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Hello, and welcome to another episode of โAsk SplitSuit a Questionโ, I am James SplitSuit Sweeney here for ThePokerBank.com and today weโre going to answer one of your questions. Todayโs question comes from Chris R and Chris asks โWhat about blind play once the whole field limps in? What types of hands should I be looking to raise here? I have trouble defining what the best move pre-flop is, when too many people have limped in to really thin the field enough with a standard raise.”
Chris, thatโs a great question and these are going to be dynamics that are more common in micro-limit games online or super-small live games like $1/$2 or $1/$3. Here there is a lot more limping, a lot more pre-flop passivity, and youโre going to encounter this situation more often. So as to what range you should raise from the blinds when thereโs a ton of limpers…
I suggest you start by raising very very tight, very very strong side-weighted. Even if you take a situation with say, pocket nines, and there are a lot of limpers…what do you really want to do with 99 there? Do you really want to raise? Because if you raise, what’s realistically going to happen? Well, we’re probably going to get at least one caller and then all of a sudden, everyone behind them wants to call as well and then you get this huge multi-way pot, with a very small SPR, with a hand thatโs pretty tough to play in a multi-way pot. I mean youโre not going to hit the flop very often. How are you going to play over-pairs? How are you going to play second and third pairs? It’s just not going to be a very fun situation for you.
So again, I’m going to be raising the strongest of my range as a default; QQ+. Then hands like Ace-Queen and pocket Jacks tend to sit on the cusp. But even a hand like TT, which is usually a very strong hand is going to be very tough to raise in this kind of situation. Somewhat related to the pocket nines mentality that we just spoke about.
Another thing that Chris kind of hinted at at the tail-end of his question was that he’s having a difficult time thinning the field with a standard raise size. A lot of players, if theyโre in this situation, actually choose a bet size thatโs too small and it actually becomes counter-productive.
Say theyโre playing $1/$2, there are a bunch of limpers to them, they raise from the blinds to $15 or $16 or $18, something like that, and often times, it’s just not going to be big enough. What’s going to happen is that one person is going to call, probably the original open-limper because theyโre usually not a good player (their open-limp hints at this). So they probably limp-call and once that happens everyone behind them wants to call as well. Now weโre back in that huge pot, multi-way pot, with a hand thatโs going to be very tough to play.
When youโre raising in this kind of situation, usually you want to raise a lot larger. Somewhere between 10-15x is going to be much more typical. These arenโt the most common situations in the world, unless youโre playing in a super super soft $1-$2 game or super soft micro games constantly. But when they happen, and youโre raising, again weโre going to be using that strong range, so we want to use a large raise size where we can ideally get it heads-up or maybe get two callers. We want to avoid getting 50 callers and getting everyone and their mother to call because thatโs usually not going to be a situation where a hand is going to perform particularly well.
Now one quick note here, if youโre in a situation where you could raise to say $25, again playing $1-$2 with a bunch of limpers…if you could raise to $25, and everyoneโs going to fold because thatโs such a large size, you should actually start doing that with a pretty wide range of hands. Youโre just contending for the pot, throwing a very large multi-way isolation out there and just trying to attack the pot. Itโs a rare situation but if you ever find one, it can be a very profitable one and then your cards donโt really matter as much.
However, as a pure default, I’m going to be raising here very strong, again QQ+/AK as the default, Ace-Queen and Jackโs on the cusp and its just dependent on what you think the raises can accomplish. Is that going to get you a heads up pot? Is that going to get you a very multi-way pot? And howโs your hand going to perform best? If its not going to perform all that great, maybe I just limp it in. I’,m going to be folding a lot of the trash hands from the small blind and knocking a lot of the trash from the big blinds.
