Lets assume the following, near- ideal conditions are met at the poker table.

9 handed
All players have relatively deep stacks of 200 BB or more.
Players are generally loose passive.
You have good position - either the button or cutoff.

Should we open up our range a lot when facing pre flop raiseswith speculative hands. Say suited 2 gappers and suited aces?

OTOH

1-3 NL holdem. Players fit above description very well except maybe 1 or 2 exceptions.

You are in the button with 7-5 cc. Everyone at the table limps. You limp. But the BB raised to 20 pre flop. There are 4 callers. The pot now stands at about
95.

We call?

Yes you should open up your range but that doesn't excuse playing random garbage. And villains being loose/passive actually cuts down the playable range a bit.

Passive players make it harder to get paid big when you do hit your weird draws. This isn't a problem in limped pots where direct + implied is high and SPR is big. You only need 1/2 smallish bets to make money and you can often swing that against weak made hands. Once the pot is raised you often need 3 streets of action and stacks all in at some point before it's profitable. That can be hard against a passive player.

The exact situation you describe favors a fold but the occasional call is OK. Your having the button here is good, you get to act last preflop and have the best position post. Everything else is marginal to negative. With money already in the pot your direct + implied odds are OK but not great. SPR will be low and you have a hand that will flop more draws then made hands.

I would be looking a lot at BB here, if it will be hard to get BB to pay off then fold. If BB is going to c-bet flop anyways or get sticky with big pairs or otherwise spew off money in a 6 way pot this looks better. It's still too marginal a situation to call every time though.

With the BB and four callers and the dead money from the limpers who folded (plus your own limp and the small blind's) there should be more like $112 than $95 in the pot. How much is the rake where you play?

The effective remaining stack is $580, and it is $18 to call. By Bart Hanson's 15-25-35 rule, we would need the chance to win 35 x $18 = $630 to make the call with a suited one-gapper. The sum of the pot and the effective stack is something between $675 and $692. This is big enough. Make the call.

I used to think this was an autocall. And if everyone at the table is going to pile in chips against the world with TP, then it probably still would be. But nowadays that ain't gonna happen nearly as much, and usually when someone piles in chips they have a good hand; and there's just too good a chance that good hand is better than whatever good hand we'll make with 75s (better two pair, better trips, better flush, etc.). So in spite of our position, I just think our RIO start outweighing our IO at a lotta tables. I'm fine with the overlimp, because with a super high SPR and position we'll hopefully be able to figure out whether we're in a RIO vs IO situation postflop and can play appropriately over 3 full streets; but with the smaller SPR thanks to the raise, we simply won't have time to do that. So I'd much rather have something like Axs here.

GcluelessNLnoobG