Lately at some of the live games I have been playing, I have been seeing A LOT of wide ranged preflop hands and some insane calling stations. Lately I have turned into a firm believer of limiting my limping to almost non existent. But at the most recent 1/3 game I was playing at, a $15-$25 pfr would get 4-5 callers which necessarily isn't always a bad thing, but I kept seeing people show down with low cards after making these big pre flop calls and just crushing the pfr who had tptk or something of the sort.

It seemed like I may win 1 hand out of 6 that I raised on "and I was playing a pretty tight opening range". But if I didn't smash the flop I would pretty much have to give up there and cut my losses. So the 1 hand I would win would have to net me at least $120 to break even after the other raises.

In games that are playing like this, is it ever a good idea to maybe open up our pre flop range and limp a little more and raise a little less (with position in mind of course)? Or is it better to stick to our standard play and just hope for that big hand to make up for all of the lost pre-flop raises.

Are you asking if you should stop raising premium hands if you're getting lots of calls on relatively big open raises?

What you are describing is close to the best case scenario possible. Why would you want to go to the flop 6 handed holding AA with $18 in the pot and $297 behind when you can go to the flop 6 handed with $150 in the pot and $275 behind?

I guess I am looking at it in a results oriented way in the aspect that in that session, not many of my good starting hands were connecting with the flop. So if I raised pre $20 and get 4 callers, my c-bet would need to be larger, and then at that point if it gets called, I have invested $60-$100 in a hand that I am very possibly way behind on.

And I guess to answer your question, of course it would be nice to go to the flop with a $150 pot with AA, but with 5 callers I feel like proceeding with caution is our ONLY option unless we flop a set or something improve to better than a pair. And I may be looking at it with the wrong mindset.

You really shouldn't be c-betting into 4 people if you whiff the flop. You are going to have sessions where you get AK 5 times and miss every flop. You are probably going to lose those sessions. It's just part of poker.

The solution is actually sort of simple though. If you are raising pre and getting 5 callers regularly, raise more $$$. AK/AQ type hands go down in relative value when the pot goes multiway. You're much better off raising an amount that gets you 1 or 2 callers. Occasionally you will raise big and you'll still get 5 callers, but you should have a good idea for how many callers your raise size/position will net you on average.

You're sort of right in that playing a lot of big pots that don't go your way is likely cost you more money than if they were small or medium pots, but it also only takes 1 or 2 wins of those pots to recover and swing the other way.

To answer your questions though. Yes, in loose games like these, you can open up and play a few more hands, particularly in late position. No, you shouldn't raise less though. You should still be raising your value hands. You'll need to make a big hand to make back all the losses, but the best starting hands make the best postflop hands, so build up that pot while you're ahead.

Stop the automatic c-betting into multiple players. And yes, always raise your good hands and if 4 people are willing to call $20 then you could raise even more. Just make it as much as people are willing to call with worse hands.

I do think that the auto c-bet is a leak I need to plug and can plug relatively easily. Thanks you guys

Imo, it's quite obvious that you want to build the pot p/f when you believe you're ahead. Everyone else is making a mistake, in the long run, by calling with worse hands.

After the flop, it's not as easy to determine whether you're still ahead in individual hands, so the game is all about control and maximisation of wins versus losses, needing reads of boards and opponents' tendencies. (Not a profound statement, but if you're playing within your comfort zone in terms of your bankroll, and your game is good, your graph should progress on an upward plane.)

Raise more preflop. In other words, set yourself up so that you put more money in when you have the best hand and less money in when you don't.

Extreme example. I'm playing heads up NL$200 poker and I have AA. I'm willing to play the following game: I raise to $65 preflop and my opponent calls with a wide range. There is now $130 in the pot and I have $135 left. I promise to call $135 when my opponent shoves into me even when he has me beat and shows me his cards. (Again, as long as he promises to call $65 preflop with a wide range.) I'm willing to play that game all night long.

However if he only promised to call $10 preflop and then I'd have to promise to call his $190 shove whenever he made it, then that's a game I wouldn't play. And yet that's a game many players play when they raise too small preflop and pay off too big postflop.

Winning one hand out of six isn’t bad when there are four to five others on the flop.

And if they never fold the pot that you do win will be bigger than just what was put in preflop. Sounds like you just need to play the patient man’s game

TPTK is for sure not great vs 4 or more players, depending on SPR anyway

OP - When you're playing low limit live and you c-bet into a flop you missed, you are bluffing.

Bluffing low limit live is -EV. Betting into 4 other players when you missed the flop is suicide. Even with AA if you didn't hit a set, with 4 callers, check/call and check/fold are often better choices than bet/call or bet/fold.

As for your other question - personally I don't like OPEN limping, ever, but I will over-limp (that is, limp behind other limpers) plenty in low limit live games. The thing is you can't over-limp and then call down - you have to be able to fold the weak pairs and lose a little, over and over, in order to find the spot where you flop the big smashes and can pull the "i've got top pair! I'm all in" players along with you. Even so, doing so can be very high variance as a flopped 2 pair with low cards is very vulnerable.

sometimes it can be profitable to slowplay

Because the more players in the pot, the less equity your AA has.

I'm not so sure this raise more pre-flop mantra is wise in typical low stakes games. At least not the ones I play in. In the games I play in the whole table can limp, and then most of them will call a big raise from late position. Why they didn't raise in the first place I have no idea, but that's what they do. Live low stakes players are a strange breed. It's actually quite shocking when you come from online.

Meanwhile the raiser has put a big chunk of his stack in pre-flop with AK say, whiffs the flop and has to check/fold.

I'm coming around to the idea of raising smaller pre and getting your money in when you hit a big hand, not before. Jonathan Little recommends the small pre-flop raise approach with all your playable hands in his small stakes cash book, and I find myself agreeing with this strategy more and more.

Want to throw my 2cents in and point out that while our top pairs go down in value after raising big and getting lots of callers, the more speculative hands at the bottom of our pf range goes up in value when we hit. In early position we set ourselves up to win set over set, boat over boat, etc. From late position our steals can turn into concealed monsters.

This is where I was going with my op. Because if most of them call your big pfr, your only options if you miss the flop are either to make a big c-bet into an already bloated pot and bloating it even further or check/fold. The games I play in, if you make a $20 pfr and get 4-5 callers and then c-bet $60-$80 on the flop, you will most likely still have 2 callers going to the turn with a big pot to do something with.

If you continue to get multiple callers then they must be doing so with bad hands because there are so few good ones. Just don't bluff them and you print money. AK is going to miss regardless of how much you make it, you're going to lose the small pots just as frequently but if you have an edge preflop then you want to maximize this by getting as much money in as you can. You don't need to win a $100 pot with 5 players very often when only $20 is yours (20% actually), just bet when you have top pair and check when you don't, and for the love of god don't bluff them if you keep getting multiple calls on the flop. Also most people don't have the balls to raise your bet with a bluff so you can bet/fold very easily against them and you don't lose much more when you're beat.

Limping isn't going to solve your problem and in fact you're going to be less profitable.

Which circles back to the c-bet less when I whiff the flop. And I agree with that. I started implementing that more this weekend's game.

And actually limping would solve your problem, just not as much as it could and the underlying reason is the problem. When you cbet into 5 people when you miss you're probably going to be unprofitable in raised pots because almost nobody can make a profit when you bluff into the entire table every time. You're probably profitable in limped pots because you don't feel like it's a big loss to check and fold when you miss.

Thing is that your good hands are massively profitable preflop so you lose out on so much money when you don't do that. You just need to have a profitable game in raised pots.

It's correct to raise strong hands preflop and it's correct to generally just give up if you miss the flop multiway with a bunch of stations.

You make a ton of money by raising because it bloats the pot so much. You are also likelier to get paid off by top pair worse kicker hands in a raised pot. Limped pots are small and when a lot of money goes in, top pair hands should usually fold; even stations know this fact these days and don't tend to stack off without two pairs+ or a good drawing hand. So if you want to get paid big in a limped pot, you'd better hit top two+ before shovelling your money in.

What you do need to consider before raising is what a strong hand is...I wouldn't raise KJo from the SB into a bunch of limpers for example. I come from an internet background and would raise hands like any two unsuited broadways from say the cutoff into a limp chain...get called by the button ('because they have position'), by both blinds ('because they are priced in') and then be completely miserable with just about any flop. Hands like AQ are strong enough that you should open from any position and raise into any number of limpers.

I would rather bloat the pot post-flop when I have a big hand. Bloating it pre-flop and then check/folding when it goes multiway is lighting money on fire imo.

I agree with raising rather than limping, but not to bloat the pot.

The core reason to raise with good hands is to value bet. We increase the size of the pot when we are probably ahead. If we're going to wait to see a good flop first, we wouldn't raise KK preflop, hell maybe we wouldn't raise AA preflop. This is very basic stuff, and central to winning poker, it's not really debateable in normal game circumstances.

I think you misunderstood my post. My fault, I should have explained it better. I wasn't debating the merits of raising (which I agree are not debateable), I was referring to the raise sizing.

The core reason to raise pre-flop is to gain the initiative and to rep a good hand, not to bloat the pot imo. A good hand pre-flop is not necessarily always a good hand post-flop. AK for example.

OK, here is some theory. A big reason to raise with the big cards is that it narrows down the hands they can have in a tight game, so you get to play the hand out having a fair idea where you are at.

In the looser games, the large non-suited hands drop in value considerably. "Trouble" hands are even more trouble when you don't know where you are at. If you raise with KJ in a tight game and get one caller and flop K94, you can be sure he doesn't have two pair. Not so against 4 players who might raise you with both K3 and K4. If you are bet into, you really have no idea if your hand is good or not and you wish you were all in right now.

So if you expect 4+ callers, take away the worst of your unsuited raising hands. As a beginner, dump KQo UTG in a full loose aggressive game. Note however that big suited hands play well against several players. You want to add some other hands once in a while; it does wonders if they see you have raised with 76s and now suspect you might have that when you 3-Bet UTG1 when tight UTG raises and they flop a pair of Js and gleefully pay you off.

Suited connectors and small pairs play very well against the field.

That's very wrong

Also it is precisely the reason OP loses money in raised pots.

Really?

I thought OP was losing money in raised pots because he wasn't hitting the flop hard against multiple callers. And by making big pre-flop raises but still getting multiple callers, he is losing more money than he would have with smaller raise sizes.

Smaller raise sizes would also allow him to open up his pre-flop range and play more hands that may hit the flop hard.

There's a bit going on here. Let's break it down.

First, the reasons to raise with a good hand is not to 'gain initiative' or 'rep a good hand'. At most, these are minor side effects of raising with a strong hand. 'Initiative' is not a reason to raise...does it even exist? What if they donk the flop, do they now have 'initiative'? 'Repping a good hand' is not a reason to raise with a good hand. It's a reason to raise when you are bluffing...a bluff is very much a valid action but not what we're talking about here.

The main reason is to value bet i.e. make a bet when we are probably ahead, hoping that our opponent will make a mistake by calling. In other words, we are both continuing to play with a larger pot, but he is probably behind. This is the single most important aspect of winning poker, if you are not making the pot bigger when you are likely ahead, you are a losing player, end of story.

There are other side effects of value raising. One is that you force opponents to fold their equity. 65o has some equity against AKss. By raising, if your opponent is not terrible, he folds that equity. Another is that, as mentioned by the above poster, you force your opponents to define their range. This can be very helpful when hand reading and it's a hell of a lot easier to hand read in a raised pot.

But that's not why we raise with strong hands...we do so because we are value betting.

Now, raise size is definitely something that can be discussed. Fundamentally, when we're ahead, we'd like to get the most possible into the pot that will still get called. However that needs to get tempered with various other considerations such as disguising bet sizes and how much we have left behind - it's probably better to get it all in rather than 60% of our stack for example. Some players advocate smaller raise sizes because they want to play a lot of pots in position against weaker players and they make it a consistent size so they tend to get callers.

But we should not want a smaller raise size when we have good hands just because we have not seen the flop yet. We don't want a cheap flop, we want an expensive flop, because that maximises the size of our opponent's mistakes. He is putting more money in when behind, that means a bigger share of the equity goes to us.

OP is not losing money due to correctly getting more money in with a strong hand multiway. This is winning poker. Yes he will miss a lot of flops, yes he will have to check-fold a lot of the time. Sometimes he will hit and have to check-fold due to action and that's fine. But he gets paid more when he wins because the pot is bigger preflop.

Think about this logically, either OP is a winner in pots he raised with strong hands or a loser. Now if he's a winner, he wins more if the pots are bigger and less if they are smaller. If he's a loser, he loses more if the pots are bigger and less if they are smaller. So the problem of losing is not to do with raise size, it's something else. If OP is losing, then he has a winning problem, not a raise size problem.

TL;DR value betting is poker 101