Why is 2.5x-4x BB the standard pre-flop bet size?

It's what I see people doing most of the time and what I see videos recommending almost all of the time. Obviously I understand the purpose of betting and stuff, I'm just wondering where this precise number comes from - my presumption is that it's just about big enough to prevent the BB from calling too often with speculative hands but also just small enough to induce a raise?

Exactly. You don't want every hand at the table to call. If you just 2x it, you get any speculative hands calling. If you make a raise that shows they better having something to call, then they will, and are more than likely to fold out the 45 suited hands.

TheDude6622 said:

Exactly. You don't want every hand at the table to call. If you just 2x it, you get any speculative hands calling. If you make a raise that shows they better having something to call, then they will, and are more than likely to fold out the 45 suited hands.

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You wish! In freerolls ( not CC Freerolls) I adjusted the rules and the hands I should raise, I'd rather limp, because there are sooooooo many "experienced" players that know, that suited connectors give them 3 ways to make a hand. But you're right, a min raise doesn't bring the BB to fold, imagine, he has already paid 100 and has to pay the same amount to defend it, he would do it with almost all cards. Paying twice as much as he's going to abandon makes people think twice.

When you get your decent hand you don't want to play it against all the table and get bad beat. Betting the way you said will get folds from marginal hands and sometimes it will even steal the blinds right away. So your goal is to play against one player or steal the blinds preflop and the cheaper you can do that, the better for your stack in the long run. I mostly bet 2.25x, unless I'm in an early position and want to isolate the play in which case I would usually bet 3x.

Is this really the standard raises? I was under the impression that a min raise is the standard pre flop open raise. This may not be the case the first levels, where the raises in most cases vary between 2-3 bb (2,4 bb for example). It is very rare to see a open raise over 3 bb, imo. Am i way of?

Sprockett

A preflop standard raise also allows you to not give too much information about your game. If you change the amount of your raises for each of your hands.your opponents could take the opportunity to follow you.

A raise of 2BB usually results in too many callers and gives the BB good pot odds to call with just about anything. A 2BB raise might make sense if you have all short stacks behind you. In those cases, it's as effective as the standard 3BB but less risky. On the other extreme, a raise bigger than 4-5BB isn't going to be very profitable because you chase away too many weaker hands. In addition, you put too much mathematical pressure on your hand to win. If you open 5BB against the blinds (1.5BB), you need to win about 77% of the time to be profitable. The sweet spot is generally somewhere around 3BB. If you keep your raise size consistent, says 3BB plus 1BB for each limper, then you also keep your hand strength hidden. This makes it much harder for a more experienced player to read you.

Ι don't think that there are some "standard" open-raise sizes.

Every person has their own rules. There was a time I open-raised 2x, some other time 2.5x, some period 3.5x, etc

It's true that sometimes at freerolls you get a lot of calls, no matter what your open-raise size is. So in this case, opening any hand 4x or 5x isn't the optimal.

I raise so for the reason that if I raise more then the opponent's raise would be very big and I would not want to pay. This way when you raise a 2.5x big bang, it's much easier to play later on, if there's a 3bet. There are several other reasons, but I practice this. And it's best to raise around 2.5x to 3x from big blend.

I know two concepts of rates:
1) From the position at the table (UTG-2,5bb; MP-3bb; COBU-3,5bb; SB-3bb)
2) from the depth of the stack (120bb = 3bb; 70-120bb = 2.75bb; 40-70bb = 2.5bb; 12-40bb = 2.25bb)
I use the second.