Improper odds for the fishies

[bravos1]

I have been seeing more and more posts like the following by Shillx (Brad, in no way am I trying to be disrespectful. I always value your posts. This just happened to be the first I saw this morning.)

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People aren't getting good odds to draw so it becomes less critical to raise. Not a lot of hands can call correctly getting 5:1 while all kinds of stuff should call getting 9:1. You need to prevent them from drawing with good odds hense you raise in raised pots.

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More and more, I have seen posts like this telling people that they should or should not raise because it gives/does not give the others proper odds for calling.

I understand the principle here, but I do find it odd that we are dictating our own play based on what odds we are giving our opponents. I would guess that 85+ percent of the time, our opponents do not understand the odds at all.

Let's assume our opponent needs 7:1 odds to call (for this example, the pot lays 10:1 if we just call) and we raise making it ~5:1, does this have a huge impact? Most of our opponents are thinking.. "man, only one more card needed to hit my straight, plus I have a pair already". Many will call whether it's proper or not.

If we know a player will call our raise, do we really care that much if we make it "proper" for them or not? So many times in the .50/1 and 1/2 levels I would raise to give improper odds, etc., but I think it really does not matter as many (those I'm getting the most $$ from) would chase irrespective if it was 1, 2, or even 3 bets to them many times.

I have seen so many plays that just don't make sense to me, like a person capping the turn, but folding to one river bet when a fairly non-theatening card falls on the river.... or players capping their gutshots w/ bottom pair when it is already 3 bets to them after the flop [img]/images/graemlins/shocked.gif[/img]

Does anyone else feel that we should be trying to get as much money into the pot when we have the best chance to win and not really worry about our opponents pot/implied odds when they sure as all are not? Or am I just being stupid? [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]