The Official Don't F'ing Open Limp Thread

[LawDude]

Spoon is right. You can, of course, get away with open limping in a very narrow circumstance, which is where you can read the table and are confident that nobody's going to raise a limped pot except in very narrow circumstances where you would want to get out anyway. And advanced players can limp re-raise in certain circumstances (basically when you have a strong hand you want heads-up and are confident that your limp will be iso-raised by a player acting after you whose raising range is way behind your hand).

But those two scenarios comprise probably 1/10 of 1 percent of all the poker you play. Which means that open limping should be about as rare in your game as hitting quads.

In fact, that's probably a good measure of how often you should open-limp. If you open-limp more often than you hit quads, you are doing it too much.

[jaytoi]

Spoon is right. You can, of course, get away with open limping in a very narrow circumstance, which is where you can read the table and are confident that nobody's going to raise a limped pot except in very narrow circumstances where you would want to get out anyway. And advanced players can limp re-raise in certain circumstances (basically when you have a strong hand you want heads-up and are confident that your limp will be iso-raised by a player acting after you whose raising range is way behind your hand).

Yeah thats what i was thinking about at 2NL- that "narrow circumstance" is rather prevalent. 80% of tables (especially ones with high %players to flop) look like this : limp,limp, limp, limp , limp , call, call ,call ,call ,call. So a raise often only serves the purpose of value, as you never get isolation out of it. And your own limp in turn never gets iso raised unless, as you said, they most likely have a better hand than you're limping with. So limping works there (@2NL) with a hand that needs to hit a flop (you can't bluff with 90 % percent of the time), as you're likely to be playing fit or fold, and the less money you waste before getting this said fit the better.

I definitely agree that open limping basically never works when you have a table where anyone is thinking about more than what they want to wear tomorrow, as it's always going to get iso- raised, so why not raise yourself , etc etc etc. It's probably even good at 2NL for value, and for newcomers for getting the idea drilled into their head of raise/fold poker.

It's just some tables do not seem to have any thought process in their actions sometimes..

And yes open limp-reraising AA UTG at a super aggressive table can work too.

[DJJunkPauds]

Yeah thats what i was thinking about at 2NL- that "narrow circumstance" is rather prevalent. 80% of tables (especially ones with high %players to flop) look like this : limp,limp, limp, limp , limp , call, call ,call ,call ,call. So a raise often only serves the purpose of value, as you never get isolation out of it. And your own limp in turn never gets iso raised unless, as you said, they most likely have a better hand than you're limping with. So limping works there (@2NL) with a hand that needs to hit a flop (you can't bluff with 90 % percent of the time), as you're likely to be playing fit or fold, and the less money you waste before getting this said fit the better.

I definitely agree that open limping basically never works when you have a table where anyone is thinking about more than what they want to wear tomorrow, as it's always going to get iso- raised, so why not raise yourself , etc etc etc. It's probably even good at 2NL for value, and for newcomers for getting the idea drilled into their head of raise/fold poker.

It's just some tables do not seem to have any thought process in their actions sometimes..

And yes open limp-reraising AA UTG at a super aggressive table can work too.

Yeah, that's about as good an outline of one the most exploitable poker tendancies as you could make. Here's how those same tables you describe look when I'm playing them: limp limp limp limp complete raise to 8xBB fold fold call fold call <flop> check bet 2/3 pot fold fold, hero scopes 25.5 BB.

I raise all pocket pairs from every single position, almost no matter what. I raise them 4+1 per limper x BB. Then what happens is that A. Everyone folds, and I win, B. Most people fold, and I see a flop, which I continuation bet my way out of, C. I flop a set, someone makes a hand/plays back at me because I've been frickin' raising all day/feels invested in the pot, and I stack them. Here's what happens when my opponents limp with their small pairs: I raise with an absurdly wide range, and cbet them off 7 out of 8 flops, turning an automatic profit, even if they call me 100% of the time. 1 time out of 8, they make it obvious they have a set, and I loose the minimum. Here's what happens when you make a set in a limped pot: nobody cares, and you make 7 big blinds.

I raise with suited connectors for the same reason as above, but not quite to the same extent.

If you never limp, you'll have almost limped as much as you should have: you're way more likely to limp to much than not enough, so just don't limp. Never ever limp. One day you'll be playing 200NL, and crushing it, and you'll come back and read this, and be able to cite some limited exceptions to this. That's when you can limp, until then, don't do it. You're loosing almost no money, and probably saving a bunch.