My high school gym teacher firmly believed in stretching.
Because betting proper sizing pre IS our game. ; ) Limping invites all sorts of troubles.
When we limp we …
1 ~ allow large multiway flops which makes it a) much harder for us to have the best hand and b) easier to get sucked out when we are strong (don’t blame ‘the algorhythm’ when this happens).
2 ~ get no information on Villains’ range leaving us blindly guessing at what they might have, which makes it difficult to play our strong hands and basically impossible to play our marginal and speculative hands.
3 ~ sometimes get very small pots that aren’t worth slow playing if we happen to hit a monster, and make difficult to get the money in post flop - a value bet on a 5bb pot is like 2bb, meh.
4 ~ have to regard EVERY card on the flop as a potentially dangerous card as we have allowed Villains a very wide range where anything could hit and kill us, not just higher value pockets - even 8Q3-rainbow could easily be 2-pair for someone else.
5 ~ lose many bluff opportunities with our weak image.
6 ~ are vulnerable to getting squeezed and losing control of the hand.
On the other hand, when we raise pre to a proper sizing, we …
1 ~ keep all the cheap limpers out of the pot which makes it a) much easier for us to have the best hand and b) harder to get sucked out when we are strong (algorhythm? who cares? hah!).
2 ~ get information on Villains’ range so we have an idea of what they might have, which makes it easier for us to play ALL of our hands.
3 ~ get decent sized pots that we can slow play or properly value bet when we hit a monster, and make it easier to get the money in post flop - a value bet on a 15bb pot is like 4bb.
4 ~ can be confident when we see bland flops since Villains’ range is tighter (will have far less garbage in it) that might luckily hit a garbage flop and kill us, there is little danger in that 8Q3-rainbow (no one is going to have 2-pair on this flop if they paid 5x to see it) and we can continue confidently.
5 ~ keep more of our bluff opportunities alive by maintaining our strong image.
6 ~ are only getting squeezed by the occasional very strong hand or crazy bluff and the majority of the time when we do not get squeezed we have control of the hand.
That’s not a trend. You just randomly hit one isolated hand. I know that you don’t believe me, but I have to counter your total baloney for the benefit of others.
I agree with everything Napkin Holder wrote about maximizing our exposure and minimizing our bluff potential but I am not averse to seeing a free flop in the big blind or for half price in the small. I also slowplay the odd monster, raise some weaker hands, and limp from other positions to make it more difficult for people to pin me down.
My Two Cents on Limping and Poker Theory (no offence to those that believe in modern poker theories)
After 40+ years grinding at poker tables, both live and online, I’ve seen it all, limping included. Limping is a strategic tool, plain and simple. It’s not the devil some make it out to be. I’ve watched savvy players including me use it to trap opponents, play marginal suited connectors or small pairs.
Early in tournaments, limping or just calling can help build a stack gradually, setting you up to shift gears later. Whether that’s a net positive or negative depends on how the cards fall that day. Luck’s always a factor, but limping gives you some options pre flop when done correctly.
When I play in the 100k 200k NLOHL ring almost every hand is a limp, action comes after the flop, 8 out of ten hands.
What game and what level are you talking about here? It would seem all the discussions are base on some WSOP NLHE kind of thought pattern.
In my experience, the “raise or fold” crowd tends to follow one of two paths in tournaments, they either flame out fast and bust early or build a stack and cruise to the final table. There’s rarely a middle ground. Those rigid strategies can work, but they’re not the only way to play. Poker’s a game of adaptability, not dogma.
As for modern poker theories like GTO, they’re powerful but overrated for some. I’ve seen players get frustrated because others don’t play “their way.” They’ll complain loudly when someone deviates from their charts or ranges. That’s a telltale sign they don’t grasp the game’s depth or the complexity of human opponents. Labeling players, memorizing range charts, and assigning variables might sound sophisticated, but it’s a slow burn that overcomplicates things. Poker isn’t just math, you either get it or you don’t. Great players don’t just know numbers; their brains process the game’s probabilities intuitively.
@Excaliburns, for example. You can mock his “trending card theories” or his talk of patterns in the RNG, but he’s a consistent winner in my private leagues and on Replay special events as well. When he says something like “fives are trending,” he’s not just spouting nonsense. His brain’s picking up on clusters in the random card distribution. If he’s tracking the last 30 or 40 flops while actively playing, that’s a level of awareness most players can’t touch. Sure, card clusters are random, and you can’t predict the next card with certainty. But you can calculate odds based on what’s already hit, and that informs what might possibly come next. If you’re doing that successfully, you start to believe in those cluster theories. But really your just smarter than most.
Skeptics will say the odds of pulling this off are astronomical, but I see it. You can read every poker book out there and memorize every theory, but if you don’t have the mental horsepower to apply it in real time, you’re just another average player. Poker rewards those who can think on their feet, not just follow a script.
That should rattle your cages.
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I agree and have noticed so many players on here just don’t get it.
Again, this has been true for as long as I can remember.
I wonder how many will understand these Quotes you’ve made in this post.
Thanks for reminding us of some important aspects of playing poker.
No you can’t and no it doesn’t. Each hand is independent from the next and they have no bearing on each other at all.
Of course you can develop an intuitive understanding of the game, but trends simply do not exist.
I also don’t think trends exist in hands which are supposed to be randomly dealt but you should be able to "calculate odds based on what’s already hit."
But the hands on Replay ARE randomly dealt. Poki proved that.
I agree, but the lower skills of the Villain, the more imbalanced the Villain, allows scripted play to exploit their tendencies.
Optimal play is scripted to math. Heavy exploitative play is scripted to Villain tendencies. It’s those spots in the middle where intuition and ‘thinking on your feet’ comes in.
Yeah, no. Statistically speaking, trending cards do not indicate upcoming flops. You can gamble that a cluster will continue or that it will not, but it’s exactly that, a gamble.
That part is absolutely not true. If 5s are hot, they’re not. 5s WERE hot. Big difference. Sure, cards will ‘cluster’ as you put it, but the chances that a 5 will hit the river are 4 in 46 (less if you have one or two in your hole). If 5s have hit the river 3 times in a row, or 10 times in the last half hour, the chances that a 5 will hit the next river is … wait for it … 4 in 46. Case closed.
And if you are using some sort of telekinesis to make a 5 come up, then you don’t care about any ‘trend’, you just make it come up.
That’s great that he is tracking 30, 40, 100, a jillion hands in his brain, and I’m sure that gives him an edge, but not on the deals, ONLY on the Villains’ tendencies. THOSE are the only trends in poker and all good players track those.
As for math trends, it’s 100% baloney, hogwash, complete bs, and it’s the kind of thinking that keeps gambling addicts coming back to lose more and more money.
Certainly, and neither am I averse to them, but those are proper limp spots.
You always seem to take my quotes out of context!
I was agreeing with lihiue that each hand is independent from the next. Unless you don’t understand the difference in meaning of independent hands from the next and randomly drawn hands.
I stated you can’t predict the coming cards, but if you have seen 46 flops and no 5 has hit what are the odds of a 5 hitting over the next 10 flops? still the same, if you say 1 in 46 each flop, that ends the discussion. I may just be digging myself a hole, I don’t want to get into number theory, or my studies of RNGs being random and that nothing built by man is capable of being truly random at this time, or how astronomical the odds of detecting any such nonrandom behavior are, I feel I am entering a gun fight with a knife; I married a woman that is high functioning autistic and only thinks in straight lines, genius level runs the library, I know how these discussions can go. Next thing is someone will tell me noone profits in a nonprofit.
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Hands do not get any more independent from each other than when they are drawn randomly. What is your point?
Again, it seems you don’t read the entire post to understand the context.
Why do you repeatedly do this?
I was agreeing with Rain’s part of his post if the bold portion isn’t clear to you.
Yeah, that’s really the key point. It’s way beyond astronomical really, and any non-randomness isn’t going to result in trends. It’s just going to mean the probabilities for the 8x10^67 possible decks won’t be uniform. Given that an astronomically small fraction of possible decks can ever actually be shuffled into existence, that hardly matters.
I’m a believer, managed to summon my card last night, just watch the chat
I understand your visceral response, thinking I was directing my comments to you.
Not the case but that’s okay, your choice of words would lead me to use caution believing all you say, speaking emotionally has no place in poker. If you can’t control yourself here you certainly will not at the table.
I get it, you read a book, others read that book, now you go around learning the others because they aint that smat. Your communication skills and your poker skills are running side by side, look outside the box once in a while.
you may learn something if you open your mind.
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