How do you play these preflop, Tygran?
I've watched some old vids of someone playing $10, 25, and 50NL who normally played 100 or 200, and he raised every pair preflop, much like Chuck seems to be heading towards in his recent vids. The advantage is that when you hit, you've already started building the pot.
Ed Miller suggested not eliminating the possibility of minraising these and suited connectors preflop, thereby building the pot when you hit while still keeping players in to improve your implied odds.
I haven't gotten to that section of Harrington's book yet.
I do not like the minraise option for the main reason that a raise with pockets isn't necessarily just to build the pot for when you win. The problem with limping them and getting into a multi-way pot is that people need to hit a big hand to play, even bad players know that. If you're in a 5-way pot you're not going to commit a lot of chips with top pair bad kicker (which is likely because of the limp preflop, they probably don't have a great kicker). So basically you only get paid off by 2-pair/higher and lower sets or the idiot who once in awhile decides his top pair is good enough to stack multiway. If you raise, you win the pot from the crap hands, who weren't giving you implied odds anyway, and you get called by the good hands, as well as isolate most of the time. If you raise and it's heads up, you're opponent is going to most of the time be feeling great about his TPTK if he hits it.
The second good part of doing this is that you can win the pot without hitting the set. When you raise and your opponent misses, depending on opponent, they will likely fold to a cbet.
And this is why I think the following is flawed:
A little further into Vol 1 now and I have gone ahead to read the weak games section from Vol 2. Harrington's number for the implied odds needed (20:1) is explained like this: Harrington claims that you'll only win someone's stack ~1 of 3 times you hit your set, so if the odds of hitting a set is 7 to 1 or so you need implied odds 3 times greater to set mine.
Because you're not just going for the set. I'd almost go as far as to say that 1 of 3 is a huge over-estimation of how often you'll stack your opponent when you hit a set. Now you may get action 1 of 3 times, but not even close to that often will you get a stack. But the big thing is, if you are raising pocket pairs preflop, you're likely to take it down with a cbet. If he misses, you win the pot. If he hits and you miss he wins the preflop pot plus your cbet. If you both hit big, you take his stack. I think you win out in that game. Now EP I'm limping this most of the time, just because I do not want to be re-raised preflop and if I get several other limpers I only need to get another 3-4 BB's into the pot when I hit to have odds.
I think a lot of people are going to take issue with several points in these books. Here's the most recent I read. In the section on playing certain hands post flop Harrington recommends check/folding KK about 12% of the time on a flop of 10d 9c 8c.
I'd like to know where he came up with 12%, and I'd like to know the context as well. Is this in your standard weak online game? Or a game full of pros? I'd also ask that question in the set mine hand. If your opponent is likely to recognize betting patterns and put you on a similar hand that you have and push you out even when they miss, or otherwise outplay you postflop, you do need much better odds to call preflop. If you're playing against your average online opponents, where they don't do too much advanced reading and they don't vary their play enough to make it tough to read them (especially with PAHUD), you can get away with playing a lot more hands more aggressively, making them make decisions giving both more opportunity for them to make mistakes and giving you more opportunities to get a read. If I'm sitting at the HSP table, well first off I'm cashing out and retiring lol, but in all seriousness I'd have to play considerably tighter and maybe use that image to try to pick up pots preflop. But you don't want to be making moves and decisions against players who are going to most likely outplay you. You do want to be doing this and forcing opponents to do this against players you know you are better than.