The art of min betting

[rocflight]

My experience with this has mainly come from playing the Rounders series at Royal Vegas, don't know if this is prevalent at other sites.

Anyhow, I've noticed that people have been using min bets and min raises quite liberally.

But my question mainly concerns post flop play when a player either leads out betting the absolute minimum or does so after people have checked to them, even when the pot is quite large. When a player does this, the alarm bell always goes off in my head because I guess I've been trained to think that weakness means strength. I'm not really sure how to proceed here. I've seen players call such bets and then have to face a pot sized bet on the turn. I've also seen players raise more appropriate to the bet size (say 3x the min bet) and have it called. Another possibility is that other players raise something close to the size of the pot, at which point the initial bettor will either raise big (trapping) or fold.

However, I haven't really found a pattern in terms of what kind of hands from which types of players warrant such plays. Does anyone have a good grasp of the inner workings of this play?

The reason I'm asking is that a lot of times, this seems like a very clever play especially when the skill level around the table is not solid all around. I think many players get confused (including myself) when faced with this play and have a hard time knowing how exactly to handle it. On the other hand, the player employing this play almost always benefits in that he/she may get to see a few cheap extra cards (if called down), or win the pot outright (I've seen it happen quite a bit, believe it or not), or lose the minimum if someone does have a hand.

If someone could explain how to employ this play as well as play against it, that would be greatly helpful.