THEORY OF LOOSE RING GAMES
Loose ring games play fundamentally differently from most games in that the constant occurrence of multiway pots massively blunts the power of superior preflop equity. In other words, if you're likely to end up playing the pot several ways, the advantage you'd expect to gain from having superior preflop equity is seriously, seriously limited; furthermore, this effect is dramatically compounded when you don't have position on all of your opponents.
We've all heard since day one that position is one of the most dramatically powerful and important forces in poker. But why? What makes it so important? One of the main reasons position is so powerful is that acting last allows us to do two very important things much more often:
1) Reach showdown. The ability to check back the river in position (or bet, if you want) and choose to show down the hand is very powerful.
2) Win without showdown. Being able to act last gives us a lot more opportunities to bluff/semi-bluff and cause people to surrender their equity, allowing us to realize more than our share.
So we get dealt AQ in early position--that's a good hand, so we're supposed to raise, right? Maybe, but realize this is only true under the assumption that we expect to either reach showdown (by checking down with one or two opponents) or win without showdown (by bluffing one or two opponents, or just taking down the blinds) most of the time.
Remember that, with any starting hand worse than QQ, we're going to miss the flop 2/3 of the time. Normally, when two or fewer players call our opening raise, that's not such a big problem, because we'll be able to either reach showdown (by checking down or calling one bet with the best hand) or win without showdown (by betting and getting our opponents to fold) often enough to justify open raising the hand for its preflop equity alone--but what if we expect three or more players to flat call routinely, with wide hand ranges that could connect with any board?
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**THE IDEA OF RAISING STRONG HANDS PREFLOP IS CONTINGENT ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT YOU WILL EITHER REACH SHOWDOWN OR WIN WITHOUT SHOWDOWN ON MOST BOARDS...IF NEITHER OF THESE ASSUMPTIONS IS TRUE, YOUR SUPERIOR PREFLOP EQUITY (WITH ANY HAND LESS THAN QQ) IS NEAR-MEANINGLESS!
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The more callers we get, especially callers who have position on us, the more increasingly unlikely it becomes that we will be able to capitalize on our hand's superior preflop equity when we invariably miss the flop 2/3 of the time. The more opponents we have, the more likely it is someone will flop something and bet, and thus the less likely we are to reach showdown when we miss; furthermore, we are also far less capable of bluffing and winning the pot without showdown when we have numerous opponents.
So if we're going to miss 2/3 of the time, and we'll rarely be able to show down the best hand OR win without showdown the times we miss, why are we raising preflop with hands worse than QQ? What is this accomplishing for us?
One can argue that, when we do flop well and win the pot with a continuation bet, we will win several times more money from the numerous callers than we would in a HU or 3-handed pot--and that is true--but the problem with relying on this is that it causes our variance to skyrocket and thus prevents building gameflow/image and capitalizing on recent wins. It leaves us too much at the mercy of whoever happens to flop well, in my opinion, and removes both bluffing and realizing the equity of our bluffcatchers at showdown from the game too much to be a viable option.
So when we're playing in a loose/crazy game where open raising early or mid position (or even the cutoff sometimes) is likely to result in playing OOP multiway (which is in itself almost inherently unprofitable), what can we do?
1) Play extremely tight in any seat where raising would likely result in playing OOP multiway. You want to avoid playing OOP multiway like the plague--unless you are somehow getting absurdly consistent fold equity in raised pots due to horrendously passive/predictable postflop play from your opponents, this is going to mean having an incredibly tight open raising range in the early and mid positions.
2) Limp/3bet (or limp/call when your hand is not strong enough to value 3-bet a tight iso-raising range) your strong hands to isolate. Even if you do it huge and no one calls, you collect a lot more preflop dead money this way than by open raising. And even if no one raises your limp and you end up seeing a multiway pot with several limpers, you can easily get away from it for just 1bb when you miss, and if you hit, you'll likely have some good smallball opportunities to get value out of a hand that would otherwise have just wasted a lot of money raising preflop and having to play OOP multiway, which ruins its preflop value anyway. (Additionally, when you balance your limping range with strong hands and people know you will be limp/3-betting sometimes, you can now limp a few more speculative hands to see cheap flops in multiway pots and get away easily when you miss.)
3) If you cannot make limping work for whatever reason, open gigantic enough (and with a tight/strong enough range) that you will reduce the field to one or two callers. The problem with this approach is that it wastes the value of your strong hands when everyone just folds, and thus reduces villains' opportunities to make postflop mistakes against your legit value hands--but it does make it pretty straightforward to play postflop.
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THE EXCEPTION FOR SUPER PREDICTABLY PASSIVE/HYPER EXPLOITABLE POSTFLOP PLAYERS:
**THE DEGREE TO WHICH VILLAINS WILL PLAY WEAK/PASSIVELY POSTFLOP, AND THUS PREDICTABLY LET YOU REACH CHEAP SHOWDOWNS/LET YOU WIN WITHOUT SHOWDOWN/PAY OFF DISPROPORTIONATELY HUGE WHEN YOU WANT THEM TO POSTFLOP WILL MASSIVELY IMPACT HOW LOOSE YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH RAISING PREFLOP--ANY TIME YOU HAVE A GOOD REASON TO THINK YOU WILL GET TO SEE WAY TOO MANY CHEAP SHOWDOWNS AND/OR WIN WITHOUT SHOWDOWN POSTFLOP TOO OFTEN, YOU CAN RAISE MUCH WIDER RANGES, BUT NOTE THAT THIS GETS INCREASINGLY UNLIKELY AS THE GAME GETS BETTER/MORE AGGRESSIVE POSTFLOP AND AS YOUR POSITION GETS WORSE!
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I can't outplay regs, and I don't feel confident beating any game higher than 10NL.
