Tamarisk Poker ClubTexas Hold’em← BackTamarisk Poker ClubTexas Hold’em← BackBeginners tend to bet either far too little or everything they have. There is a simple answer that covers nearly every situation.
Pot has 600 in it? Bet 400. That is it. It is big enough to make a draw pay a bad price, small enough that you are not risking a fortune, and it looks identical whether you have a monster or nothing.
A tiny bet gives everyone a cheap look at the next card. If someone is chasing a flush, they need to be right about one time in five to call a bet of a quarter of the pot — and their flush comes about a third of the time. You have handed them a profitable call. See is this worth chasing? for where those numbers come from.
Going all in with a good hand does one thing reliably: it makes everybody with a worse hand fold. You win the chips already in the middle and nothing more. Bet an amount somebody can talk themselves into calling.
Betting big with good hands and small with weak ones is the easiest pattern in the world to spot, and at a table of friends it will be spotted by about the third week. Betting roughly the same proportion of the pot every time costs you nothing and gives away nothing.
This is a tournament, so the blinds keep rising. Sooner or later everybody becomes short-stacked — and short stacks are played completely differently.
Nothing in between. With a stack that small, a normal raise commits most of it anyway, and shoving all in at least means nobody can push you off the hand afterwards. Raise-then-fold with a short stack is how beginners lose their last chips without ever seeing a showdown.
Here is what that means on our actual schedule, if you were still sitting on your starting stack:
The lesson is not "wait until level seven and then shove". It is the opposite — if you fold your way to level six you have no chips left to work with. Get involved while your stack still gives you room to make a bet somebody can fold to.