In today’s post, we are going to look at the secrets of playing limped pots.
It can be a tricky part of the game where we need to know which hands we want to be playing in pots with limp action and what action we need to be careful to play against.
Be Wary of Certain Limps
Some players these days will limp with solid hands that other players may choose to enter with a raise, but if they are conscience of stack depth or aggressive players behind they can choose to limp which will allow them to 3-Bet Jam all in if short-stacked for example.
We see this in the High Roller events where players will limp the button with a hand from the top of their range, this allows them to keep weaker hands in the pot and also allows more play with shorter stacks.
Get aggressive versus most players
We can’t always assume though that players will be limping with a balanced range including monster hands, a great percentage of the time limping in from players is just a new player that sees a hand that they don’t want to commit too many chips to the pot, but want to see a flop.
We need to take advantage of these spots!
These are huge spots to pick up dead money, for instance if our opponent is passive enough to limp fold or limp, call a raise pre-flop and then fold to most C-bets, then we are just printing money from getting involved in pots versus them.
How much should we make it?
We are going to want to make it around 3BB +1BB for every limper in the pot, so if just one open limp raise to 4BBs and if there are then 2 players limping in the pot make it 5BBs to go.
We want to have a size that will put our opponent in awkward spots with their weak range, if we make our raises to small they can easily call, also we want to get some chips in the middle for playing in position with the betting lead and a range advantage where we have a much better chance of winning the larger pot versus hands that will limp.
When should we not be isolating limpers?
We are going to want to be careful when we get below 40BBs, this is when things get a little dicey for playing hands like pocket pairs, we are going to want to start limping behind with most of our pairs 22-88 at least on this stack depth and then we can isolate with 99+ for value if we know our opponent is limping weak hands we will dominate with these hands.
We are also going to want to have a tighter isolation range if our opponent is ever limp 3-Betting, so watch out for opponents with some tricks up their sleeves.
Another big mistake some players make is isolating with good hands but when out of position, even with hands like AJo in the blinds for example, we are going to want to pump the breaks a little against our opponents when out of position, as realising our equity is much harder to do.
Make more money with these exploitative sizings
So against weak players they will not be looking at bet sizings and making reads or looking to exploit us, so we can comfortably bet larger with our value hands and bet smaller with our bluffs.
This achieves two things, we get paid more chips with our real hands and protect against draws and we lose the minimum amount for the times we are bluffing and end up not winning the pot.
Play fairly lockdown post-flop versus the Calling Stations
We are not going to want to fire off many bluffs versus these types of limping opponents, try and just have a one and done strategy in general, meaning we bet once with our bluffs and then just shut down.
These types of opponents will just call us down with pretty much anything once they hit, so we are looking to exploit them when they don’t hit or when we hit but with our stronger range. So there is no need for us to go into 3 Barrel bluff mode.
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