[dfscott]

[ QUOTE ]
I've been thinking of one of the concepts in the Harrington book which says to maximize inducing mistakes in your opponents by betting the most you think they will call incorrectly, so would it be better to encourage more mistakes from them by betting the 400? Or what reasons are there to decide that winning it right here is inherently more important than maximizing the mistake in your opponent?

Or am I misinterpreting HOH?

[/ QUOTE ]

That's true, but there are two things working against you here: 1) at the first level some of the players are bad (which isn't bad in and of itself) and 2) you have multiple people in the hand. These two things make it hard to determine what the minimum bet amount should be.

Let's say I bet enough to give the player to my left insufficient pot odds. But he doesn't know that, and calls anyway (which is good for me). However, as soon as he calls (correctly or incorrectly), the next player(s) has better odds. This is what happened to me. LAG boy called my initial raise, making it easy for the guy with the real hand (KdQd) to call as well.

This also had the nasty side effect of making the pot so big that I now didn't have enough chips to put in a meaningful bet on the turn (another reason to push the flop).