Falling into the limp trap

[fundiver199]

Limping in with very strong hands to trap your opponents are a popular strategy in tournaments, especially when stacks get short. This hand illustrate, how well it can work. The Villain was UTG with an 11BB stack and could have open jammed. But then he would likely just have picked up the blinds and antes and increased his stack by 22%.

https://www.cardschat.com/replayer/224ugmPST

 

[300HPGOD]

It didn't work in this hand lol but point taken although I disagree if you do believe it is better to limp with a small stack. First, you don't mind just picking up the blinds since the addition of the big blind, small blind, and antes increases your stack by usually 25%. Secondly, and I hate to say this cause I am not a fan of using this word but the limp play has no balance to it. What are you doing with A9 in that situation? If the same limping strategy then how are you playing the flop, turn, etc.? If you jam A9 but limp AK (or better) then players (depending on buy in) will pick up on it fairly soon. I think it is better to just jam and take the blinds and in many scenarios get a worse hand to call.

 

[fundiver199]

I was being ironic. While it might work sometimes, I think, this limp-trap play is really stupid in general. Sure sometimes people can limp aces, and then an opponent will jam on them. But a lot of those hands, that jam, would also have called a jam. And other times they end up in a limped pot and allow the blinds to realise their equity for cheap. With AK its certainly better to jam and take the blinds.

 

[Igor Popadyk]

an opponent who limps from an early position requires special attention - there may be a trap!

 

[fundiver199]

an opponent who limps from an early position requires special attention - there may be a trap!

I agree. I recently moved back to pokerstars, and it seems to be a really popular play there? To be honest it sometimes work. Yesterday I was playing a multi table SnG and looked down at a pretty bad hand in SB. I was like 14BB deep effective against BB and decided to jam on him. However someone had limped in from early position, which I had simply missed, because I was multi tabling. BB folded, the limper called with AA, and I was out of the SnG.

 

[Igor Popadyk]

Yes. Now there is such a tendency among the regulars

 

[Collin Moshman]

Great post Fundiver.

One problem with limping high pocket pairs is that any good player at the table can catch on to this strategy. They then give you no action when you're limping a short stack, and can (in theory at least) call you even wider when you're shoving.

So rather than weaken your shoving range by limping the strongest hands, you just jam everything and stay unpredictable.

 

[akmost]

I don't like the open limp strategy especially from EP , population is so unbalanced , I am unbalanced and I don't know how to balance because you should have a good grasp of the theory.Population do this mainly with monsters so why to fight back? So just go with the one and only unexploited move here which is the open shove with 11bbs.

On the other hand I read several articles and I watch some training videos where you have at some frequencies some open limps in later position mainly because by doing this you will be able to see more flops in position.

I will keep reading. Nice post