[john kane]

Folded round to you in SB and you have 99. you are playing a 21/17 game.

BB is tricky, decent 24/21 who knows importance of position, willing to float, generally decent player (not some 18/12 grinder, but someone with ambitions to move up).

What do you do?

I advocate limp becuase I think raising leaves you vulnerable:

- he will expect your range is pretty wide here so he will call with a wide spectrum of hands as he will a) know he has position and b) will not want to seem like an easy blind steal

- you will flop an overpair only 20% of the time. if you plan to fire c-bet the flop and he could easily float you and then your in that '[censored], do i bet the turn again and let him make a move or keep paying him off or do i check and let him successful float-bluff me?'

for sure, sometimes he will fold preflop and fold on the flop, but given his player style this is not that often (note if he was a 17/12 i'd say raise pf everytime)

whereas by limping:

- he may raise with a wide range of hands and so by calling this, he will think maybe you are making a flat call with a speculative hand. if he then fires on the flop, you can then check-call given he will more often than not miss and will likely reveal his strength on the turn.

but importantly;

- when he checks you can then fire on the flop and either take it down then, or you can check and more often that not he'll bet with as a bluff or with a lower pair than 99, thus you get paid.

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well, those are my thoughts. as i mentioned a couple of weeks ago, i spent a lot of august re-evaluating my game, i used to always raise 99 in the sb but now i think focusing on a positional style of play preflop is much, much better. since switching to focusing more on position preflop when considering the blinds i have been a lot happier (and successful relative to july) than when i was playing a more hand strength preflop game.

for instance, the small blind takes a pounding when im in the big blind (obv i shift down gears if he starts limp-reraising).

i must stress this is only when the BB is a very good 24/21 or so. if he is tightish ill raise everytime.

but i just dont see the point in building a pot oop vs a tricky semi-lag with a hand which we can rarely have a lot of confidence with.

also id add if ive been playing tight on the table then im more likely to raise, as ever the importance of playing based on your image applies here.

ill throw in a poll: