

iii) for control we raise preflop sometimes to gain the initiative in the hand and setup a flop continuation bet/semi-bluff, and also to take control of position where you raise in the CO to try to fold the button, or when we raise after a bad player has limped in front of us so we can isolate them on the flop.

iv) as a bluff - sometimes we raise preflop as a bluff/semi-bluff in order to steal the blinds

I think everytime we raise preflop at a Micro Stake NL table it should be for one of those reasons.

So if we know why we are raising how much should we raise??

ideally you want to raise as much as you can and still get at least one caller (unless you are stealing blinds) so if we have AA ideally we want to push all-in preflop and get called.

If we are raising to isolate a bad player then we want to raise as much as possible so that everyone else folds but the limper.

Because a lot of decisions we make at a NL poker table are related to the size of the pot, raising the size of the pot preflop is a good idea. This cuts down the implied odds we offer to the villains - and it means that if they call generally they won't be getting much better preflop odds than 1-1. It turns out that a pot sized raise is roughly 4-5BB depending on what the exact blinds are.

And if there are limpers in front we need to increase our preflop raise to ensure that each limper after we raise is faced with a call where the pot is offering them very short odds.

So the 2p2 standard of 4BB +1BB per limper seems to be based on raising the size of the pot preflop in order to cut the odds as much as possible so that most villains facing our preflop raise will be making marginal/bad calls if they do decide to call our preflop raise, and the more mistakes we can make our opponents make in every hand the more money we win in the long run.

There's one last thing to consider - giving away information about our holdings. It is of paramount importance that however much we raise preflop that we do not tip our hand to the opponents.

If we push every AA we are dealt - bet 10BB+1 with KK 8BB +1 with QQ, before too long some of the opposition wil pickup on what our bet amounts mean so that we might as well turn our hand face up when we bet. Obviously this would be a disaster.

We have 2 choices - 1 use a fixed amount or some fixed formula to decide our preflop raise amount for each and every raise no matter what our cards are. 2. Vary the amount we raise pseudo-randomly everytime we are dealt a certain hand - e.g. raise 8BB usually (say 80% of the time) with AA, but sometimes only raise 4BB, and sometimes raise 8BB with 76s.

NLTAP advocates varying your raise amounts and mixing up your play to throw off the opposition, but I don't think that this is good advice for Microstakes.

The real game of poker is played postflop. Microstakes players are trying to learn an incredibly complex game. Postflop is what we ought really to be concentrating on learning. If you are taking time and effort out to make your preflop game the best it can be, then you are not spending the same time improving your postflop game.

NLTAP is not really meant for microstakes play. It assumes that you are playng against good observant opponents for example - almost noone of the players at microstakes are good OR observant, true they pay a little attention to what goes on - if you push 2 hands in a row preflop all-in and everyone folds and then push a 3rd hand all-in expect to get called, but thats very far away from being observant and picking up and exploiting your betting habits...

So I say stick like glue to the 4BB+1per limper standard raise. Forget about preflop play until later on in your poker career, we can tune the engine later right now we need to put the wheels on first..