Game was pretty loose passive pre-flop. I had 300 and villain had me covered.

1/3 9 handed. Three limpers to me with Ac3c, I limp, Button makes it 15, sb and BB call, as do the limpers, 7 to the flop.

Flop Qc Tc 8x
Pot $105

Checked to me, I bet $50, all fold to MP player who calls.

Turn 7x
Pot $205

I bet $100, MP player calls.

River Jx
Pot $405
MP player shoves

I'm new to live NL and am trying to learn the lessons of Miller's The Course which says that should I raise my Ac3c, but with three limpers and a hand that wants multiway action, I figured a limp was correct.

On the flop, I bet my draw hoping to possibly fold middle or bottom pairs, though at this table I could see people calling with a T or an 8, though now realizing that at this table someone might call with a gutshot. I now think I didn't bet enough.

On the turn, headsup, I hoped my half pot bet would fold a weak pair. I also considered shoving for the same reason, since I only had around $135 left after the bet. When villain called, I was more confident of his middling pair with a remote chance that he might be on a lesser flush draw.

On the river, I was flummoxed and was scared by the board and mucked.

I'd be grateful for thoughts on each street.

If you are going to limp then you should fold preflop to the raise. It’s 5% of your stack, meaning it’s unlikely you will be compensated enough when you hit a hand. The call is borderline at best. I understand not raising the first time though.

As played, your postflop plan is inconsistent with your preflop plan. If you’re trying to make a hand, then why are you betting like you want folds once that coordinated flop comes out? This is especially true on the turn. The guy who called flop is never folding turn, so you can take a free card.

Thanks very much for these thoughts, they make total sense. I had not considered folding to the pre-flop raise and now see how inconsistent my thought processes were. Should have taken the free cards.

River seems like an obvious fold.

Looking at the flop you gotta realize this will hit a lot of the middling hands that limp and call a raise like QJ, T9, etc with a pair or gutshot+overcard (K9) so it won't be likely they all fold to your half pot bets.
That said I don't mind the flop bet as a way to either get paid off when you hit, or take a free card on the turn.

On the turn, the board has not changed much. If you are going to bet, go all in to put pressure on one pair holdings (which may still call ). Otherwise check and see the river.

PRE - I generally play a raise or fold strat pre with most, if not all of my range, from every position. I don't hate the over-limp, but I'd prefer a raise.

Once we flat call, I think I prefer a fold to BTN's raise, though a call isn't terrible, and one I'm sure I'd make in a game like this, though preferably when stacks are deeper.

FLOP - just check to the BTN raiser. We don't mind the flop checking through at this shallow SPR. See how the rest of our opponents act if he bets.

TURN - check back or jam. At this SPR, our 1/2 pot bet is too small to fold much of V's range and too large for us to make as a bluff when we'll be last to act on the river.

We've put $165 in and left ourselves $135 back with a pot that's bloated to over $300 with our bet, and that will be over $400 if V calls, leaving us little to no fold equity on the river if we miss.

We need to do some hand reading here. V probably would have check-raised flop with 2P+, so the turn is a brick, unless he's got 96. With the line we've taken on the flop, I think we're better off just jamming turn as a semi-bluff, to rep the flopped straight.

RIVER - obviously fold. We beat nothing.



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I really don't like the flop bet here. Achieves little, especially with the button still to act. Check-calling is fine.

pf is fine check flop and call any reasonable bet.

raising pre is obv fine too depends on how you like to play.

pf is fine, we got it like 7 ways with a good multiway hand. Once we limp, the button raises and like 5 people call, it's an easy flat. Raising pre would be ok too, there's more than one way to skin a cat in poker (just ask GG).

I disagree with the flop bet vs so many players on a flop that connects with most of them. I prefer to try to get there as cheaply as possible without taking the lead/initiative which would suck if we got raised off the hand.

Preflop is fine. Folding to the button raise after 5 people also call is absurd. We are getting an amazing price with a suited wheel ace.

I would not bet this flop with a drawing hand when we are 7 ways. This is a flop that smashes peoples ranges so you have next to zero fold equity.

You have Ace high, someone has shoved, you have no chance to improve. The person seems to have been slow playing a straight. you beat noghitn. How are you flummoxed?

Pre I raise if deeper, at 300 I fold. Post Im checking down unless I hit. We're shallow enough stacks can go in easy.

Limping is bad.

Limping is better than isoing preflop.

Probably X back flop as well since it's unlikely you get 6 people to fold. Definitely X back turn since 7x is better for your opponent.

Overlimping is fine especially with a suited ace or king - you get to flush over flush your opponents.

Flop is not a great bet with a bunch of randoms. Any one of them can have 2p+ a set or a flopped straight. You would be surprised by the hands these guys limp in with.

I would check call flop
Maybe check call turn depending on size
give up on river

You have very little fold equity multi-way so you want a reason to bet.

We bet because we think we have the best hand and want to create value or we bet because we have fold equity and think we can take the hand down on a later street.

While we may be able to take the hand down on a later street, I don't see that as a reason to justify betting. We do however have enough equity in our hand that we don't want to fold, but it's in our best interest to keep as many people in the hand because if we hit we are going to have the nuts.

Check call flop

As played on River, how is this not a fold? Am I missing something, but don't you have Ace high?

Most of the straights got there, and even if he's bluffing with a busted club draw, he could still easily have the Jc, 7c, 8c making a pair - and once you remove Ac, Qc, Tc and even the 9c (which now makes a straight), there aren't that many club draws left.

Recommending a limp, something thats been recommended against by every good player since the beginning of poker shouldnt be stated as a declarative statement with no reasoning behind it. Cant believe I gotta defend something this obvious but here goes.

With this many limpers you can raise to ~$22-25 here, theres $13 of dead money out there if you take it down, which is a great result. Iso is great too, and bonus, the hand plays great multiway if it gets called by everyone (which I assume is your reasoning for recommending a limp)

There's nothing obvious about poker.

You very likely aren't taking anything down preflop and you are just putting money in with a hand that is going to be dominated a lot.

A lot of common knowledge is just incorrect. You have to understand where EV comes from and winrate to realize that limping is superior to iso raising against a bunch of limpers with uncapped ranges.

You want to play turns/rivers vs fish because that is when the pot is the biggest (biggest EV decisions occurs) and they will make the most mistakes. Making the pot huge preflop with a marginal hand does the opposite of this.

Hurr durr



Yeah thanks, im plenty aware where EV comes from. Also lol @ uncapped ranges. How much experience do you have at live poker? They almost all raise with their top 5-15% range, guys who play a 40/0 strat are extremely rare.

7x raises take down the pot plenty pre. If you raise to $22, even if it only takes it down 1 in 4 times (with an uncommon sizing that is this large it will be more common than this), and gets folds to HU the rest (for simplicity’s sake), then youd only need to win $18.75 to break even in a ~$49 (after $5 rake) pot, meaning youd only need 38% equity to break even, in a HU pot IP vs a fish. Not to mention this is a solver approved 3 betting hand, much less single raise, so shoveling money in with this hand is very common, even when its regularly dominated. This is a painfully obvious EV+ position to be in.

The common knowledge that aggression is the only type of winning poker is not incorrect and is backed by data of all kinds as well as crushers who know far more than you or I.

If you have data that backs up your recommendation for a passive style id love to see it, you have millions of hands of data, filter for the biggest winners in your dataset and look up how often they limp (not including blind(s)). Maybe im wrong.

Making the pot larger is the opposite of *checks notes* playing vs fish when the pot is biggest? Got it.

Thanks, everyone for all these thoughts. Huge help and lots to think about.

Extra thanks for docvail's Princess Bride meme: my absolute favorite movie of all time. I was flummoxed b/c the last thing I thought my opponent had was a 9 in his hand, but I couldn't imagine calling down with Ace high. Hence, it hurt my brain and made me confused. Not sure if I should post the result, but happy to if so.

Thanks again all!

Trying to use math to figure out the EV of your raise is a futile effort. What about when you get limp RR and lose your whole initial raise? What about if you would of over limped and you would of stacked KK?

There's a reason why computer's can't solve 9-10 handed games yet, it's too complex.

Once you understand where EV comes from you will realize why over limping is a better strategy. You can open fold a hand like AKo in a 6max game and lose less than a big blind. How many river spots do you lose less than a 1 BB between a call and a fold?



Almost none.

I can't objectively prove this to you like I could online since no one has millions of live hands for MDA purposes to my knowledge but Sklansky talks about this strategy in his new book.

A live crusher is not very impressive since live is so soft. I have crushed 200nl online and that is way harder than any live game. A lot of live players don't understand how to play vs fish that well because they don't have data to look at. That's why you think RFIing against limpers is better than over limping.

You aren't supposed to play regulars and fish with the same strategy. Now, online I know exactly where to deviate based on population tendencies but live is different so it will be less scientific and more anecdotal. But the first and most obvious deviation is preflop. especially in 1/2-1/3 games.

Making predictions and incorporating math is the fundamental basis of poker. I already said this, but limp RR are extremely rare at low stakes, as are light 3 bets, so you are considerably less vulnerable to a 3 bet in this spot compared to against a solver despite facing more action. The exploit to not facing 3 bets of course would be to raise more often, and you would realize more profit with the hands that were already raising.



This is a fundamental misapplication of GTO for at least 5 reasons i see

1) GTO profit cant be viewed for each hand in a vacuum, the range creates an unexploitable strategy. Simply node locking a tight or loose preflop range and allowing gto to adjust to the range will show you your error. The easiest example is if you nodelocked a range of only AA preflop, AA would not continue to show a 8.61 BB profit, at max it would show 1.5 BBs from folding your whole range. Its like the old saying, AA makes you money and every other hand is just metagame.

2) the reason youre seeing a small winrate on early streets and big on later streets is because early streets are a aggregate of all possible outcomes of later streets. Hitting the nuts shows huge profits even if you play it completely wrong. Youre basically recommending that people simply hit, since hitting postflop is the most profitable thing. This is also why so many decisions made by gto are “indifferent” between multiple decisions. Dont confuse indifference with irrelevance, especially against extremely imbalanced opponents.

3) Villians are obviously not playing unexploitable strategies, and this is an exploitative bet over a capped range, and you will continue to show profit on later streets due to these errors. Most of these errors (specifically playing fit or fold, and not bluffing enough) are considerably smaller errors multiway.

4) a 0.86 BB winrate is into a 1.5 BB pot, where GTO is betting ~2.5 BBs, meaning that you win about 57% of the pot on average. This pot is 4.33 BBs, and im recommending a 7BB raise, meaning if you realized the same percentage profit, youd be looking at 2.48 BB of profitwith AK.

5) GTO is actually trying to minimize loss, as it is a losing player against its opponent (other gto bots) due to rake. a live crusher wins about 10 BB/hr which is about 33 hands. Assuming they play about a 30% range, this means the typical hand they play wins them a full BB, certainly more with premiums like AK, and certainlu more IP, so you should expect a considerably higher winrate on a hand for hand basis for a live winning player compared to GTO.

6) as an aside, what i find especially ridiculous about this line of argument is that if you thought this was how EV was created, youd find the decision between folding, calling, and raising almost irrelevant since it would amount to 0.01 BB of profit or whatever. Like, what is your point, that players should just not learn preflop ranges cuz you can get in with ATC cuz the lost ev is so low and theres some huge profits to be gained otr?

Thats what I asked for. Filter your data for top 0.1% winning players online or whatever, and tell me how often they limp outside of the blinds. Maybe live is different, or maybe im just wrong! Certainly would be evidence in your favor if they limp a decent % of their range. Of course if the evidence is in my favor would presumably never get posted based on the 60k hands thing.

Also lol ****ing sklansky.

Over 60k hands, and i think we both know what happened before that, but i wont get into that with you. You very well may be better than me, i have no intention of dick measuring against you, im just a guy with a normal job with a solid wr when i play (for fun), but i feel confident youre wrong about this.

My point about you clearly not playing live is not that i dont respect your opinion in general, but its because youre so obviously oblivious to how the live fish play by thinking people are limping AA KK with any sort of frequency to balance their range. Sure, certain old men do it, i feel pretty confident that I get limp/rred less than once every 1000 times i raise.

Yes. And the deviation is to iso raise IP against bad players who limp with a very wide range. I could probably play poker profitably without even looking at my hand if i was HU IP vs a fish who limp called my raise.

It'll be interesting to see if Sklansky's new book brings about a shift in how pros and theorists approach the game. The reception so far seems to be pretty lukewarm.

Hard to see how a passive limp/over-limp strat pre, combined with what I presume is going to be a passive / nitty fit-or-fold strategy post is going to be higher EV than the more aggro style suggested by game theory.

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Yeah i mean sklansky has sorta had some detractors on the forums for years, to put it lightly. I think Ted Forrest is the other advocate for limping. It doesnt entirely not exist conceptually, but I dont see how a low stakes forum really needs to encourage deviations such as this, when RFI at minimum has the advantage of simplifying your decision making, which is valuable for low stakes players.

idk i think overlimp is better than raise here. i think its unlikely you get many preflop folds and your hand is probably not going to play well in a bloated multiway pot. if the options were raise or fold i guess itd be more appealing, but you get to limp ip with a hand that can cooler many second best hands and very deep spr vs likely weaker players. i think not considering limping an option bc of random reasons without thinking about the hand / situation is the bigger leak than erring on the side of passivity in a particular spot

i think ddp is overestimating the strength of the limpers ranges / frequency of limp rr's. i think the other side is over estimating pre fold equity and i guess ev of postflop w a weak hand in bloated pots (kind of think this side doesn't think in terms of math / ev tbh). i think raising relies on playing well and / or limpers having very large leaks both pre and post to make it substantially better.