Smooth-Calling your Button: Always a Mistake? NL

[Stealthy]

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It depends how much your opponent sucks. The more he sucks, the better idea it is to limp.



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Can you expand on this a little. Are you simply talking about limping if villains will never raise your limps when you hand is weak. Or does it go further to include the weaker villains who never fold pre to raises anyway and will not fold any part even to 2 barrells. If it does include the latter it would kind of make sense to allow you to play small ball with your weaker hands whilst punishing them with raises and value bets with your stronger ones.

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If he's passive and never raises your limps, you limp your bad hands (which would ordinarily be mucked) because he's not going to raise them out of the pot, and therefore you can eke out a small win with them.

If he's a calling station and never folds pre, then you make what is ordinarily a mistake and stop raising as much; you limp with some borderline "default raise" hands with no high card strength like 53s and 76o and J4s because you don't have fold equity.

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I had given this a lot of thought today after my post and came to the same conclusions that the only hands I would want to limp v a guy who never folds his BB but will not raise limps is the speculative hands like 54s that cannot win without improving. Still think raising is the correct default in 90%+ of the time your hand is playable but maybe being more selective on making C bets. No point trying to force through double barrells when he doesn't want to dump his 93o on the KQ37 board.

[creedofhubris]

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It depends how much your opponent sucks. The more he sucks, the better idea it is to limp.



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Can you expand on this a little. Are you simply talking about limping if villains will never raise your limps when you hand is weak. Or does it go further to include the weaker villains who never fold pre to raises anyway and will not fold any part even to 2 barrells. If it does include the latter it would kind of make sense to allow you to play small ball with your weaker hands whilst punishing them with raises and value bets with your stronger ones.

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If he's passive and never raises your limps, you limp your bad hands (which would ordinarily be mucked) because he's not going to raise them out of the pot, and therefore you can eke out a small win with them.

If he's a calling station and never folds pre, then you make what is ordinarily a mistake and stop raising as much; you limp with some borderline "default raise" hands with no high card strength like 53s and 76o and J4s because you don't have fold equity.

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I had given this a lot of thought today after my post and came to the same conclusions that the only hands I would want to limp v a guy who never folds his BB but will not raise limps is the speculative hands like 54s that cannot win without improving. Still think raising is the correct default in 90%+ of the time your hand is playable but maybe being more selective on making C bets. No point trying to force through double barrells when he doesn't want to dump his 93o on the KQ37 board.

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J4s might've been a bad example, it'll still high card him about 15% of the time if it gets checked through. Think about stuff like nine high or lower.

[abcjnich]

OP Colin wrote a book on SNGs. SNGs are mostly shortstacked situations. I used to play 6person sngs and by the time it got hu the average stack was almost always <30bbs.

In tourneys, I will limp otb. This is because I try to win a lot of small pots (unless I pick up a great hand) to chip away at my opponent. In cash games, chipping away doesn't work because people can reload and I'm giving away too much equity in the long run.

That said, I will still rarely limp in cash games, usually with hands like k2 or j5 (ok hands that don't have much potential). I'll also sometimes limp with mediocre hands in the first few hands with a new opponent.

[Collin Moshman]

Primordial, the "why play moderate/deep HU as strictly raise/fold pre-flop?" is exactly my question.

Cwar, how would your opponents exploit button limping? By raising most of your limps, I assume? Because if so, that in turn is a very exploitable counter-move. You simply limp some of your stronger hands as well, and your opponent's OOP raise will either win him a small pot (when you hold a J4o type hand and usually fold), or he'll be set up to play a larger pot OOP with an inferior hand (when you hold a decent hand, say K J, and call).

Same question to creedofhubris: if you are confident your opponent will be frequently raising button limps, why not mix up your limp/raise frequencies a little and make him gamble on whether he's chosen the right time to raise? This strategy also allows you to play more hands from the button. Position is key enough in HU that I think this benefit outweighs the cost of occasionally having an AA checked behind, or being forced out of a few straight marginal hands after a 1 SB chip investment limping.

Maybe I'm playing devil's advocate a bit, but I would really appreciate a more detailed explanation to the question at the top of this post. It's something that's been on my mind a lot recently.

-- Collin

[ChicagoRy]

You don't really get enough hands in on avg in a turbo to exploit a 50-75% auto raise of limps from villain.

You lose a ton of value when you limp an AJ type hand.

You also lose a ton of value because a majority of players call way too light OOP to a button raise preflop and play weaker postflop in these bigger pots OOP.

[creedofhubris]

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Same question to creedofhubris: if you are confident your opponent will be frequently raising button limps, why not mix up your limp/raise frequencies a little and make him gamble on whether he's chosen the right time to raise?

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If he autopots vs. your limps and you fold more than half the time he profits. You gonna mix in enough decent hands to call half the time?

If you limp with hands from your top range (AJ+ 99+) then you eviscerate your raising range and he can repop your raises profitably.

[cwar]

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Cwar, how would your opponents exploit button limping? By raising most of your limps, I assume? Because if so, that in turn is a very exploitable counter-move. You simply limp some of your stronger hands as well, and your opponent's OOP raise will either win him a small pot (when you hold a J4o type hand and usually fold), or he'll be set up to play a larger pot OOP with an inferior hand (when you hold a decent hand, say K J, and call).

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Its much harder to develop a good metagame in regards to limp reraising or limp calling than it is to just raise or fold. Its so hard that I suspect it may not even be as profitable as raise or fold so I generally take the easier route and just dont worry about this and use the simpler r/f.

[Collin Moshman]

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If he autopots vs. your limps and you fold more than half the time he profits. You gonna mix in enough decent hands to call half the time?

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Let's assume you play limp/raise poker (no button open-folding, maybe you limp around 25% -- generally your weaker hands, but not always -- and raise the rest), and it takes you four times of being raised out of the pot to realize Villain will auto-raise those times you button-limp. Assuming you fold each of these four hands (as your starting default is to limp weak hands you'd otherwise be folding in raise/fold poker), you have lost an additional 2 BB (losing four 2 BB pots instead of four 1.5 BB pots).

After losing those 2 extra BB's, if you call/reraise 50% of his OOP raises those times you limp rather than raise (not necessarily your top 50% of limping hands, you can still mix up your play), your expectation for subsequent limps is positive iff:

0.5 x (-0.5 BB) + 0.5 (P) > 0

where P is your expectation of playing a large pot in position against an opponent holding the random distribution.

If P > 0.5 BB these subsequent button-limps are +EV. If you are at all decent playing HU, P should easily exceed 0.5 BB.

Of course, this is far from conclusive, since ...

1. Your expectation for raising these limping hands may be higher than 0.5 BB (although this is non-obvious, since in raise/fold poker, your folds are 0 EV plays, and so you must believe raising has -EV if you are choosing to fold instead).

2. Villain may readjust to your increased in-position raise-calling frequency ... what he would do, and the effects of such an adjustment, on your limping EV is difficult to say. For instance, if he begins checking more often, this benefits you those times you were limping weakly, and hurts you when you have a better hand.

3. You start out losing those 2 BB to obtain the knowledge you are facing 100% OOP raises, which could be significant in a turbo SNG.

Perhaps cwar's point cuts to the chase a little quicker: r/f poker is an easier style to play with fewer meta-concerns, particularly if multi-tabling or playing a quicker format such as the turbo SNG.

-- Collin