Preflop Limping is Bad

[WannabeCoder]

@Sassy_Sarah

@WannabeCoder ,
Can I assume all this time we were talking about NL and Hold’em??
In PL games, regulating the pot size does include limp’n.

If anything, this demonstrates how much more important it is to raise preflop in pot limit games. When you have an edge on your opponents, why would you want to keep the pot small? Raise with your strong hands, both to get opponents to over-commit their equity and to fold off their equity, and fold your weak hands instead of paying bingo and hoping to hit a flop. Better to build a pot by betting strong preflop than to hope your opponent catches a strong enough piece of the board that they’ll bet/raise into your nuts postflop.

Also, as a wise man once said:

@WannabeCoder

Good players bet with strong hands on every street, including preflop, regardless of game type. To illustrate this, the biggest pot in online poker ever was a heads-up pot-limit Omaha hand between Patrik Antonius and Isildur1. The blinds were $500-$1000. Isildur opened to $3K, Antonius 3-bet to $9K, Isildur 4-bet to $27K, and Antonius 5-bet to $81K. When Isildur called, there were 162BB in the middle before the flop. That’s simply not possible if players aren’t betting preflop in Omaha - and I think we can all agree that Isildur and Antonius are among the best PLO players in the world, or at least they were at the time.

Yes, sometimes you’ll raise preflop and the flop will miss you. However, when you’re ahead of your competitors’ ranges, choosing to limp instead of raise allows your competitors to catch free/cheap cards, and creates less of an incentive for them to fold off their equity. That’s why good players always raise their good hands preflop in Omaha, while weak players never do.