How in God’s name does limping preflop make this hand “easier to play”? Seriously. Maybe if your strategy is “only stack off with the nuts and hope they don’t notice that you’ve played 7/1 for 7 hours and suddenly you’re betting 50 bb on the turn”, yeah limping makes it “easier to play” because you have one pair.

But if your goal is to make the most money, you should put more money in when you’re ahead and sometimes lose an all in.

This isn’t even that “difficult” of a spot. We have an overpair on a draw heavy but nothing-completed board against a guy who probably never has us beat unless he has QTs or 33 exactly. I’m not sure how limping would “solve” this problem unless your goal is to bet fold kings on the flop in a limped pot


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GG makes about $15/hr i think, according to his current WR post

I agree 4ways sucks. And yet at a typical loose LLSNL table, that's what we end up in quite a lot, and surprise surprise, that's exactly what happened here. And yet now we've handcuffed ourselves into a commitment spot (SPR lol 4, can we do anything other than get our money in postflop?) where we gave 3 opponents fairly decent 20+ IO, most of whom are in position, and often we have a fairly face up range at that (unless you think we should be getting out-of-line in EP with a stack < 100bbs).

If we limp and it goes 6ways, we have a very playable SPR of 15 where it's going to take 4 bets for stacks to go in postflop, Lots of room to simply play pokrs (try to build a pot if we flop great, fold easily if we flop terrible, play cautiously otherwise, leaning to folding which is never a big mistake in a small pot). Meanwhile if someone raises preflop (2/3rds of pots are raised in my game) we have setup a trivial fistpump spot and are now able to fully capitalize on our hands TP value.

Getting ourselves in a spot where we're flipping for stacks with a hand as strong as KK is just kinda destroying it's value (even though I realize this always won't be the case). We can't do better?

GconsideringalternativesG

We got a fairly meaningless 5% of our stacks in as a fairly decent fave. Not exactly a huge coup.

GcluelessNLnoobG

That doesn’t answer the question at all w/r/t “ease”.

Also you’re thinking of raising completely wrong. When you have the best hand, you want to build a pot to get immediate value (since you get more of the pot than the other guys as it stands), and, to your point of “ease”, you make it less profitable for hands to chase you down.

Let’s imagine that the squeezer here on the flop has As4s. Certainly a good hand to see a flop with multi-way. He can check if it limps to him or call this raise. Both are fine. He doesn’t have to turn this into a squeeze bluff.

We hit this flop. In this 4 way situation we have 65 in the middle and ~260 in stack. Had we limped, we have 272 in stack and 15 in the middle (assume sb completes). So from > 18 SPR 5 ways to 4 SPR 4 ways with a single raise.

In the 5 way scenario, we may elect to bet...10. And let’s assume this A4ss in the bb plays passive. So he overcalls flop getting 3.5:1 on his money. Pot 45 stacks 262

Turn is a blank for his hand. Check, you bet 35. He needs to just get $54 on the river if he hits to make this profitable based on get there equity alone (even pretending his ace is no good, which means he needs even less implied odds to continue). Not to mention he can rep a strong hand on any Q, J, T or 9 easily and get you to fold with a river donk. So you’ve given this hand all of these chances to draw out.

Now the second situation. You get the $35 bet and it goes call call. There’s $235 left and $170 in the middle. Turn is the 8 again. Bb with his A4s checks and you bet 115.

Now, bb is in a terrible situation. If he thinks he’s purely drawing to a flush (9 outs), he needs 37:9 in implies to draw. There’s $350 in the middle and just $120 in stack. He has to call $115.

This is a situation where you’ve set your opponent up to make a mistake. Against your actual hand he should be calling with his extra Ace out and potential fold equity. Against your range it may be a fold. And the way you set up this potential for larger mistakes is by setting up larger pots to begin with. By limping, now he doesn’t make a mistake and you turn your entire win rate into playing less shitty preflop hands than your opposition (and maybe some other things like actually folding AQs when someone limp reraises their Range of KK+).


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This advice is pure trash and I can’t believe you’re still giving it dude. I’m sorry if I’m being mean but like really. It’s a problem to stack off a strong hand and it “destroys its value”? What?


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What I'm saying is that you have a hand as strong as KK, and yet you'll often get in spots (just like this one) where you're simply doing a high variance flip for stacks for smallish EV. The best we can do is flips? Against this field? I think we can do better.

Your example above regarding the Axs is a fine one. But it's just one of many possibilities, and I can come up with just as many on the other side.

I know the limp/reraise discussion is a contentious one. And, as I've stated, I'm never going to say that raising isn't EV. But it doesn't mean that limping can't also be very profitable. Those against limp/reraising seem to be suggesting (with their "lol" comments) that it isn't remotely as EV as raising, and that is simply not true.

As always, I leave it up to everyone to decide for themselves. If you think you have a really good grasp on these postflop situations, then you'll do just fine. But if you feel you don't have a really good grasp on these postflop situations, then you really should consider doing something different. Play to *your* wheelhouse and you'll likely do fine.

GcluelessNLnoobG

That makes no sense. You’re not doing flips. You have KK on QT3. Betting and getting it in performs fine. And you usually don’t get raises because hands that people are more likely to have are hands like QJ that will pay big at least twice with terrible equity.

Saying you’ll do “fine”’with kings isn’t a statement at all. You’d have to be a total dope to not make $ with kings. The worst player in the world would make $ if he got kings every hand.


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Well, I only make $36/hr at 1/2 and 1/3. Throw in a little 2/5 and PLO, and it gets up to $53 Very few hours, though.

I've been through all of this with GG before. I'll let jdr0317 take over. He's doing a great job!

Yep I have too, but it’s easy to suck opinion out of me (and admittedly I was a dick last time so...).

But I’ll present this hypothetical. Say the pot is $100. You have top set 3 ways. Everyone has $1000 behind.

Guy #1 flips over an OESD. Guy #2 flips over a flush draw. They both say “bet any amount and we will call”. What should we do? Well clearly we should bet all in. If not this, at least by the turn. No reason to let these guys draw at our hand cheap.

GG’s entire point seems to be that because bad things sometimes happen and we lose our stack, that we should avoid this situation. Probably bet small both streets in the above hypothetical. In real poker, it manifests in this ultra conservative preflop strategy where GG is basically playing bingo with two spots in a column already marked off against the opposition who have empty cards. Sure you’ll “win” but you’re at the mercy of the cards, and playing KK with the idea of making sick folds is a mental leak.

Also, GG mentions that he wants to be able to “play poker” and deep SPRs allow it. Except when you have a strong preflop Hand, lower SPRs are actually advantageous to you because it gets weaker hands closer to commitment and it makes it harder to exploit you. And preflop is poker too. In fact, it’s the most important street of poker. The dude who smugly shows AA after he gets in a 6 way limped pot and bets 2/3rds pot on flop and turn and checks down river ftw probably thinks he did everything great: invested 15 bb and won a 34 bb pot. Then doesn’t blink an eye when the kid raises a limper, gets 4 way for 5 a man and bet bet jams his stack in FTW against TP.

Like if GG is playing 1/3 idiots who like to raise, rarely 3 bet, and hand him their stack when he does his LRR thing with KK+, then sure by all means keep trying it. But it’s exploitable and also requires lots of parameters to be hit to be optimal


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I'm all for creating smaller SPRs *while* not offering good IOs. At this stack depth, you don't accomplish that by raising; you accomplish it by limp/reraising.

Here we created an SPR 4 pot where we're handcuffed for the rest of our stack while giving multiple opponents 20+:1 IO. We're fine handcuffing ourselves to the pot if we've given horrible IO; but handcuffing ourselves having given great IO and removing all our postflop skill (which we would have in a high SPR pot) ain't a great result. Now admittedly it won't be as horrible if our opponents are complete morans ("hey, the nit raised in EP and is now committing his stack postflop multiway, I think my TPNK might be good here, I call"), but as soon as you get a little beyond that type of opponent your profit reduces greatly.

Gbutdoasyoudo,imoG

I’ve acknowledged that this could be a viable strategy if the parameters that are required (frequent raises, infrequent 3 bets, terrible hand reading ability) are rampant at the table. But once you don’t have complete droolers in the game, this strategy becomes a huge money sinking leak by turning your Hand face up and allowing players to get away from shitty hands that they call raises and flop c-bets with constantly but would never in a million years call a LRR with. If 16 gets 4 way action, then make it more and tighten your range up.

Also, LRR is actually a huge gamble. You limp EP, you’re banking on two factors to get value from your Hand

1) someone raises
2) said raiser is too brain dead to fold his hand when faced with a LRR against a player like you.

You have multiple ways to get value from a raise preflop. One, people can call with worse. Two, you can win the blinds (1.33 bb is obv a disappointing result with KK but it’s a lot better than the result most hands will have).

Also, it’s questionable whether LRR is optimal even in the game conditions you describe. The hallmarks of 1/3 live players are that they don’t raise enough, don’t fold enough, and call way too much. So when fully stacked up to 100 bb, a limp reraise sounds great but you’re often just as likely To go off to some 16+ SPR pot with a wicked linear valued hand (an overpair) 7 ways. Linear hands perform terrible OOP in wicked deep situations, being OOP plays a lot easier when your ranges are polar


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As I say, my game sees 2/3rds of hands being raised preflop. If your game is much more passive, then definitely more reason to not opt for the limp/reraise.

My game also typically features lots of calls to raises. So even if no one is brain dead enough to call off a limp/reraise from the nit in EP, we still typically take down a sizeable pot risk free and rake free. You could still be incredibly profitable with big pairs *never seeing a flop* (and freerolling the times you do having gotten in a huge percentage of your stack).

Game conditions obviously matter and might tilt the strategy either way. But OP describes his game as most LLSNL games are: loose. The preflop result (as well as the hand he ends up being against) are a pretty good indication of that.

GcluelessNLnoobG

I generally don’t like appeal to authority arguments since while they are evidence, they don’t technically prove anything, but there is a reason why the number of pros whose default strategy is to open limp big pairs is basically zero.

I’ll concede it’s not impossible that it’s the best strategy for people who play part time and don’t have as much time to develop their game. It’s a crutch that makes our decisions easier. It’s probably like the equivalent of teeing off with an iron in golf instead of the driver. Usually the results aren’t as good, but it’s rarely a disaster.

We want to have a raising range, we want to build big pots against people that are bad at poker. We are going to have a skill edge post flop and we are going to have better starting hands. We want to be playing post-flop and not just stealing $30 every time we have kings.

Some crazy stuff in this thread.

Exactly.

And the golf analogy was pretty great

Some absurd stuff as usual from GG in this thread, good job by jdr when it comes to destroying this madness.

Even though no one will ever get through to GG, so all this will lead to exactly nothing, I would still like him to react to this specific retort, which he seems to be conveniently ignoring. The "we can do better" thing:

This is of course true. We're not "often" flipping for stacks, we're often getting a lot of value from top pair type hands that have five outs, smaller overpairs with 2 outs and naked 8 or 9 out draws that people like to chase by checking and calling. The times we're actually flipping for stacks are obviously few and far between.

Thats exactly how he always reacts when get pushed up in the corner: sticking to his classic strawman arguments ("If youre table is only droolers that will hurp durp off a stack with top pair keep doing what you are doing" and such), and fighting against windmills. Nobody will get through to him or get him to listen, i dont care if you are Phil Ivey or Garrett Adelstein- you are not getting through.

theres a reason why OMCs exist

you have to be the biggest nit who has ever point by point put their ideas into written word. I mean, lipping KK, the 2nd best hand in poker, would mean you should limp all hands in poker. Put that in a computer simulation overtime, and you will lose the majority of the time. Why? Because you will be allowing too many hands into the pot that shouldn't be there. Whats more weird? Is that this is a basic concept, yet you still hold onto these ridiculous ideas. I know a guy at my local casino who says he raises NO hands, EVER. Wouldn't you know it, he's a losing player. I'm not sure what happened to you in your poker career that lead you to these conclusions, as you are a heavy poster in these forums, but seeing too many hands may have twisted your ideas about how to make poker profitable. GL to you sir

^^

gg is actually a winning player though. I mean, there's zero doubt in my mind that he's playing sub-optimally with his LOL limping strategy and slavish adherence to SPR 'rules', however it goes to show that a well disciplined turbo-nit can still outlast the average casino poker player.

He used to crush the game until he went on a massive breakeven stretch. That’s what makes me believe his ideas are distorted by this massive breakeven stretch he had to endure. It would be hard to see poker from the optimal perspective after getting beat up for so long. I’ve always respected gg but some of his posts have just gone off the rails due to what I believe is his limited vantage point.

I really try my best not to respond to winrate directed questions down here (especially since I'm basically the only one in these threads who constantly / consistently / transparently posts them), but I've never gone on a "massive" breakeven stretch (unless you consider ~200 hours "massive"). My winrates are for all to see in the Winrates thread and my 1000 hours noob thread, and I'll leave them in there.

Here's the bottom line for me regarding preflop. I have a pretty much ~0% preflop raising range in EP/MP. I do just fine. Am I crushing at 15bb/hr? No. Is anyone in these non-deep / high rake game? Doubtful. Are there other ways to win (including raising)? Absolutely. But OP thinks he's struggling. If that's the case, I'm suggesting perhaps he should *consider* doing something different preflop in his conditions, other than "hurp durp, I haz KK, I raz" (level 0 thinking at it's finest).

Gdoyouwant,Idon'tcare,butlol@thethoughtofthismetho dnotbeingprofitableG

Does libratus have a lrr range at all?