So the guy who said limping AJo in the CO instead of building a pot, running multi street bluffs against fish is a good idea and that we need to be worried about getting 3 bet at 1/3 to the point where we shouldn't be raising AJo in the CO is now banned. I wonder why.

I see trolling right away. Unfortunately some of the newer and less experienced players on this forum can't differentiate between real advice and trolling. Although I mostly disagree with your limp pre advice in most threads, your advice is at least well thought out and reasonable enough for me to keep an open mind.

Limping behind preflop against a whale seems pretty criminal. We are crushing his range and getting it down to heads up or three ways is awesome. Not exactly sure what we scared of. Button and blinds are only going to wake up with JJ+ AQ+ 10.5% of the time.

Don’t raise flop.

I wasn't trolling either when I said there was a case to be made. As always, it depends on what play will maximize your EV vs a set of villains. Sometimes that is over-limping AJ in LP (not often I grant you, but it is not 0%).

GG (not to hijack thread), do you find you're folding out lots of dominated aces with these raises? I still feel like at my 1/2 tables in Schenectady, plenty of worse aces are calling my PF raises with AJ. Sure, there's a certain player type who is (only) calling here with AK and AQ, but these players are fairly easy to spot, and of course they mostly don't have AK or AQ when we raise, so they just go away...

-EF

I've been enjoying this back-and-forth. I want to chime in with a small point, however: In this theoretical example, there's a simple solution to the opponent who floated the flop bet and caught third pair on river or whatever, and that is to 3-barrel, including with hands like AJo.

This is, of course, highly opponent dependent. I'm thinking of Ed Miller's urging his readers to see ranges as a pyramid that narrows with each action and each street. The big question is, "Where are the edges of the pyramid not ideally smooth?" -- in other words, if our opponents see way too many flops, then where do they dump the hands that miss?

Some villains dump on the flop, and we call this fit or fold. A fit or fold opponent who stays past the flop probably won't fold to the turn or river barrels unless the board texture is super unfavorable to his/her holding. But some people are sticky until bets get big (i.e. on the river), and against them, 3-barrel bluffing often will be correct. And if that's the planned line, then the equity-when-called question diminished in importance.

Reiteration: if we're worried about our very loose opponent floating flops (without even a pair), we should be happy when they float against AJ, because then our flop c-bet (as a bluff) turns out to have been a value bet!

So according to raging owl we need to LIMP AJ because when we don't take an aggressive line our opponents can float us/get there.

Reading that tilted me.

Why do you raise a player that is usually passive postflop but is now showing interest otf and signalizing strenght? (although his sizing seems kinda weak)

To build a bigger pot and get paid. This guy woulda called down ace rag.

But when this guy leads weak aces otf after limp/calling pre he is not passive postflop when he takes initiative.
If he really is passive we should´t raise otf because passive players dont tend to lead weak hands and we will valueown ourselves more often than not.

Passive players still lead weak top pairs or x/c weak top pairs then lead turn to see where they're at. It's a classic fish move especially when it's like 1/3 pot.

The bottom of our CO opening range should be ATo and KTo. Fold A2o-A9o pre. So our AJo is definitely strong enough to iso raise, without very specific reads that our opponents are trapping with exclusively nutted hands.

These are standard preflop ranges to ensure that we only enter the pot with premiums, whilst also ensuring that we play more hands in position and fewer hands out of position.

A lot of people are trying to argue "when we raise a hand like AJo pre, we fold out worse and only get called by better. We should overlimp instead!"

Here's the thing: when we raise, we get to deny a tonne of equity from our opponents. We can fold out hands like 64s which have around 40% equity against our hand. That means we're taking down 100% of a $10 pot when our hand probably only had 50% equity 3ways. We're stealing more than our fair share of equity in the pot, which is never a bad thing.

If you steal 2 pots per hour preflop, where each pot is $10, that's $20/hr. Never a bad result.

Also, the implied odds of AJo are counteracted by the reverse implied odds. Sure we might run our AJ into QJ on a Jxxxx board sometimes, but we'll also run our AJ into 33 too on a J3xxx board other times. This isn't a hand where we're just begging our opponents not to fold preflop because we want to make more money postflop. We're actually thrilled if our opponents fold pre and we take down $10 uncontested.

It is a crystal clear iso raise in co with AJ imo.
Why do you guys think we would fold out everything worse and only get called by better????
There are tons of worse hands we can get called by.
We have a playable hand IP (that is ahead of their limping range) against weaker opponents ...why wouldnt we want to get more money in the pot?

Well, obviously AK/AQ is very unlikely to fold to a single raise while a lot of opponents are capable of folding AT- (or at least consider it), although admittedly there is a lot more combos of AT-. But even if AT- sees a flop, how many bets are they going to pay off on an A high board vs the raiser when scary stacks are in play? Now compare that to how many streets they might pay off in a limped pot (especially considering scary stacks might not be in play). Also throw into the mix some other stuff, like how we can easily overlimp/fold AJ preflop instead of getting ourselves into sick situations vs AK/AQ.

I mean, I just think it's close; if you go back to my original post in my thread I actually state I would probably raise after 2 limpers, it's just that I'm thinking that isn't necessarily best and if there's more than 2 limpers I'm now leaning to the overcall route. If I recall, HOC's LP raising range after multiple limpers bottoms out at AQs (if I recall, although it also states he'd widen that range somewhat after very loose limpers); not stating that as a bible or anything, but just stating that's it's not like this thought isn't totally foreign or unthinkable.

GcluelessNLnoobG

I'm not ignoring these cases, but you're ignoring the worst case scenarios, which is when we go multiway to smallish SPR pots against dominating AK/AQ and an A flops, where it will be very difficult not to lose our stack. And those devastating cases may make all these little raise-and-take-it's kinda moot.

As I say, I don't keep track of this sorta thing (so I could be wrong), but my suspicion is I lose more money with AJ/KQ than any other hand, and I'm slowly coming around to the fact that it may simply be because "I haz AJ/KQ in LP, 2 doods limp, I raz suckas".

Gjustsomethingthathastobefactoredin,imoG

I think this comment might be directed my way (?). I was responding a very narrow hypothetical rather to the OP's hand. Agreed entirely that multi-street bluffing is not how we make money against most LLSNL rec. players, but I do think we find villains who routinely play a large % of hands and yet aren't super sticky to the river. So the question of where they dump the hands they are folding is really important. Most of our opponents probably dump them on the flop, but if a villain dumps a lot of excess on the turn, it's worth bluffing there, too. And if you find a villain who just doesn't want to call big river bets, well, then you have a chance to steal a decent sized pot against that villain.

And, of course, you may be able to engineer that situation against that particular villain multiple times in a session if the table dynamics, position, and game flow all work out.

Not to bash HOC but it's considerably older than Ed Miller's The Course which is what I mostly base my game on. So if you've read his books and get his whole "attack weakness avoid strength" philosophy you can see why I hate your limping strategy. Both books are outdated cause it's 2018 but The Course is post Black Friday which is an important difference IMO.

The pyramid of where villain's dump their excess hands is very very important and something I need to consider more. But it's a double edged sword. You need to be very confident in your assumptions otherwise you're gonna be that spewtard at the table dumping money.

GG, thank you for these notes. Your questions are the right ones, and I wonder whether you and I have different expectations about how many streets AT- will pay off on an A-high board. We have different experiences and different player pools. And I agree that it can be very valuable (and deceptive) to limp occasionally with hands we usually like to raise.

I second this, in theory at least. But actually, I don't think you have to be super confident in your assumptions so long as you are testing those assumptions selectively, in appropriate situations and based on your observations of your opponent.

There have been several references ITT to how we ought to play against "this fish" from the OP, but "fish" is barely a read at all (c.f. the sub-thread on "brown young guy" or whatever the description was). This guy plays too many hands. OK. When / where do those hands go? Watch, and see if you can find the jagged edges of the pyramid; and of course if there are none, it means this player is unbluffable and you should (exclusively) value bet him to death (I mean, not death, just brokeness / feltness).

-EF

If AT is going to be folding turn against us after flopping top pair we should be raising fairly wide in late position and throwing out more barrels than Donkey Kong.

If this was rounders and villain was Mike, it might be possible to value bet him to death.

Results ??

Nothing exciting. I just folded and he didn't show.