hey i love reading ur guys forum posts! i'm working on my HUSNG game, i just have a few questions.

1. assuming i don't have a hand worth raising, should i always be limping except against LAGs?

2. assuming we get to flop, how often should i be taking down the pot with my sub-marginal hand in position?

These are sort of general questions that are going to get general answers. But I'd say

1) No, you should rarely be limping. Actually, I tend to think of it in reverse: what's a reason I won't raise here?

It's been discussed plenty and I don't have anything valuable to add, but you want to raise every pot you play in position. However, you may not be raising stuff like 56s and you should be.

2) As often as they'll let you. I don't know if you mean raised or unraised pots (or both), but I cbet probably 80% against most players who can fold. In unraised pots in position I probably bet something like 60%, mostly deciding whether to bet based on the board texture.

Start every match (cashgame) with raising every hand and bet every flop, untill your opponent gives you a reason not to. After all, it all starts with a battle for the small amount of money in the pot (blinds). When they adjust, you adjust, make sure you are always ahead of the situation

ok thanks!! one more question though...

i read harrington on holdem volume2 - in the heads up section he says that limping is better than folding (even if you have a hand like 32o) because of the price+position.

however i know u guys are really good...so i just want to clarify

harrington: raising>calling>folding
heads up forum: raising>folding>calling

i think harrington is awesome, but i asked this question because there seems to be a conflict;

1. so why is folding better than just trying to see a cheap flop?

2. if folding is better, what is the general optimal % versus passive or loose?

Playing raised pots with a hand like 84o can get you into a lot of trouble because it is going to be very difficult to tell where you stand postflop even if you hit. Against a LAG I would fold this to avoid the situation all together (I think most people would too). It is pretty much impossible to play a hand like this perfectly when you have no clue where you stand. The cbet won't push out a LAG player often enough, and it is very difficult to play a low pair against someone who is prone to raising you. However, against a loose/passive player I'm pretty confident that it is ideal to limp. You are getting 3:1 in position and are unlikely to face aggression unless you decide to build the pot.

I'm sure some of you will disagree - please include why.

I am still toying w/ if raising or folding is always right. Pokts limps sometimes, so either it is right or a tiny leak, as he is near the achievable ROI IMO

It isn't always right and there are examples against certain opponents where you would prefer to limp some of the time.

How would you play against opponents who raise oop a wide range every time you limp the button but that they frequently fold to your button raises ? Wouldn't you prefer to limp some hands and use a rope-a-dope strategy until they catch on ?

Part of being a successful poker player is to find holes in your opponents' game. One way of accomplishing this is to test them out with different strategies to see what works best for you. If you never limp your buttons, then you may miss out on a potential weakness in their game.

I figure if you go through your hand database, you won't find many that will show you winning more than 1bb per hand.

There's a lot of spots where I think limping is fine, especially depending on stack sizes, but in general I don't think so.

I don't agree with Harrington saying limping 23 is better than folding it. Especially since a lot of players are going to raise your limp and you end up just giving away chips.

My problem with limping 23 is you never, ever flop top pair. Say you get a "good" flop, something like 259, how can you really know where you are? You need an extremely predictable opponent to do anything but fold if he bets.

Limping is fine, and almost certainly correct later on in the game.

75bb deep I wouldn't limp OTB without a fair amount of opponent history.

I might also limp a fair amount in a no blind increase.

lol @ pokts playing perfect, though he very well might be the best husng player out there, I wouldn't say he plays anywhere near perfect judging by the play of people with similar ROIs.

Btw, there are several threads on this. Nicho I think had one called "contention, limping ATC is fine" or something like that, and I believe Collin Moshman had a limping OTB thread as well. Use the forum search and search for those two posters starting threads that use the word "limp" and/or "button" in them.

This is a classic thread and a must read.

http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...fpart=all&vc=1

What? Why almost certainly correct? I'm not 100% sure I disagree with you, but I don't necessarily think limping is correct later in the game. That said, I never limp.

It's correct to limp some hands later in the game against most players, yes.

Even good players are horrible at defending the BB, they either over raise (most common) or never raise, both of which are very profitable to limp against.

Players are generally better at countering raises preflop later in the game as well.

Also it's very easy to steal limped pots against a lot of players, later on in the game a BB is worth a much greater % of a stack.

We also have great implied odds vs a lot of players, and aren't gaining anything extra by raising and building a big pot before the flop, especially against a blufftard that will win more hands than us, whom we will win most big pots against. We want pots as small as possible against those players to begin with.

These are all very general points, there are more and I could elaborate some but I'm in one of those stupid PS VIP freerolls (beat).

assuming arbitrarily large stacks and an opponent who doesn't have large leaks preflop:

1) if you had to play every hand the same way with position preflop i think everyone can agree that your first preference would be to raise, then call, then fold.

2) if you had only the preflop strategies of (call/fold) or (raise/fold) i think we can also agree we'd prefer to play raise/fold.

the reason raise>fold in these two extreme situations is that our raise serves a pot-building function which benefits us due to our positional advantage. positional advantage is less valuable the shorter the stacks get (to a point) so as we consider shallow stacks limping becomes the correct play more frequently.

the reason for this is that we no longer need to actively build a pot preflop. the initial pot is already significant relative to the starting stacks and we will still have positional advantage after the flop in the pot. so in this case the best way to "build" the pot with position is by limping.

with shallow stacks the starting pot is a large portion of the effective stacks and we're looking to win pots immediately rather than build them. if you decide to play a pot you move all in, otherwise you fold.

so in my opinion correct preflop strategy from the button against a solid opponent looks like this:
deep stacks (>50) - raise/fold
medium (15-50) - raise, call and fold are all viable
shallow (<10) - raise/fold only

note - when stacks are between 10 and 15 big blinds i play very awkwardly and i'm not sure what is correct here. for me it depends on gameflow and how well i think my opponent will play against either of my possible strategies.




there's another reason for folding preflop that's been touched on that i'd like to expand. scw mentioned that playing marginal hands preflop can get you into difficult spots postflop that may be -ev and/or 0ev but difficult to play. if you can identify that ev(limp) ~ ev(fold) then i think it can be correct to fold. my reasoning for this is analogous to the argument for taking small edges in husng that decrease roi while increasing hourly rate. basically, in a very marginal situation, fold and play more hands at a negligibly reduced winrate. sacrificing ptbb/100 for more hands/hour can increase $/hour when the expected postflop decisions are ~0ev and complex.

There are two things limping gains you over folding.

#1 is that sometimes you get to stack your opponent with hidden monsters.

I would guess that's more important in cash than in a HUSNG, since most of the time in HUSNGs you're not getting huge implied odds even if you think you get to stack him (which is certainly not going to be the case all the time).

#2 is that you get to stab (and probably take down) many more small pots in position.

This is probably worthwhile, but if this is your main goal, minraising with the same range you would limp might actually be better, because it gives you an extra way to win the pot.

The disadvantage, of course, is that unless you want to make your range transparent, you have to sometimes limp with hands that have tons of preflop equity. Given how many villains will call a raise almost any two cards OOP, I personally think this is a big enough disadvantage to make limping pretty bad except against players who are unobservant enough to think you're limping big hands (because that's how they play theirs), even if you never show them one.