Overbet

An overbet is any bet bigger than the pot, and it earns its place when a range is polarised into strong value and real bluffs with little in between, or when a card hands one player a clear nut advantage. Both conditions let a big bet do two jobs at once: extracting maximum value from hands that call and maximum fold equity from hands that do not.

Worked example. The pot is 100bb and the aggressor overbets 150bb, one and a half times the pot:

required fold frequency = 150 / (150 + 100) = 0.6

That bluff needs a fold 60% of the time to break even, noticeably higher than the 50% required by an ordinary pot-sized bet, which is exactly why overbetting demands more from the range behind it, not less.

Overbetting a merged range, thick with good but unspectacular hands, backfires: strong hands call anyway and the medium hands that would have paid a smaller bet fold instead.