Multiway pots are one of the least explored parts of poker, this is why multiway pots are good spot to find a significant edge over our opponents. When one of the players makes a mistake in a Multiway pot the EV doesn’t get distributed to other players in the pot.
Mistakes of one player can reduce the EV of another player in that pot to benefit a third player, and neither strategy is safe from this effect.
Also if we consider the Minimum Defense Frequency (MDF), for the bluff to be profitable with a pot size bet, we need to take down the pot 50% of the time, and in the multiway pot, the percentage of defense is split on all players.
So players need to defend enough so that together they are not folding more than 50%, and this is putting a weird dynamic into the hand. In practice, the player who is closing the action has to take the larger part of defending than players before them, because there is nobody to push them out of the pot.
This is how MDF looks with multiple players in hand:
Multiway pots offer really bad risk/reward on bluffing, your opponents can defend tight and still prevent you from profiting while bluffing.
In multiway pots your betting range should be much stronger, pure bluffs are not good multiway – you need strong value bets and strong bluffs.
In multiway pots, our opponents don’t have to defend very wide at all. That works directly against the range betting – all of the fold equity you get heads-up doesn’t translate to multiway pots.
Another important thing in the multiway pot is the Nut potential of the hand.
So if you are in a spot where you are thinking of stacking off, you need to think if your hand is drawing to a good hand or nutted hand.
Conclusion:
- Players share the responsibility of defense, leading to tighter calling ranges.
- Betting with air or range betting is not typically a viable strategy.
- Use smaller bet sizes due to decreased equity retention.
- Use stronger betting ranges, with stronger thresholds for value bets and bluffs.
- Place more value on implied odds, equity retention, and nut potential.
- The positional advantage becomes more valuable.
- Blockers are more significant as card removal effects interact with multiple ranges.
- It becomes harder to attack capped ranges with another player involved.
- Bets become more linear and check-downs become more capped.
- The GTO solution is no longer guaranteed to be unexploitable.
