We’ve all seen these action-packed games where players are limp calling huge raises with seemingly almost any two cards!
This has happened to me a tonne, in live casino games with deep starting stacks, blinds at 25/50 I’ve seen players call raises of 700 chips with terrible hands like A3o.
So we know this environment exists and it can be super frustrating to play multi-way pots even with a tight range that includes huge hands.
So let’s look at how to play better against this…
To adjust people seem to go two ways, either raising bigger or they give up with that because they are still getting a tonne of multiway action and now the pot is just bigger and there is less play post-flop!
One answer we want to take is to…
Go Even Bigger
I used to give up on even trying to isolate in some of the games I used to play, taking hands as good as AQs to the flop without even trying to raise after many failed attempts and lost post previously I started playing like the fish!
This is not good, we need to be attempting to isolate the pots still and either getting heads up or at most three-handed, so we just need to find our opponents pain threshold on what they will call.
Let’s say we are playing 50/100 with starting stacks of 20,000 chips
There is an open limp UTG+1 and then 3 limpers behind this action, meaning a total of 4 players in the pot already!
We look down at JJ on the Button, how much should we be raising to?
Well typically we should be raising an extra big blind for each limper, so we would want to be making this pot at least 6-7BBs or a raise of 600/700 chips as a minimum.
However, this is chump change for these chasers that have 20,000 to burn… we need to go huge here otherwise one will call and then they are all going to be in there seeing a flop.
Trying going double what you would normally raise… so make it 1,200-1,400. This adjustment should get at least some of your opponents to make folds.
If this doesn’t work, next time Go Bigger Again!
We want to maximise our equity in these spots, against weak hands we want to build big pots, but in multiway pots, we will have much less equity, even with our strong hands, so look to get a pot heads up pretty much always.
Limp behind with some borderline hands that you would normally Raise
KJs, ATo, 77, 88 etc are all hands that are going to play fine in a limped pot, we can make some strong hands and keep holdings in the pot that we have in bad shape, let’s say we take our ATo to the flop and it comes Ace high there are tonne of players that will limp any weak Ace high hand that we now have in very bad shape.
Limping can become contagious
Don’t catch the bug!
Try not to fall into the trap of playing just like the rest of the table and start limping all kinds of junk just like them.
We will still want to play a solid range of hands even if we add some more limps into our range in certain games be careful not to play too wide, an occasional 76o played from a later position on the table is going to be fine, but don’t look to add in too many of these offsuit type hands from earlier positions otherwise, we are just being one of the fish ourselves!
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