I have been playing a few ring games recently after years of not doing so, only playing in sit and go games and multi-table tournaments as that was really all I understood.
Ring games on RP are deadly. Most players have a strategy called "limp every flop, call every raise, see every flop, slow play every hand, and never raise except on the river when you think you are ahead with your two pairs of queens and fours or similar.
Most hands look a bit like this: (I am in the Big Blind here and 8 players all limp to me.)
So if you are sitting in the BB with AA, it is quite possibly that 5 players will limp to you, and that when you put in an appropriate raise, say 5BB, 3 of them will call the bet, and with 3 opponents there is a distinct chance that someone will flop two pairs with a cleverly disguised Q4o and bust your aces.
So what to do? First of all it seemed to me that what you needed to do was to play only, say, the top 20% of hands and that you should raise the pot so that at least when you were playing a hand, it was a large pot and you had a hand with good potential to make the nuts, while the pots you folded preflop cost you nothing, or only the blinds, and this would reduce your chance of making second or third best hands.
If the flop missed you, then you should just throw away the hand, but sometimes you could win the pot from position with a massive semi-bluff on the flop.
But this still had the drawback that if 5 people limped to you and you raised, then they all called the raise, you were still back to square one, with absolutely no idea what anyone held other than random cards.
So I devised the strategy of making absurdly high raises preflop, so as to narrow the flop down to one or two callers, and then hope that better starting cards would produce aggregate gains to the bottom line.
This seems to be more effective, but you have to play it like a tournament and just be prepared to go bust every now and again. Still the good part is that you can quit while you are ahead in a ring game, which you cannot do in a tournament.
This is how it goes when it goes well.
I imagine that if you are playing ring games for real money, then it is completely different, but it seems boring to me to play for play money if all you are going to do is limp and call everything down to the river.
In a game for real money, I imagine I would be content to avoid huge bets and just try to make steady small gains, which is not too hard to do when you have draws and are given great pot odds to draw. The important thing is to play hands that can make the nuts by the river, so suited aces, suited hands with a ten in them like T8, T9, JT, QT, and pocket pairs mined for sets and boats.
