Bet Size Sets Your Defense. Board Texture Barely Moves It.
Take two flops that a PLO player would describe in completely different language. J-T-4 two-tone is the wet one: K-Q, Q-9 and 9-8 are open-enders, A-Q, A-K, K-9 and Q-8 add gutshots, and half the pot-sized bets you face will have a straight draw somewhere in them. Q-7-3 two-tone is the dry one: no open-enders exist, the gutshots are few, and most of the range is pairs and air.
Now defend the big blind on each against a third-pot c-bet. The solve folds 31.1% on J-T-4 and 31.0% on Q-7-3. The two textures, as far as how often the caller gives up, are the same board.
The size is the whole story
Change the c-bet to pot on those same two flops and the fold frequency goes to 55.8% and 55.9%. Still identical to each other, and 25 points higher than before. One variable moved the defending threshold by more than twenty-five points; the other, the one that dominates how players talk about flops, moved it by one tenth of a point.
That is worth sitting with, because the intuition it displaces is a good-sounding one. More draws in the defending range should mean more hands competing for the same continuing slots, which should mean a higher bar for any individual hand. The logic is fine. It just does not survive contact with the range as a whole, because the wetter board hands extra equity to the defender at the same time as it raises the bar, and the two effects cancel almost exactly.
What it looks like hand by hand
Bottom pair with the nut gutshot is the cleanest test, because both boards offer one. On J-T-4, A-Q-4-x is bottom pair, the nut gutshot to the king, and two overcards to top pair. On Q-7-3, 3-4-5-x is bottom pair and the nut gutshot to the six, with nothing else.
Against the third-pot bet, both are pure continues: A-Q-4-x folds 0.3% of the time, 3-4-5-x folds 0.2%. A bet that small does not pose a question to a pair with a good draw, on any texture.
Against the pot-sized bet the same two hands fold 57.7% and 67.8%. Both collapse, and the one on the wet board collapses less. That is the reverse of the draw-density story, and the reason is not the board: A-Q-4-x has two overcards to top pair and 3-4-5-x has none. What separated these hands was their own equity, not how many draws were available around them.
Where texture does show up
Texture is not irrelevant to the flop. It is just on the other side of the table. Across all 1,755 canonical flops the button c-bets 52.3% of the time, but only 40.9% on monotone boards, and the fifteen least-bet flops in the solve are all monotone. Texture strongly determines whether you get bet at. It barely determines how often you fold when you do, at a given size.
So the order of operations for a defending decision runs: what size am I facing, then what is my hand actually worth, then what does the board do to both. The first term is worth twenty-five points of folding frequency. The last one, on this evidence, is worth a rounding error.
The c-bet frequency reference has the aggression side of this across every canonical flop, and the hand distribution page counts how much of a range holds each draw class on any board you enter. Both are worth more to you than a rule about wet boards.
Numbers are from the 6-max 100bb solve, single-raised pot, big blind defending the button, measured with the tool's own decode. You can reproduce any of them in the solver or the notebook.