[Albert Moulton]

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75-125BBs, NL25/NL50 or 1/2 live (max 200 Buyin), 8+ Players.
Trying not to play against shorties.

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If you are in an aggressive live game with 75-125BB stacks and with lots of raising and reraising, then making full-sized "standard" raises with hands like 66-99 in EP and MP is probably worse than limp/calling because raise sizes tend to be bigger in live games, and if you get reraised then you end up in a push or fold situation with a mid-pair.

Also, if you raise in EP with mid and low pairs in a live game, you should probably avoid cb'ing in pots with 3 or more players. I've seen plenty of hands like the one where an old guy call down his whole stack with A9o in a 2/3 NL game where the board was something like 2293J and he was up against a guy with AQ who had raised pf from EP, fired at the flop, fired at the turn, and then pushed the river (and lost). So, in many cases, if you miss your set in a live game where you had raised with a mid-to-small pocket pair, it's multi-way, and you're OOP, then c/f is probably better than auto-cb.

Sometimes, small raises in EP with speculative hands as a pot-builder is sometimes good if the game is generally NOT super aggressive and sees a lot of "family" pots. A small open raise can sometimes make a big enough pot that if you flop a set or a straight that you can get somebody on a big draw or with TP all-in by the turn by just betting your hand aggressively. In this game a limp ends up in a pot that is too small OOP to stack somebody when you hit. And if you raise a full amount, then you either get too few callers (rare) or too many callers (more likely) in which case you are essentially paying to much to flop your own set. Also, a small raise can often withstand a reraise without having to fold.

Finally, in deep 200+ games (like at our local 5/5 game), I've just started folding 22-55 in EP and MP. They don't get paid off enough when they hit and nobody else has a big hand. And when somebody else has a big hand, is generally a bigger hand than bottom set. Ciaffone and Reuben wrote about this in one of their PL&NLHE book. I didn't think they were making any sense until I started playing occasionally at the 5/5 $1000 buy-in game. Then that section made more sense to me.