Limping Poker Strategy
Aug 23, 2016 Poker Strategy With Ed Miller: When Limping Is Good Miller Outlines The Scenarios When It Might Be Beneficial To Just Call Preflop: by Ed Miller Published: Aug 23, 2016. A limp is when a player calls the big blind pre-flop. Limping is usually done by confident players, players with large stacks or by players with potentially solid hands who wish to see the flop. E.g 'I might limp to see if my King Queen hits.' Find out more about limp in this poker video.
Introduction
Let us start with explaining what limping in poker means and what it says about the player who has decided to take this action. When a player just calls the amount of the big blind, we call this action “a limp” and the player- “ a limper “. It is generally considered a weak play. Overlimping, or limping behind, is the act of choosing to limp AFTER one (or more) players have already limped preflop. Not to be confused with open-limping (being the first person to enter a pot preflop by limping in), overlimping can have some serious advantages when done properly. $1000 Bonus Accepts US Players Soft Games. $25 Free $1,000 Bonus. ACR ♠ 27% RB ♠ $1000 Bonus.
Open limping before the flop in no-limit hold’em cash games is almost always the sign of a loose/passive, weak player. However, this doesn’t have to be the case, and you can definitely add open limping to your game in the right circumstances if you plan things out well. What we want to do here is look at some of the advantages of open limping in a vacuum, how to counter some of the disadvantages and what some of the math looks like for specific scenarios to get you to thinking about your play.
If you work through this and really think about how you would do it, even if you decide not to, then it will help your game and your understanding of poker.
We’re going to start by looking at the typical disadvantages and what you want to avoid doing in terms of general play style.
Avoiding Passive Play
The one thing you have to avoid if you’re going to limp is being super passive. The reason that open limping is such a typically bad thing is that it’s done in a particularly passive way that allows you to just run all over the people who do it. You want to avoid being one of those people who get ran over, and we’re going to cover a few quick ideas on how you can do that here.
Don’t Limp/Fold Much
You shouldn’t be limp/folding all that often. There are obvious times to do it, like when there’s a raise and a 3-bet before the action is back around to you, but for the most part, you should be calling or 3-betting when facing a single raise. Limp/folding much at all is a good way to destroy your win-rate.
Leading Flops After Check/Calling
You’re on the flop out of position in a heads-up pot. You have a range, and your opponent has a range. This is no different in principle than the type of situation you would be in if you had raised pre-flop and gotten called once from a player who had position on you. Leading this flop will follow the same types of basic principles of forming your range well. The only difference is the content of your range.
Limp/3-Bet Pre-flop
When you limp and face a raise, you should be 3-betting some percentage of the time. The bet sizes will be a little larger, but the same principles remain. You’ll need to have some bluffs and some value bets in your range, and you’ll probably be balanced when you have something like 60-65 percent bluffs in your 3-betting range on average with 100bb starting stacks.
Check/Raising Flops After Check/Calling
Along similar lines, you want to be attacking on the flop in a similar way. What’s really interesting is that a lot of robotic players will probably continuation bet entirely too often on flops against you at first since you’ve limp/called pre-flop, so you can exploit them by check/raising on the flop a bit more. This diverges into several different scenarios involving 3-bets/4-bet on the flop and what happens when you’re called on the flop and see a turn with double barreling and similar.
The 3-Betting Game
To give you an idea of the math involved, we’re going to take a brief look at the 3-betting game that happens after open limping pre-flop. You limp and a Villain in late position raises to 4x. It folds around to you, and you 3-bet to a total of 12bb.
The Immediate Fold Percentages
Immediately in a vacuum, you’re betting 11bb to win 6.5bb that is already in the pot, so you need Villain to fold 11/17.5 = 62.9 percent of the time to break even assuming that you never win the hand if he doesn’t fold. It’s important to realize that robotic tags are going to probably fold a lot here, so it’s a fun exploitative move at first.
It’s also important to realize that all of the strong hands you limp are going to be taken out of your open raising range. However, your opponents aren’t necessarily going to know this, so they’ll think your open raising ranges are stronger than they really are. It’s something to thing about.
Of course you want to be able to show up with strong hands when you limp/3-bet some percentage of the time, but you’ll have to work out the appropriate percentages to limp nut hands based on what range you decide to open limp in the first place.
Your Actual 3-Betting Range
You need to know what your actual 3-betting range looks like if you want to have a good idea of what your bluffing frequencies are. To be able to do this, you have to know what your limping range looks like and what you have available to 3-bet in the first place.
Limping Poker Strategy In Tournaments
For the sake of example, suppose you decide to open limp {QQ+, AK} a total of 20 percent of the time in some position in some game. Normally this would be a total of 34 starting hand combinations. However, since you’ll only have them 20 percent of the time, they’re really going to show up with the same frequency that 35 * 0.20 = 6.8 normal hand combinations would show up.
Now suppose that you decide you want to be bluffing 60 percent of the time. You can use a shortcut I’ve posted about before to see how many bluffing combinations you need in your range:
Our desired bluff percentage is 40 percent, our desired value betting percentage is 40 percent (since that’s 100% – 60%), and we have 6.8 value betting combinations. That gives us 10.2 combinations of bluffs that we need to have in our range.
Learn More
This should be enough to get you started thinking about this stuff. If you’re ready to learn more, then check out the forum thread on this topic.
In our first installment we learned how to open the pot for a raise for the primary purposes of thinning the field, building a pot, and of course to sustain ourselves by taking down the blinds. By raising, we sought to create an small field where we could win the pot in one of two ways: either by our good hands holding up or by our opponents folding. When someone limps into the pot before the action reaches us, they are threatening to create quite the opposite environment from the one we are usually trying to set up. Limpers attract more limpers, and before we know, it the pot is fourhanded. This threatens our EV by diminishing our chances of both winning at showdown and making the field fold. We shall be defining how to react to limpers by splitting our hands into three categories:
- Hands that cannot tolerate the multi-way environment that is being threatened and need to raise to prevent it. We shall call these iso hands (short for isolation).
- Hands that actually benefit from the multi-way environment and want to accept it by limping along.
- Hands that are put off raising by the lower fold equity (our chance of making our opponents fold) caused by the limp or limps, and that are not suitable to limp along and play multi-way. These hands will we shall simply fold.
1. Isolating
The first question we should ask ourselves when encountering limping before us is whether our hand will benefit the most by making an iso-raise. In my book, The Grinder’s Manual, I stipulated three key attributes that make a situation a good one in which to iso. Here they are:
(A) Frequent Strength: This factor is all about how frequently our hand will make something strong on the flop. By ‘frequently’ we mean hands that are easy enough to flop such as top pair decent kicker or a flush draw. Powerhouse hands such as sets are very nice, but they do not come around often enough to be called ‘frequent’. Consequently, we should think of starting hands such as AA, QQ and AQs as having a great deal of frequent strength; hands like KJo and A5s as having a fair amount of it; and hands like 44, 54s and A6o as having relatively little.
(B) Fold Equity: This concept is central to the EV of so many of the decisions we make as poker players. A good interpretation of ‘fold equity’ is simply the percentage of the time that our opponents fold, thereby increasing our EV (Expected Value). While we cannot know the exact numerical value of our fold equity, we can estimate whether it is likely to be higher or lower based on how many people have limped, the player types who have limped, and how many loose players there are left to act behind us. The better the fold equity appears to be for us, the weaker the required frequent strength of our hand for isolating.
Limping Poker Strategy Games
Example 1: Let’s imagine that two very loose reckless players limp in UTG and the HJ and the action reaches us in the CO. We also know that the BB is very call-happy and is likely to be easily tempted by a multi-way pot. This is clearly a situation in which we need greater frequent strength to isolate. Here, hands that flop good one pair a lot like AJo or QJs are still worth trying to thin the field with as they crave a heads-up, or at worst, a three-way pot. However, in this situation we will not be able to raise too many worse hands than these due to the likelihood of being called by multiple opponents.
Example 2: This time the action reaches us on the BU. CO has limped, but he is a very passive and fit-or-fold player, likely to give up either now or when he does not connect too well with the flop. The blinds are tight and not looking to get involved in pots lightly. This is an enormously different spot to the example above. Now we should gladly isolate with hands as speculative as 85s and K8o. All of the conditions are right for it. In other words, we have a great deal of fold equity so we need very little frequent strength.
(C) Position: Being in position (acting last post-flop) is a very powerful advantage indeed. The power of information and heightened control over when money goes into the pot vastly increases EV in almost every situation where stacks are relatively deep. Therefore, being in position increases the EV of any poker investment, especially making an iso-raise. While this factor is not quite as impactful as the two preceding ones, it can tip the balance very easily in favour of deciding to iso. In Example 2 above, we might not be so eager to isolate as wide as 85s if we were in the SB and had to act first on every subsequent street. The weakest hand I would raise with in that instance might be something like 87s, 76s or JTo. Position can be a real deal-breaker when it comes to isolating.
Note that the requirement for these three factors is inversely proportionate. The more of A we have the less of B and C need. The more of B we have the less of A and C we need and so on and so forth.
Iso-Sizing
The limper has created extra incentive for other players to join in the fun. This means that we should take extra measures to dissuade them when we have a hand with which we desire to thin the field. A good rule here is:
Raise to 3BB plus one extra BB for each limper and each very loose player left to act behind. Add a further BB if limpers have position on us.
This creates a preemptive disincentive for our opponents to create a multi-way environment that our hand cannot tolerate. For example, if we are on the BU, two players limp, and one calling station waits in the blinds, we might want to size right up to 6BB (3+1+1+1).
2. Limping Along
It is almost never okay to open-limp (limp as the first player into the pot) in 6-max cash because open-raising is almost always a better play. Limping behind other limpers however, is a different beast altogether and something we might often consider. There exists a type of hand that actually prefers the multi-way climate caused by the limper. These are hands with low frequent strength, but high implied odds.
Hands with high implied odds are ones that are currently experiencing a favourable ratio of investment to average payout if they connect in a huge way. It follows that high implied odds hands are hands that are capable of connecting in a huge way some meaningful amount of the time. We shall take ‘huge’ here to mean better than one pair. The natural candidates for limping behind then are small pocket pairs like [22-66] and suited connecters that do not make large pairs EG. 87s. By getting in cheaply with these hands after a limp, where fold equity is already shrinking, we keep our investment down the times we miss and are forced to give up on the pot, while still giving ourselves the chance to flop a huge hand. The more opponents that enter the pot, the better our implied odds become as the chances of being paid of increase. We can see that the limpers create an environment that these hands are actually happy to see.
3. Folding
Remember that capitalising on fold equity to steal blinds was one of the primary reasons for open-raising. When someone limps before us, our fold equity decreases so it is only natural that the bottom of our stealing range from late position becomes a fold when others have already entered the pot. Try not to view these limps as an insult for interfering with your default raising strategy, but as a kind warning that certain hands are no longer profitable to play. For example, we would happily open-raise K9o on the BU, but when two players limp before us, such a poor holding turns into garbage. We do not have the fold equity plus frequent strength to iso here and neither do we have the implied odds and multi-way playability to limp behind. Our hand becomes a clear fold.
Conclusion
Encountering limpers is very common when you first begin your poker journey in the micro-stakes. However, as poor a strategy as open-limping generally is in 6-max cash, fear not – many opponents will continue to make this mistake even as you move up through the stakes. Having a solid grasp on when to isolate, when to limp along, and when to fold is an invaluable and eternal poker skill to master.
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