How to manipulate SPR? Fish out of water here...

So I finally got around to reading PNL, mainly due to all the talk about SPR that I’ve seen in the BC. On the whole this book makes a lot of sense and is well worth the read, but I cannot for the life of me get my head around manipulating SPR.

I know what SPR is, I know how to calculate it, I know why certain SPR’s are bad for certain hands. That’s all clear as crystal. What I don’t get is how you go about achieving your ‘target’ SPR in the first place.

The book says SPR is the effective stack divided by the total size of the pot pre-flop. So in a common online scenario of 100BB E.S. with a 4xBB pfr going HU would be between 10.1 and 12 SPR (depending on dead blind money). Apparently this is a bad SPR for top pair/ overpair type hands. So how do we manipulate it? The book didn’t explicitly say, so we’re left to guess.

1/ Buy in for less – no, that’s stupid. Suppose you buy in for 50bbs with the intention of hitting your target SPR with a TP/OP type hand, and the first hand you’re dealt is a PP that flops a set. The book says that a good target SPR for a PP is close to 13 – in other words, you should have bought in full.
2/ Dump the hand until you get a favourable SPR – yeah right. I’m dumping AQ, AJ, KQ, KJ until I have enough people in or out of the pot to make a favourable SPR. That’ll be long term profitable.
3/ Change your pre-flop bet sizing – This is the only other option that I can think of, and it’s asking for trouble. Buy in for 100BBs and raise to 6.5 to 8BBs with KQo, just to hit your target SPR for a ‘top pair hand’? The only callers you’d get are setminers or hands that have you crushed. Or raise 3xBB with SC to create a favourable SPR and get 3bet off the hand, fantastic.

There are some people on this forum who really like this whole SPR thing so it must be good. Somebody please tell me how you aim for a ‘target’ SPR pre-flop? Surely I’ve missed something ldo obvious? Please make me look stupid, it’s the only way I’ll learn

*waits for IOPQ to reply to this thread*

Well, you should notice that a 3.5x raise is exactly pot. So I make it 4x OOP (EP/MP) and 3x IP (LP).

Even if you have hand like KQ on the button and you have a "bad" SPR you can always check a street for pot control if you're not really that excited to get three streets of value.

Yes, it will suck if you're OOP with a weird SPR for your hand. But I seriously doubt that overbetting the pot with a medium strength hand is a great idea. Maybe a better idea in 6m is to just cbet, and check to your opponent on the turn to induce, and prepare to fold the river.

ok.

So you're not willing to commit your stack to KQ on a K74 flop against Great player, against a good player, and against a bad player. But the worse the player, the closer you're willing to get right?

Against a great player you'd want to get around 4x the pot in the center.

Against a good player you'd want to get around 6-7 times the pot in the center,

against a lolbad player you'd want to get 10ish times the pot into the center.

Since raising to 6.5 or 7 times the BB is lolbad. Why not manipulate your bet sizing down the stretch

bet 2/3rds pot on the flop(2.33 if called) check the turn (still 2.33) bet 1/2 pot on the river which gets you to a total spr of 5. Or perhaps 1/2 pot on the flop 2, followed by 1/2 on the river gets you exactly 4.

Against a good player, 2/3rds pot, on the flop and 2/3rds pot on the river gets you mighty close to 6, while pot on the flop and pot on the river gets you mighty close to 8.

against a lolbad player. bet 4x with 100bb stacks and then ALL YOU CAN EAT BABY.

Originally Posted by Lucothefish

There are some people on this forum who really like this whole SPR thing so it must be good.

Originally Posted by Robb

Originally Posted by Lucothefish

There are some people on this forum who really like this whole SPR thing so it must be good.

lol. It is good.

It's an element that was missing from my game that establishes what a big pot is in comparison to the way the pot grows.

It establishes what is acceptable for the way a pot grows, and what isn't, and what kinds of things you need to consider when betting.

I think it needs to get to the "fundamentals of a system" sort of level where you don't even think about it, you just seem to instinctively know it.

I've been so high on it because it's such a new concept for me which makes decisions much easier.

SPenda ..........could you at least give us a clue what colour number 15 is ?

Brown... Just and educated guess.

Like the stain in his pants brown.

the four color theorem states that we can color that using only four colors and never have the same color touch itself. We'd have to start with all currently touching regions with the same number be considered as one region though.

Originally Posted by iopq

Well, you should notice that a 3.5x raise is exactly pot. So I make it 4x OOP (EP/MP) and 3x IP (LP).

That'll do for now.

I don't think I'll ever be too fussed about SPR manipulation. It's noteworthy, but I think that the PNL book review week made it sound more important than it actually is.

Thanks for the replies.

Ok, just posted in an SPR thread and now posting in this one also. Hmm.

How to manipulate: Change your bet size. It's outlined fairly clearly in the book, with their example being limp/3bet AA/KK type hands.

This method is generally derided on forums that advocate standard bet sizes as the way forward. You correctly point out that buying in half is a different way of accomplishing this, and there are some classic threads on FTR about the half buyin strategy which I think was actually inspired in part by either PNL or similar literature. The obvious connection here is that given a certain bet size relative to stacks you MUST adjust the hand ranges you play to make sure you play profitable ones.

The basic assumption (in the book) is that you can make different size raises preflop and get calls from the exact same hands. As in, if I bet 2bb this opponent will call. If I bet 10bb this opponent will call the same hands. Thus, I pick the bet size that gives me the SPR closest to my target SPR.

There's a bit of waffle saying that sometimes bet sizes will cause calling hand ranges to adjust and how that limits your SPR manipulation options but it's important to know how and when you'd want to manipulate your SPR as well as recognize when you hit a good or a bad SPR for your hand.

In live games there may be situations where you get the same calls from a 2bb raise as from a 10bb raise, but online this is generally not the case. From someone used to the standard bet size argument it seems awfully exploitable to be raising to 7bb with broadways only, but sometimes the stack sizes we are playing against contrive to make this less obvious. We may end up raising to 3bb against one specific limper and 8bb against another specific limper based on their stack size and our target SPR, but a casually observant might get a read that "8bb is always unpaired broadways" - and then find himself disappointed when in a future situation (against him) it is not the case. You can make some standard sized bets and occasionally throw in a preflop raise size that is informed by target SPR if you think the likely opponent in this particular hand is unlikely to have an idea what it all means. That said, there's nothing wrong with having a single standard raise size (or the 3bb (IP) in CO/BTN/SB when folded to/BB when SB completes, 4bb (OOP)elsewhere).

One way of looking at it is also to say, even if you don't manipulate your SPRs it helps to be AWARE of what good and bad SPRs are as it can help you make better commitment decisions in a hand.

Remember that the important thing about SPR is not just memorising the good/bad SPRs for different types of hands in the simple form, but rather figure out how to calculate an opponent and situation specific SPR using hand ranges, player tendencies etc.

Let's say villain one is a loose passive calling station with 70bb and our target SPR with unpaired broadways (making TPGK) against this calling station is 5 - he limps and we act after him. We know that he is bad and when he has decided to see a flop he doesn't care if he pays 3bb or 12bb for it. We know he's not observant and doesn't try to read things into our bet sizes so we can freely manipulate our bet size to get our target SPR. We need the pot size after the flop to be around 13bb, so if we raise to 6bb and the blinds fold we get our SPR of 5. Note that in this case his playing tendencies (calling down any bets with A-high and second pair) made the target SPR an otherwise excessive 5.

Villain two is a tight player against whom TPGK is hardly ever good. If he puts money in past the flop we're often beat. So even if we hit our hand (TPGK) we don't want the SPR to be much past 1. However, in this situation he has limped in with 35bb behind, something that for this player makes premium holdings unlikely and his likely range is low broadways that will stack off if paired, suited aces that will stack off if they become flush draws and low pairs that might pay off at least one more bet against which we can probably adjust our TPGK target SPR upwards to 2.5. An 11.5bb pot will set up about the right SPR. This opponent is observant of standard raise sizes and will be suspicious if we use a non-standard raise size, but since it's customary to bet something like 4bb +1bb per limper we can bet 5bb (where normally we might iso raise to 3+1bb in position), achieving a pot size of 11.5bb (less rake) if both blinds fold and have 30bb behind for something close to our target SPR.

While I think using standard bet sizes preflop is a fantastic thing, there are times, especially when your opponents are not playing full stacked, and are bad, where betting non-standard amounts can be useful, and in those cases SPR is a possible tool to use to decide how much you want to raise preflop to manipulate the SPR to something that suits the hand that you are likely to make.

If you do something like this, it's worth keeping in mind what it does to your image. Some semi-observant players may get wrong reads on you or think you are more donkish than you are and give you more credit in some situations and less credit in other situations based on what they consider a donkish sized preflop raise.

+1 for the clear explanation