Why limping is bad

I always ask students, are the ingredients of the hand on your side when you are involved in a pot. This can be converted to questions as follows:. Clearly the ingredients to winning the hand are not on your side by adopting a limp in style of poker.

Limping in is a poor poker strategy. It makes playing post flop poker harder, you are less likely to win and more likely to get bluffed out too. By adopting this style, you are inviting better players to abuse you before and after the flop and put you in awkward positions. There are professionals that have attempted this style of poker in the past with a view to setting traps but it is rarely profitable and to be used at your peril. Even with the relentless aggression in online poker , the limp in style of poker is not one to be seriously considered yet.

Sign up below or read our Coral review. Image Source for Fish: Unsplash. Skip to content. What is Limp in Poker? Why is it so Bad to Limp in Poker? Limping raises the chance of having to play against more than one competitor postflop. Multi-way pots are tricky to navigate. On average, hands will be stronger, leaving you uncertain whether your moderately-strong hand is the best at the table.

That could also make it harder to get value when you make the nuts. Some hands that would be more profitable as a bet will need to be limped instead in order to disguise the strength of your limping range. This means that some of your strongest hands will get less value than they should.

You see too many flops with weak hands. As a result, you end up losing chips overall. How do you react when someone later to act preflop raises? You are absolutely correct if you are playing against people that have the slightest understanding of this concept. Optimal strategies at high level are not necessarily optimal at a low level. You can play high level poker at a low level table and come out ahead, sure.

Lots of things do not make any sense at all when up is down and down is up. It appears to have come naturally to MekonKing as described in this thread. Against this type of player pool, you should play fewer hands and raise bigger. At which point, it becomes an all-in pre-flop bingo-fest. Been there, done that. Still came out ahead despite a very loose all-in range.

You can play tighter and more aggressively against these players, but:. I get it, you counter loose-passive with tight-aggressive and chips rain down from the heavens. That is the standard intuition. I also understand that what I propose is counter-intuitive to this line of thought. The counter to Agressive is Passive and visa-versa. Then you have those players who mainly only play postflop poker. Some of them are pretty crafty, and I suspect bank profit most of the time.

Do you really wanna be betting into a player who has demonstrated a willingness to limp AA, check and flat when the board hits Axx?? Basically players who have strength, yet passively wait for others to just donate thier chips, waiting to take it down on the river.

There are a few sports I can think of, where form is alot less important than results. The point is that poker is also 1 of them. So here are a few situations where limping can be good.

The first time limping tends to make sense is when the stack sizes are awkward. The problem is, however, that as soon as one of the shorter stacks enters the pot, your hand loses all its value. In this case, limping is almost as good as raising when you look at your upside playing a hand in position against a bad player , but it goes a long way to limit your downside when things go wrong.

So in these situations, go ahead and limp. The classic rationalization for limping goes like this. If I miss, I know how to get away from the hand. But if I hit it, I can win a big pot. But not every game in is nitty. When you do find a great game with lots of river action, this old logic for limping becomes more correct. The more you can rely on winning a big pot for your big hands, the more you should try to see flops cheaply with marginal starting hands. Not only should you play some marginal hands for a limp that you might not play in a nittier game, but it can also make sense to limp some hands that you might raise in a nittier game.

For example, a hand like 10 8 can be a great bluffing hand in a nitty game, and I might raise that hand on the button to set up a likely post-flop bluff. But we keep our initial investment low. He is still investing money into the pot as an equity favourite. SB completing regardless of BB, is a trend that began at high-stakes and filtered its way down. Certain high-stakes pros decided that SB completing takes better advantage of the blind structure.

We only need to invest 0. The high-level version of this approach involves cutting out all open-raising. And you should only complete with hands that you wish to continue. SB completing is especially essential when there is a limper before us. We get an opportunity to play against a weaker opponent. Like the concept of over-limping, there will be hands within our range, which are too weak to iso-raise. The best hands will be iso-raised. While the majority of holdings can simply be completed, hoping to see a cheap flop.

What if we were to start by limping preflop , then play strong aggressive poker postflop? Such a style could easily end up winning. But we still have three postflop streets on which we can make steal attempts. As the goal of a flop float is usually to steal the pot on later streets.

We define the expectation of any play by the whole postflop tree that follow, not solely on whether the play can win directly. A small group of high stakes online players have become aware of this fact.

They are experimenting with open-limping strategies from non-SB positions.