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Post Deep dive questions about dealing with limpers
Thanks Chris for the great detail in the Deep Dives. I have gone over the dealing with limpers deep dive twice and wanted to know if anyone has some further direction on some other scenarios with limpers. The scenario I have come across, more than once, in my live home poker league and playing the Rec.Poker home games is the player that will not raise pre-flop but will call a significant jam/all-in bet. Is there a range or specific hand types that are suggested as the hero to mitigate the risk against this type of player? Better to use standard raising strategy and try to out play opponent post-flop when called instead of jamming? Suggested effective stack depths that may work better or worse for this scenario? Stage of the tournament, pre or post re-entry period or different for non re-entry tournaments? Can’t wait to hear the feedback!
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4 Replies
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I think some similar principles apply against this player. As suggested, we can approach our preflop sizing by dividing up hand classes. Unlike playing against more studied players, we don’t have to worry about balance as much. Depending on how deep we are, I’d go very big with strong value and less big or just overlimp with more speculative holdings. So a hand like 8c7c can just overlimp. As can 44. A hand like AQo can make a healthy raise, but not get carried away postflop. A premium holding like AA or KK can raise even bigger, lower the SPR (stack to pot ratio) with every intention of getting stacks in by the river. Our plans can change based on the runout, but that’s at least where I’d start.
If this player type just will call down any raise and call down jams with any value, then we need to start with hands that have or can make good top pairs (or better) and then go for it when we have spots where we’re likely to dominate them. So if we raise with AQo and we know they are calling with every A and lots of Qs, we’re okay pushing our good made top pairs on the flop. If they’re willing to call off stacks light, we’re going to have them in real trouble. We’re going to stack them ourselves 4-5 times for every weird time they show up or suck out a weird two pair that beats us.
At the same time, we should rarely run big multistreet bluffs against this kind of player. Once they start calling, they are just almost never folding and they almost have SOME value. So we weight ourselves toward value when betting and allow us to see cheap cards due to the passive nature of our opponent.
When we go for it with top pair, it becomes higher variance, but it is variance that leans pretty heavily in our favor in the long run, so we need to embrace it.
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Thanks Chris! Looking forward to the next Deep Dive on multi-way pots, another common theme in the low buy in live casino tournaments I play.
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I agree with Chris on everything here, and I want to add that as stacks get shorter, the same principles apply: if they are calling preflop shoves light, then we just have to shove with a linear range from the top down, and sign ourselves up for some variance. Players like this do not require balance or blockers or other sophisticated tools – you beat these players with a blunt instrument instead – value hands – and you just keep swinging that club whenever you have it in your hand. So we can discuss where the thresholds are with regard to stack sizes and hand strength, but then it’s just a math problem.
Here’s an example. If we assign our shorter-stacked villain a SUPER wide limp/calling range of 34% that I have quickly and roughly put into Equilab here, the shoving range of 20% has an equity edge of 55% to 45% over the villain. If we tighten that to a little over 11% our equity edge increases to almost 60% to 40% over the villain. Notice that if we replace the bottom/worst pocket pairs and replace them with the bottom/worst suited Broadway hands, the equities remain almost exactly the same: it is the overall range strength that is more important than exactly which hands you fill our the frequency with once you have run out of ‘good hands’.
Of course, who remains left to act might not be just you and the villain. You can never know when other players behind you might wake up with aces. Plus, you might add more AX hands before some of these other unpaired combos. So – don’t use these actual ranges! This is really just an illustrative example of the equities of looser vs tighter ranges. But you can use this as a rough guide for building your own ranges. Thanks for posting, @marcel-dusyk !
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also – premium members can join Chris and the gang at his monthly Q&A on the fourth Wednesday of each month: expressly to discuss this kind of thing! Here’s the link to the upcoming events in that series: https://rec.poker/series/monthly-qa-with-chris/
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