Originally Posted by Chopper

kind of depends (bet you've never heard that one).

use your reading skills at the lower limits. keep small pots for small hands and make big pots for "big pot" hands.

speculative hands, like sc's and small pp's, need good implied odds to pay off in limit games. you need to be pretty sure you will get a multiway pot with a couple players that are prone to overplay their hands. smaller stakes are great for this, as the situation presents itself so darned often. limping encourages others to jump in behind you with bad hands. you want that! however, if raising will blow up a big pot and will not thin the field, you may want to raise more speculative hands from ep, too. just dont get too carried away with it. no one is paying a lot of attention at these levels, so you can really play pretty obviously and limp weaker stuff, but raise powerful stuff. i have yet to see anyone other than Lawdude adjust to me.

there is a passage in one of sklansky's books that basically says, "have you ever noticed pros limping almost every hand in NL games? they KNOW they have a huge edge and are encouraging others to grossly misplay their hands against them." you dont limp QQ because you have an edge in limit games, but you can certainly take some suited aces and 67s/T8s type hands to a flop by limping them up front in these passive games....and get a nice pot for flops you like. then, outplay them.

however, from about MP2 on, its open-raise or fold 90% of the time....just like 6max. the blind stealing aspect becomes more profitable than trying to encourage big pots with only 4 players in.

you can definitely isolate players in limit games. you just need to seat select a little. sit directly to the left of a complete loose ass and just iso the hell out of him. sure, you will get cold called by some other loose players....but 1) you can adjust to that by tightening your iso range a touch and 2) cold calling raises is a HUMONGOUS leak in limit....perhaps the worst spewage of chips there is. if they want to, let them, and let the long run bust their asses....just make sure you are prepared for big, multiway pots.

forcing others to call 2 bets cold is one of the best things you can do to manipulate the hand...whether it be preflop or post flop.

Originally Posted by ponyboy

Thanks for the analysis. I have definitely gotten myself into trouble a couple of times in the last few days raising in LP with questionable hands, getting called and then going too far with cards against a blind where I think to myself "he can't possibly have THAT!".

Originally Posted by ponyboy

One of my biggest leaks right now is assuming blinds call raises with weaker hands just to see a flop.

Originally Posted by ponyboy

Your statement about cold calling raises just brought another question to mind - so that means, if I was planning on raising anyway then I should automatically 3 bet? Or take my read and sometimes lay down a hand I would have raised with had it been folded to me?