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Totally true, could be that 3 is fine and people just need to adjust. It also might be different at higher stakes when betting 1-2 chips would be much more meaningful, but since so many of the games seem to be around $1 or less stakes, the value of chips is so low that when people bet they tend not to bet 1-2 at a time, but 5 or 10 or more, making for the problem of all the folding on the first betting round. I personally don't have the patience to play a fold heavy strategy, but I do try to keep my first round bets at 5 if I intend to play (I will fold if I get whammied with a really low number, but I have won enough game starting with a 10 or 12 to at least stay in if it is cheap) simply because I want to discourage folding at this point and at least see what the next round brings.
I also think that people fold a bit too much, but that could be the nature of the game at this point. I have had people fold out of games in the 3rd round where they needed to call 7 more chips to win ~80, which seems like pretty big stretch. I have also called down with some pretty low totals, and won a few of them, because the odds were so good it wasn't worth folding.
I think there is an issue with a low starting ante not just because the the stakes are so low that folding is essentially "free" (more so at 1 coin ante per player than the new 3) but also because the pot odds are pretty unappealing, whether players are actually thinking about the math or feeling it intuitively.
After the first move, it becomes difficult to make a meaningful bet without offering your opponent somewhere in the range of 1:1 odds of winning. E.G. if you get a 'good' starting number, somewhere around 25-30, and you make a 'strong' bet of 10 coins, you are putting your opponent in the situation where they have to call 10 coins to win 22, meaning they have to feel like they are going to win ~50% of time for their equity to dictate calling.
The numbers vary of course if your opponent has a decently strong start and decides to bet 5 themselves, making it so that they would have to call an additional 5 into a pot of 22, putting them around the 25-30% range of needing to win for the call to be profitable.
However, I get the sense from reading the other post that the default strong conservative strategy is to bet 0 (check) on anything other than a top number on the first turn. So, more often than not there is an asymmetry where one player is betting and offering ~~1:1 odds, and the other is simply forced to fold on any start that is average or worse. You could argue that players are foregoing equity because they may have above average expected scores on subsequent turns, depending on what is eliminate after the first round, but for simplicity sake I think this plays into it a lot even if others are not explicitly stating it when discussing this issue. I thnk this explains why ~half the games are folding at this point.
This issue would be less exacerbated if the value of the coin were higher, e.g. if it were a 10 coin stack (setting aside other issues of going to smaller stack from other thread) and an ante of 1, the normal bet size would be more like 1-2 coins instead of the 5, 10, 20+ that happens more often in games that are not folded now. This would set the odds into a more speculative range, someone betting 1 coin into the starting pot of 2 offers the opponent 3:1 to call, meaning they could justifiably continue with as little as 25% chance to win. currently these scenarios are incredibly rare for the first hand of the game, and can only happen when a reasonable pot of 20+ chips has built up.
The tl;dr of it is, I think going up to 3 ante is good, but if its not having effect on the folding patterns seen from before the change, I think it means simply that its not enough. I'd expect we would need to see it move in the 8-10 range to allow for round 1 betting to not be so easily solved.
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