Is this range against the button open or in general ?

jpsychlady,
when i post something that seems obviously wrong maybe its time to think more deeply about it and you may find some reasons to agree. or not. i wont spoon feed it to you though.

Funny example of this that proves your point nicely...

This guy (who honestly isn't me lol) opens to £8 in a £1/£1 game with AK in EP and a semi-competent LAG flats from the BTN. They're around £200 effective.

Flop is something like: 974 £18
UTG X/C BTN's £15 bet

Turn: 974 6 £48
UTG X/C BTN's £35 bet

River: 974 6 2 £118
UTG tank X/C BTN's £100 bet

BTN says "you must have me beat man" and doesn't immediately show his cards. Without hesitation UTG proudly shows his Ace-high.

BTN, who is about to muck, laughs and shows 32 to win with a pair of 2s and says: "did not think I was value betting river there".

UTG says: "Damn! I f***ing knew you were bluffing and I still f***ING lose man!" and pretty much the whole table (UTG included) bursts into laughter.

It was funny but it exactly illustrates why you can't "take a stand" with ATC just because someone is obviously too loose. You've got to have some idea of what they're betting and be reasonably confident you're actually beating enough of their range before you continue.

It's the strategy I'd start with if BTN (or CO/HJ) were obviously isolating wide over limpers a lot AND their isolation raise was usually succeeding or getting it heads-up.

If it's just an occasional BTN steal of my blinds I'm just folding and not caring.

If late position iso-raises are producing massively multiway pots then I'm going to think differently

If late position isolator is sticky vs 3bets then I'd shift my 3bet more linear and wider and flat less (because my flatting range becomes weaker as my 3bet range becomes wider and more linear.)

If late position isolator folds at a high % to my 3bets I flat more strong hands and replace them in my 3bet range with more bluffs with blockers (AXs, KXs). But I don't go too crazy wide on my 3bets because I don't want them to catch on too quickly that I'm exploiting them. Ideally I'd like to catch them out once or twice with a flatted premium for a big chunk of their stack and that be what tips them that I'm exploiting rather than just have them immediately notice I'm 3betting them 100% of their iso-raises and them immediately switch gears after the loss of only 3 raises.

^thanks!

my 1st thought is this?
is he raising a bunch of other times as well pre ? IE: A MANIAC
IF NOT and he's only raising your BB and it bothers you to fold junk then its a mental game leak you need to address.

so what if you fold 40 blinds in a row

it just helps your image when you are involved

Think of this another way: you're pissed that this guy is stealing every opportunity he gets right. However, he's only able to do that because the whole table is so overly passive. In a tougher game EP/MP players won't just be limping 30%+ of their hands and playing fit/fold.

Over 50% of the time one of the 7 non-blinds players is picking up a top 10% hand and you better believe stronger players are raising these from UTG+ and putting up stiff resistance against loose 3bets.

How would you feel about defending your blinds in that situation? Would you get annoyed the field are attacking your blinds well over half the time and start defending a wide range?

No of course not. So in this spot maybe it would be psychologically better to look on the bright side: what this LAG is doing is demonstrating, at his expense, that the table is weak. He's putting a lot of chips at risk over and over again and they're all letting him get away with it.

Rather than attack this guy - who potentially knows what he's doing - just follow his lead and start attacking the other weak players.

Stand up for yourself on your BTN. Don't let this LAG steal your BTN when he's HJ/CO. That's where it's worth going to war with a reg and that's where, if he proves to be more than a match for you even when he's OOP, you should consider switching tables.

However, what I generally find is that on a weak table like this if you're friendly AND display a modicum of poker skill (through your actions) these LAGs will lay off your BTN and let you have your fair share of pots with the fish. It's not worth it to them to get into an attritional reg-war that only the rake can win.

Conversely what you're doing by gunning for them out of your blinds is you're crushing they're main source of profit (isolating limpers) and that's sure to drive the LAGs nuts. Then they're not likely to be so accomodating when it's your BTN.

Try to take a higher level view of the table dynamic and make a proper assesment of where your and other stronger players' profits are going to come from.

Got this from Doug Polks site. Comments ?

Tip #5: Defend Your Big Blind
The big blind is a special position because you already have 1 big blind invested in the pot. For this reason, whenever you are faced with a raise while sitting in the big blind, you will have better pot odds to call than the other positions – think of it as a discount.
Because of your discount and the fact that you are the last person to act preflop, you can profitably call with many more hands than if you were sitting in another position. That's not to say you should call raises with trash hands like 9♠ 5♦, but the more borderline hands like K♣ 9♦ and Q♥ 6♥ become playable in most situations.
Exactly how wide you should defend depends on a multitude of factors – here are the four primary ones:
1. Position of the raiser (play tighter against the early positions and looser against the late positions).
2.Number of players in the hand (when 1 or more players has already called the raise, play tighter and only call with hands that do well in multiway pots).
3.The size of the raise (the larger the bet sizing, the tighter you should play and vice versa).
4.Stack sizes (when short stacked, play fewer speculative hands and prioritize high card strength).
There are other important factors too, like how often your opponent will continuation bet post-flop, but the three above are the main ones you should consider.

Doug Polk is right and there's been a fairly big shift in recent years towards calling wider from the big blind among highly skilled players.

Just bear in mind that Doug is talking about mid to high stakes live games and online games where typical open raises are 3bb, stacks are often very deep relative to open sizes and players stealing from the CO/BTN are frequently using very wide ranges and the blinds players are competent playing OOP, deeper stacked against wide ranges.

The games we play are very different beasts. Open raises are much larger, frequently are very tight strong ranges, stack depths are often short and most of us are not really good enough players to be playing OOP against aggressive players whose strategies (or lack thereof) it may take us a long time to decipher.

Typically during the time we're floundering about trying to identify the aggressive players' "strategy" (if there is one!) we're going to just get run over postflop if we flat too much preflop OOP.

Quite simply a crap strategy of frequent big betting aggression is going to see most of us take too big a hit to our bankrolls before we get to grips with how to exploit such a strategy. We have too little time and too little stack to defend ourselves adequately and so flatting wide OOP just gets us killed in our low stakes games.

That's a shame because there's plenty of easy money to be made at these games if you look elsewhere for profit - like doing what this LAG is doing to you and this limper to other passive/ABC/fit-or-fold players when you're in position. If you're confident you're already crushing all those types of players then move on to working out how to beat the really aggro guys. Typically then you'll be building your roll fast enough off the weak/tight and loose-passive crowd to be able to tolerate the swings going to battle with even bad LAGs is going to inevitably impose on you.

Live play usually has all of those factors Doug mentions which should cause you to defend tighter. People open ranges that are too tight to very large sizings, other people will often call and the pots are raked to death. If you find yourself facing $6 opens a lot closing action, then go ahead and defend hands like Q2s if you play well postflop.