I was going over my final hand of the day during a Live tourney. I had been playing with this player for a few hours, I actually knocked him out and then he entered back in and got the same seat(1). I'm in seat 7 and for this hand, I had noticed that the villain was always raising big or moving all-in when he was in the BB. He should have been eliminated a long time ago but kept catching rivers that saved him. He is a good player but usually over-bets or moves all-in with marginal equity.
so for my last had, I limp A/Qc expecting the BB to raise or do something he had been doing all day. The btn limps as well as the SB and as I planned, the BB shoves over 50 BBs. I have about 22 BB and call, the others fold. The run out was not favorable but as I was telling my poker friend, we cover a lot of hands, he did not like the limp. He feels even if you expect the BB to act erratic, you should put in a 2.x-4x raise, and protect your strong hand against the other potential limpers.
No matter what happened, we were going to get it all in on the flop, so the outcome was going to be the same.
Again, the outcome is not my concern as much as expecting a player to continue his usual betting tendencies and just limping to induce?
I knew I was going to call it off, no matter what the BB was going to do, I had 22 BB, so I raise 4x, he re-raises, I'm going all in and he will call(has 9's).
My friend says no matter my expectations from the BB, you should be raising that hand to make sure you don't invite other players in, but again I felt confident he was going to put in a big bet.

Is there merit to always raising +EV hands, even if you anticipate a certain reaction from a player?

appreciate the insight?

Cheers,

It's perfectly reasonable to employ a limping strategy at ~20bbs. It sounds like your friend has an antiquated line of thinking if that is a direct quote. When creating a limping strategy from ~20bbs you tend to want to do it more often (in terms of overall range %) from early or late positions. Ie. UTG/1 and BTN/SB, but will have it at some % from every position.

Is there merit to always raising? Yes. Is there merit to creating a strategy that involves limps? Yes. I'd say your strategy of adjusting to your opponents and capitalizing on how they will react can net the most EV. Though, we can't always assume what people will do and sometimes our assumptions can be very wrong. It's important for you to figure out your ranges. FWIW this sounds like a good spot to limp (position, your reasons about the player, etc.) and AQs is a good hand class to do it with.

For example here's a 20BB CO chart from DTO:



As you can see their solution has a 12.2% limp range. I'm not saying I recommend trying to implement a 12.2% limp strategy at 20BB on the CO, but it speaks to the advice you got.

It depends. In cEV late position does have some limps when this short. However, if there is any ICM (even soft bubble ICM) the limps disappear from the ranges.

For example this is 25BBs from CO at 50% of field



This is at cEV



So at cEV this is definitely a thing.

Early ICM and later it is not a solver thing. I think maybe in early ICM it could still be an exploit thing though.

So overall, this is a thing, but maybe 2x is better the deeper into the MTT we get. If this was deeper, I would prefer to 2x, because limping with higher ICM pressure invites more variance into the situation which I think we want to avoid when running deeper.

Yeah, we don't know where we were in the tourney or what position we open limped from, so I can't really answer whether the limp is OK here.

In general, I would probably just make a standard raise (I'd minraise off this stack size) and just call off to the shove, especially as wide as BB is being described.