We don't limp all of our range but we give the Big Blind the opportunity to realise equity with all of his. Isn't this just strategically terrible. Why do the high stakes guys limp the SB?

Because they only have to pay 0.5BB to do it.

There’s also a difference between open limping the SB with or without antes involved.

This is probably very different between cash games and tournaments because of the rake.
Also depends on stack size and antes and some other stuff.

But in general if we're not playing 70-90% of our hands from the SB, we're just giving away our 0.5bb to the BB putting ourselves in an auto-loss spot from which it's impossible to recover.

Since our range is insanely wide, which 70-90% is, we can't just raise with our entire range, so we need a limping range.
Again in general, the tighter your range the more you can and probably should raise. So with wider ranges we can/should raise less.

For example, if we would open to 3bb with a 90% range.
BB would quickly figure this out and start 3 betting us a lot.
Since we're going to have to fold a lot of weak hands, we'd be losing even more.

This is mostly knowledge from tournaments, I honestly have no idea how rake in cash games affects this.

Well I have to pay the same amount lol. But why is more prevalent (among the regs) at high stakes than at lower stakes?

What's that difference?

Without ante the pot is 1.5bb and you have to call 0.5.
With ante the pot is around 3.75bb and you still only have to call 0.5, giving you much better odds.

I'm really not sure about this logic. Can't the same be said about the BB? That if we don't defend it 70-90% of the time we can't recover? But still if you don't get an appropriate hand, you just won't defend it, right?

This does make a lot of sense

Out of curiosity, how do stack sizes figure into whether you want to limp the SB or not? I know that if you're like 10bb deep it's jam limp or fold, but apart from that?

Right. Can you then start limping earlier positions too since you're getting such a good price? After all, 1-3.75 is as about as good as 0.5-1.5

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

Sun Tzu, the Art of War.

Against a 2bb open we should in most cases defend our BB 70-90% of the time.
You're absolutely correct.

Again this depends on a lot of factors, mostly the same as limping from SB.

But yes, you're correct, if we fail to defend our BB often enough, we're in an auto-loss spot which is impossible to recover from.

There's a huge difference between limping without already having any money in the pot and limping from the SB.

If we fold from the SB we lose 50bb/100 (more if there's an ante)
If we fold from any other position we lose 0bb/100

It's pretty easy to lose less than 50bb/100 when playing most hands from the SB. So that's why we can limp there.

Limping from other positions can certainly be good in some specific cases, but 99% of the time we don't want to do this.
It's a whole different discussion though.

That's not really the case at all though, is it. You don't lose 0.5BB from the small blind and 0BB from the non blind positions, you lose 1.5BB every orbit. The only relevance that can exist in the SB position, is that you're getting a better price.

Not sure how to explain but that logic is wrong.

If we played and folded 1.000.000 times from the BTN, we would lose 0.
If we played and folded 1.000.000 times from the SB, we would lose 500.000bb

So on the BTN we only play hands that will make us win more than 0 / hand in the long run.
We can't just open or even limp 90% of hands on the BTN, that would cause all sorts of problems for us.

On the SB we can play all hands that will lose us less than 0.5bb / hand, which is a lot lot more hands than 0+ / hand.
We can easily limp 30-45% of hands and open 30-45% from the SB, since we only have to make more than -0.5bb / hand or -50bb/100
So let's say we limp 76o from the SB and we end up losing 40bb/100 with it, that's actually better than folding it, since that would lose us 50bb/100

On the other hand, if we open 76o from the BTN, we might only lose 5bb/100, but that's way worse than 0, so we shouldn't open it (or limp it, we'd probably lose even more if we limped)

It's a pretty well known standard concept that you can find on any training site if you don't believe me.


There are a lot of other reasons why limping from other positions is mostly bad, but again I don't want to get into that here, since that's a different topic.
You can find why limping is bad all over this forum if you do some searching.

I suppose you're right

That actually makes a huge amount of sense, never thought of it like that.

This is going to be very useful to me, thanks