stop auto piloting 4 tables with 5 rows of hud stats and actually pay attention to people's showdown hands

have enough basic understanding of gto play to know if opponent is allowed to bet that specific hand you saw using their sizes and frequency, then form counterplay strategy to punish

start playing hudless and your intuition will be stronger if u dont have hud numbers distracting you, also playing heads up helps a ton

Hey Saduser. What stakes are you playing? It might be easier to talk about a specific spot. If your talking about flops you could use a program like gto wizard to figure out what you should be defending. And ajust to how you think your villians are playing

Cheers saduser,

theory wise this question is quite easy to answer: a merged betting range is a fairly thin value bet with a whide variety of hands.
In Flopspots this kind of bet is often used where one player has a decent range advantage over the other.
The typical example is UTG opens, BB calls and the flop comes: A72r
BB checks and basically everything in UTGs range is going to CBET, even hands that are way weaker than TP.
The main reason is, that we don't only want to bet for value, we also want to deny equity to villain. So beside Ax also every PP and so on benefits from betting.
The reason why we can do this is mainly the fact, that BB has to proceed very causiously as he has a huge range disadvantage and so has to fold a huge part of his range.
But as we bet so merged we are forced to BET SMALL usually as we don't want a lot of parts of our range to isolate themselves vs a strong range:
Example for this flop: 88 doesn't want to bet big and play vs a range of Ax only, while Villain still has to fold overcards even vs a smaller bet. But if we choose a small bet, we can often simply bet 100% of our hands here.

On the other hand we usually BET Big in spots that are more polar.
Lets stick to the same scenario: same flop, bet-Call from BB and the turn brings an offsuit K.

The BB checks and UTG has the decision of betting or checking. In this case we have to be aware that BB doesn't have a weak range anymore (remember: BB has to proceed super cautiously here OTF).
So BB is fairly condensed as we say (no more weak hands) while UTG often still has his 100% of range.
In this case a lot of UTGs range doesn't have incentive to deny equity anymore. So all underpairs and a lot of Ax-combos have to be careful now and imidiatly became too weak to bet at all while other parts of our range (AA/KK/AK/77/22) are still super strong.
So in this case our betting frequency will go down a lot but the hands that want to bet have incentive to go for a BIG bet or overbet.

To shorten this: small bets are theorywise more merged while bigger bets are usually more polar.
And indeed this pattern is used somewhat correctly from the regs even on smaller stakes these days and you can construct your ranges accordingly.
However: Its not guaranteed that your Villains got this concept correctly and still might just be clicking buttons :)