Facing a limp

(Or why you should resist the temptation of raising limps over and over and over again)

You probably get what I'm going to advocate in this post.

First, the following is a response to another question from Spacko about "when you should raise limpers." It's a very general question but I notice that even good players often have a general problem with how they approach this area of the game.

Lets begin by looking at reasons why people raise limps.

**We'll assume that effective stacks are a relatively deep 40-75bb, unless otherwise noted.

1. Our hand is better than the range of hands villain will call with.
2. We think villain will fold a tremendous amount of time and we will raise for the fold equity. You could call this a bluff-raise.
3. We have a great read on villain and have found an exploit in their game (fairly rare early on). For example, a player that calls almost ATC preflop but is very weak/tight postflop. You would want to get chips in the pot preflop to steal postflop.

There are no doubt other reasons you can raise a limp, but the most common will be similar to the 3 above.

We'll start with raising for pure hand value. A common reply to "why did you raise his limp with that hand (we'll say a hand like QTo)?" is "he'll call with worse hands." That is probably true, a lot of villains will limp and then call a 3-5x raise with a lot of worse hands. But unfortunately, many people don't consider other factors of the hand besides the hand values.

The first factor of the hand that a lot of people ignore is position. You're out of position, so you're at a disadvantage (the deeper you are the more this is true). This will weaken your holding/value somewhat.

Another factor is postflop play. How does your opponent play postflop? What is his calling range? What is his limping range? If you're having trouble answering any of those questions, raising a medium-strong hand like QTo OOP for around 4x the bb is probably not going to put you in good spots postflop.

As an example of how crucial it is to know most if not all of these things about your opponent, I'll point you to a recent thread in 2+2: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=177357

In this thread, Skates (a 220-550 regular) raised Heir Apparent's (a very solid 200/220 regular) limp with what you could call a "medium-strong" hand. He assumed that Heir would raise any ace preflop, so therefore an ace could not be in his calling range. Based on that assumption, it would be a pretty easy call based on Heir's line (call, c/c, c/bet). However, Skates even admitted that he was pretty confused about the hand/line and it turns out Heir had a weak ace. Throw aces into Heir's range and it would be a pretty clear fold on this river.

Moving on, the other big reason people will give when raising a limp is "he's only limping weak hands, he'll probably fold."

While this is fine reasoning, this is generally not worth doing until effective stacks (in bbs) are pretty small (think like < 30bbs deep). Most players will adjust after you raise their limps a few times, so you're not going to want to pick up their 20 or 30 chips once or twice when you have 1500 chips and then have to figure out how they are adjusting later on. Knowing they are limping weak and/or folding often is going to be much more valuable when you can pick up 50-100 chips each time or more appropriately, 5-15% of their stack a pop.

I'll touch on one other point about limp raising before I conclude, and that would be to think about what it means to face a limp. Are you really worried about a player limping his button when stacks are deep? You shouldn't be. Most players are losing value by constantly limping their button when stacks are deep, so why should you abuse that leak early on and force them to raise more often in position and generally play more aggressively throughout the game? It is my belief that you should not.

Now lets quickly touch on when you should raise limps.

-The blinds are a big % of the effective stacks. 5-15% is probably a good rule of thumb for when you really want to be paying attention and looking for spot to raise limps for fold equity.

-You really have a good grasp on this villain and his calling range as well as his postflop play.

-Your hand is very strong. I would never suggest checking a hand like 99 or AK in the big blind when a player limps. With a hand like this, your hand is just too strong to not want to build a pot, position or not, good reads or not.

Building off of that, my default raising range for low-mid stakes husngs would be 55+, A9s, ATo+, KJs+, KQo+.

That range would change as effective stacks, game flow and reads developed and changed, but on the first hand of a 22 dollar husng that would be my suggest raising range facing a limp from a random player.

To conclude, in general I would suggest letting players limp early but especially paying attention to limp ranges, reactions to aggression and postflop play of villains so that you can take advantage of poor play as effective big blinds get shallow and leaks grow tremendously. A good way to gain this information is to mainly only raise strong hands early on when facing a limp, and to deviate from that strategy as the conditions above warrant.

I hope you enjoyed this post, if you have any questions or comments about this post or about anything having to do with husngs in general you can leave them here or email me (ryan.ryryp13(insert the @ symbol bc of spammers) gmail.com).