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What is a Big Pot?

whiskeyriverw
whiskeyriver
in General Poker Questions

I'm pretty new to studying poker. I keep running across this advice: Small hand, small pot. Big hand, big pot. Great. But is there a definition, or some general guidance on what a big pot is in terms of number of big blinds? For example, is a pot of 30bb big? How about 50bb?

Thanks for any advice. This may be one of those things most people just understand intuitively, but I'm autistic, I don't like fuzzy ideas. :-)

Comments

  • apt_gs
    apt_gs

    I think the concept is to think what the bet size will be at the end of the hand in proportion to the bet size now. For example, if you bet the amount of the pot on all 4 streets of betting, even with just one caller your last bet will be about 40 times as large as your first bet. Whereas, in the same situation, if you were to bet 1/2 the pot size, you last bet would be about 22 times as large. The underlying principle being that in No Limit, the pot size grows exponentially and that you can very easily find yourself all-in by the river if you let the pot size grow faster than your hand warrants. So by betting a smaller % of the pot in early streets (or by checking a round of betting, to reduce the number of betting rounds) you can control the pot size to better match with the strength of your hand. Of course, if you overdo it and make it obvious what you are doing, your opponent can easily exploit it, so you do have to mix it up without straying too far from the concept.

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