Something I think are vague and pretty annoying in the final thoughts part of this chapter.

"If you are last to act and might be beaten, your bets should tend to be smaller than they would be if you were fairly sure you had the best hand.

Okay this is pretty misleading. The author is suggesting that how likely it is that you are beaten should determine how large you should bet on the river. Umm no...the factor determining how much you bet on the river with a marginal hand for value is not how many better hands are in villains range, but how much equity you have vs his non folding range/continuing range for various bet sizes and how these different potential bet sizes change his continuing range and hence the EV of the bet. If you are "likely to be beaten" you may well not even have more than the 50% equity needed to bet vs his continuing range and shouldn't bet at all since he'll be folding a lot of weak hands usually.

EG. You are against a passvie villain who cannot fold much at all on the river with a decent piece of the board or pair. You have AT on QT224 and have bet the flop and turn for value. On the river you decide that hes calling with anything 33+ but is passive enough to have all Q combos that he reaches the flop with. He cannot fold these 1 pair hands to a psb. So lets say at an estimate that we have 63% equity vs villains continuing range, as there are more combos of 33-99 and Tx than Qx. So should we bet less on this river than we should if he had 0 Qx combos in his range? Of course not, in both cases, he calls just as often to the psb as he does when we bet less, and so, if betting at all is +EV, then betting the pot will be most +EV in either case, regardless of how much of the less than 50% part of his range is beating us. (assuming here that a psb is his inflection point where he starts to fold a lot more often as we bet more than this and hecne our EV goes down.)

So yeah, vague misleading statement - EV vs a continuing range is what decides how much we should bet on the river, not the amount of stronger hands in villains range as a whole.

Challenge: Post a hand where you bet the river for value and have a go at estimating which size is better out of 1/2 pot, full pot, and 2x pot. Make a continuing range for villain for each bet size and work out which range you have the most equity against using pokerstove.

If you can't find a hand like this, make one up. It's great to practice assigning continuing ranges vs your value bets. Get in to the habit of doing this in the right way and not going "meh I'm beat here quite a lot so I'll bet a bit less."

One thing is true, the weaker the range you are trying to extract value from, the less you should bet in general (not always) The more hands that beat you, the weaker the range you're trying to extract value from. This is likely what he means to say, but yeah felt it needed a lot of clarification for beginers so you can practice doing this in the right way.

/rant

gogogogo.

If feeling generous, you could interpret the author's statement as a badly worded and unclear version of that.