In this post, we look at how to play from the Big Blind against limpers from the Small Blind…
We are going to want to first have some idea about what kind of player we are up against in the small blind, as there are two types of players that will limp:
- The Balanced Limper
- The clueless weak Limper
The Balanced Limper
Firstly we will want to try and know if we are up against a solid player that will limp with all types of balanced holdings, so they could have a bad hand, a playable hand or a very good hand.
These players could look to limp 3-Bet us, so we will want to raise slightly tighter versus this type of player.
A good way of knowing if the player to your right is going to have balanced limps is how have they played up till this point, have they generally played well in pots and been making good bets playing similarly to how we might play? Well, then they are likely to be fairly balanced in their limps.
So against this type of better player, we will still want to attack their limps but with this range:
We can raise all the hands in Blue and when we do we will want to use a large sizing, making it around 3.5-4BBs to play.
This way we will be putting a lot of the player’s hands in a tough spot, making it hard to continue with many of there holdings.
But this is where things get tricky against a balanced player, they won’t often be limp calling this bet, many times they will continue with aggression, so for when they have induced a 3-bet from us, let’s look at the range we will want to continue with…
This is a good example of the hands we will want to continue with either as a call in Green or as 4-Bet in Orange or occasionally a 4-Bet Bluff in Pink.
The clueless weak Limper
Secondly, we are going to come up against players that will enter pots without a real plan and just try and see a flop for the minimum but possibly look to continue versus raises too.
Because these players will be playing a wider range and usually enter with a raise with their strong holdings we can raise wider versus this type of player, let’s look at the range we can do this with…
It’s hard to give an exact range on how many hands we are going to be wanting to add some pressure with but this is an example of 52% of our hands and its a pretty decent range to go with including many playable off-suit combos, all pairs and nearly all our suited playable combos.
Because these players are going to be more of the calling station type and have less limp 3-bets in their ranges we are going to want to raise heavily making it around 4-5BBs to continue in the hand, this way we get more value when we are building a pot with our stronger range and we put the pressure on them when they have weak holdings and just win the pot right here pre-flop.
How do we continue post-flop?
Ok so we have raised the limper and they have called us, now we have bloated the pot but are in position…
So what’s next…
We have constructed all our hands into 4 easy to play categories for post-flop play in a previous article so we will use that advice here once again.
Which hands do we bet?
- Premium Made hands
- Draws
Which hands do we Check?
- Marginal hands
- Missed hands
This means we will be balanced in our approach of betting post-flop as we will be checking not just our weak hands but marginal ones with showdown value and betting with not only our good hands but our semi-bluffs too.
Try and widen your range a little when betting against the weaker players, betting more for value and bluffing wider but for small bets, this will mean we can bet them off their instant folds easier and build pots for value when they are going to station us.
For a little more information and advice on how to play Post-Flop check out the article that we have linked for you.
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