Rec limpers vs. Competent limpers

I open suited broadway from any position and generally small pps, although I sometimes open limp small pps in ep, depending on the table. That is at a typical 1/3 game where you aren't getting 3! much and usually get multiple callers. Then position is not all that important. I may fold suited broadways if there is a big raise in front which appears strong. Will fold small pps to a big raise if it doesn't look like it will go multiway. Guess I don't play as tight as a lot of people here. I play a wider range on the button or CO in a raised or limped pot. I sometimes raise and sometimes limp behind in late position. When I limp behind in late position, I am expecting a limped pot.

I don't like playing really tight ranges. For one thing, it is easier for people to put you on a hand. Particularly, at 2/5 where there are a few pros, it is better if you can have a small pp, suited broadway or good suited connector, and they don't know you always have like 99+/AQ+. Even apparent fish will make reads, maybe subconsciously, and you want to confuse people about what you have.

There are some situation where limping is the best play IMO. I mentioned small pps. Say you have Axs in a limped pot on CO or BTN. You want to keep it deep and multiway, even more than with a pp. Sure you could raise big and try to get it HU, but just building the pot is bad. If there are people 3-betting a lot, it may be better to limp/call with some hands and play a single raised pot rather than a 3-bet pot.

I don't agree with a limping strategy like GG, and if you are going to do that. I saw someone make the final table of the ME who always limped, but he did some limp/3-betting. However, I don't agree about never limping because it is a donk play. IMO, you need to use all plays available to you. Similarly, you should use all sizings available in the right situation, preflop or postflop.

Small pps are trash in ep in a tough game with a lot of HU and 3! pots. In loose game where you can raise and get 3 callers, that are very profitable. Limp/calling them may sometimes be better than raising, and is way better than folding.

I said it very early in this thread, and I'll say it again -- you limp only when you know your opponents and can outplay them post, then you can win money w/ 33 -- or any other hand worth limping. You don't always have to hit your hand to win the pot 😉 It's the same if you raised 33.

Just play poker, people, and at the right table w/ the right players that includes limping.

IMO, it's very difficult to win the pot without the best hand in a multiway pot, especially OOP. I'm rarely "outplaying" my opponents this way; I'm more outplaying them by putting in far less chips than they are when I have the worst of it / putting in more chips than they are when I have the best of it.

GcluelessoutplayingnoobG

That's not even the point -- so off-track.

U lose a lot of bslue limp-calling good hands.

It's all about being exploitative in certain situations but in general limp calling 5x raises is very spewy.

If the players are bad and passive enough and the game is deepish though it will often limp around and then you'll get a nice situation where you paid very little for the opportunity to effectively stack someone. When stacks are 4x bigger relative to the pot the advantage is larger.

The type of tables you'd be doing this a lot at are not the kind of tables where you are worrying about balancing ranges and you can play a limp/fold line without having to fold all that much.

If I see a more perceptive player at a fishy table doing a fairly wide amount of position raises I may limp 3-bet them once and then show some clown cards hopefully when they fold. But this is to get paid off by the rest of the table in situations where I'm more or less playing strong hands face up. I will never waste AA to balance my limp 3-bet range and the table image stuff actually will pay off better on 4-bet reraises from open-raises than on limp 3-bets.

Raise less wide vs competent limpers because their ranges are stronger. (Especially out of position)

I never open limp unless there's a maniac at the table raising almost every hand. Will limp behind occasionally because I don't see a point in bloating the pot and decreasing SPR and increasing rake.

Yeah, I don't understand why you need to raise or fold everything when it is limped to you on the button. Some weird rule about never limping because you don't want to look like a donk or something?

?

Your line I quoted reads as if you're outplaying your opponents by winning the pot without hitting your hand. That's not what you meant?

GcluelessNLnoobG

Sklansky/Malmuth argue in their latest book that it makes little sense to be completely opposed to open limping and yet be completely fine with overlimping a limper.

GI'dagreewiththatsentimentG

I have no problem with sometimes open limping. However, if you limp/call everything, including 99+/AQ+, aren't you losing value at many 1/2 or 1/3 tables when it goes as a limped pot?

Sklansky and Mallmuth's book is odd, as they appear to advocate open limping hands like Q6s in ep. They do make a point that limped pots may be profitable with a lot going in postflop with a little preflop and limpers making big mistakes.

When I'm at a table where I know I can outplay my opponents post, yes, I can win w/o hitting my hand. Sometimes I don't even look at my hand (although if I don't look, I raise -- never limp). However, that has nothing to do with limping, which is what this thread is about.

I can think of a few reasons:

1. The nut worst result if you open limp EP is when it folds to the BB and you are playing a limped pot HU and rake is at least 15%, this can't happen if you overlimp.

2. The more limpers the less likely people are to raise or fold.

3. If you overlimp but never open limp, you aren't splitting your opening range at all.

4. While you are still splitting your range after a limper it isn't as noticeable, you are "protected" by the limper (see #2) and if you think about it like a raise then very few people are playing a raise or fold strat. from any position.

I get the general point you are making but for me the only time I ever open limp (non BvB and I chop at SSHE) is in time raked games so 5-10 and above (the rake kind of kills you at low stakes, especially as it keeps going up... and not taking the pot down rake free preflop will hurt the WR.)

Pretty much if you play around with some pre-flop solves you can make a strategy that limps or big raises (like 5BB) and just given the fact that population will over ISO raise you, you can play only limp from early then kind of have to split from late...honestly it's fun for me as a poker nerd studying OOL spots and seeing how regs adapt but I don't really think the strat is good except for fun and maybe if you are new to a room and trying to get an invite to a private game...

The HRC strat limps all sorts of random garbage (e.g. J6o) from EP at a low frequency (think like 10-15 percent) and a very strong range as well (it does cut out like suited connectors, I assume, because they don't want to call like a 5x OOP with depth), you then fold all garbage to an ISO raise and continue with your strong hands, only limp raises premiums along with weird blocker hands K4o, A5o...(though you might want to swap in the suited high-low hands because we are human)...If your not running these ranges through like PIO (or GTO wiz AI now I guess) you just have to play poker and make assumptions about how people will react....turning over Q6o in a limp-4 bet pot (loose isoer and then loose 3-bettor attacking the loose open) will get you the whale tag real quick...

Lol...as the OP, I said earlier that I never play that way at the 5/10/20. At the 5/10/20, I play ONLY raise/fold preflop and I adhere strictly to a GTO opening hand chart. If you want to play that game, it's at the Encore in Boston. Talk to anyone who plays it and they'll tell you that a limper would get absolutely destroyed. I do very well at that table but I have wanted to experiment at a few other games I play in where these "competent limpers" do some damage to the more seasoned players.

Anyway, nice to know that I've sparked an interesting dialogue. As promised, I have some results from my first outing testing this theory. I have no problem being honest with the numbers.

It was a relatively short session of just 3.5 hours. It was a 1/2 game where most buy in for $300 but stacks quickly got above $800+. I tracked all of my hands that I open-limped or limped behind when I normally would not have (the only cards I will normally limp behind with are pps so I left those out). I tracked the number of times I limped, how much I spent limping and how much I ended up winning or losing in each of those hands. The results were that I limped 12 times, spent $43 in limps and lost an overall amount of $97 in all of those combined hands (some of the limps were to call $5 straddles which is why the losses were higher than if they were just the blinds). I did not win a single one of those hands which I found very interesting. I'm sure those of you who feel that open limping will always lose money in the end are saying, "What did you expect?". Well, I don't consider a dataset of 1 to answer the question, but I've decided that I am going to continue on until I've reached either a net loss of $500 or I've made $1,000 trying this out. I'm very curious to see what I make on a hand when I actually win it. Does it wipe out the losses? Does it only win a few $$$?

Anyway, I play again tomorrow night and will report back.

With regards to limping behind. What hands other than pp's do you like to limp behind? Axs and pp's seem obvious as they can make nutted hands and are weak when it comes to raising for value. What about Kxs? kqs? Would you rather limp behind or iso? What about Qjs and It's. Limp behind or iso? In the past I would've iso'd all but I've been thinking about the merits of limping more in live low stakes games. I now definitely favor limping behind with Axs and small pp's but I'm unsure about Kxs, Kq/kjs, Qjs, jts. I think I would be more inclined to iso because I can't make the nuts multi way as easily

Personally, I usually limp behind small pps and Axs. I usually raise suited broadway for value. In CO and more on BTN, I will limp behind a wide range, suited connectors, some suited gappers, KJo, ATo, Q9s and others. Will sometimes raise those hands in position though, depends on reads and table. I don't play Kxs, which can't make the nut flush or a decent straight. I limp more that most people here, but don't agree with GGs approach at all.

5. You can polarize IP against limpers in a way you can’t with no one VPIPing in front of you and 6+ players LTA. So even if a limp and raise are both similar EV in a vacuum, you’re incentivized to overlimp certain hands if it means you can raise larger and/or with a more polar range.

But that would require playing almost ass-backward from how most of the posts here would suggest, so we’re not ready to have that conversation yet!

And why's that? Most limpers aren't folding to a raise which is why I don't mind limping behind sometimes. If they are the sort who will fold then raising is usually better.

You don't open limp because no one has shown any interest in the pot and you can take it down preflop, avoiding rake and giving the blinds free flops.

By "deep-stacked" I mean like 70bbs+ deep in the context of ranking preflop holdings.

But that also means our opponents are calling more QJo/K9s, baby flush makers in the same suit, etc.

I would start with the assumption that a solver using regret minimization (eg: Monker and GTOw) isn't going to purely raise a hand that becomes -EV in certain environments.

I just mathed this out with someone offline w/r/t to A7s (which just happens to be the stone bottom of GTOw's pure RFI range UTG with live rake), and honestly it was very hard to devise a combination of our 8 opponents' strategy that makes it clearly unfavorable to play.

Now, we did eventually come up with one where you'd have to realize like 140% of your equity, which is steep but also maybe not entirely impossible in 2nd-to-last position 4-way against a bunch of droolers trying to survive to showdown with hands like A8o without getting fleeced by our value range.

But while we could quibble all day about the exact contours of the bottom of your range (77 vs A7s vs K9s vs AJo, etc)--indeed solvers themselves spit out different combinations of 0EV hands--but I think it's important to recognize what the heart of your range is. And in FR poker, either KJs is a profitable hand or you're doing something wrong. (Fun fact: Even in a literal 20-handed game, KJs is at-worst a neutral raise.)

I mean, it's all whatever. No one's biggest leak is playing too few hands cold without a reasonable chance to scoop the blinds uncontested. If anything, what I respect about GG's game is that he doesn't start battles he can't win, whereas so many will get themselves in a spot where they ARE bleeding chips by (eg) not realizing enough of their equity after VPIPing. Or just being generally incompetent in multiway pots.

But strictly speaking, you're missing potential EV by folding it.

Last night's numbers were a bit different. This was a 1/3 game with similar players.

It was a 5.75 hour session, limped in 12 times again, spent $46 in limps, but this time netted $42. Two flushes gave me most of the winnings. I won four hands overall versus winning none last time. $97 - $42 puts me at -$55 between the two sessions.

There were two observations about both of those specific hands that stood out:

1. Because these are limped pots without much $$$ in them, it made it harder to build them up.
2. Because the cards I'm holding were marginal (in one case 86s), I couldn't bet it out too much for fear of a larger flush being out there.

Both are reasons against employing this strategy, but I want to continue to see where things end up.

Even a brain dead monkey will be able to determine your limp range after a few showdowns. LOL at players worrying about GTO while playing hands face up.

We can open limp some small pairs as long as we work in some limp raises to protect us from the ISOs.

My limp range? I highly doubt it, none of them are good enough to notice, let alone adjust -- those are the players I'm talking about. LOL.