Friday, November 20

Recognizing bad players, way #1: Limp, call

A key element to winning at poker is playing against bad players. If everyone at the table is as good or better than you, the only way you can make money is to get lucky. So it's critical to find bad players and be able to recognize them. How do you find a bad player? Easy, look for them to make bad plays. What's a bad play, well that's not so easy. But here's a favorite of mine.

Sklansky's gap theory says you need a better hand to call a raise then to raise. An application of that is that limp calling is a bad decision. You have a hand you've already deciding isn't worth raising, are now faced with a raise and decide to call the raise. Essentially concluding A > B > A.

Like anything in poker, it's not a hard truth but "it depends". This doesn't apply to a fixed limit game where you're getting at least 4:1 and sometimes 10:1 on your call; here you'd be foolish to fold though this is a reason to not limp first in or in early position. In non-poker terms, once you've paid/wasted $4 for a bottle of water, you might as well drink it. In no limit games, this is often a bad play but one you see all the time. With deep enough stacks and a speculative hand, it makes sense to call a small raise with a speculative hand, like a small pair. But you need to be able to win enough money when it hits to make up for the times it misses. If you start with $100, limp in early position with 44 and someone raises to 25, you can't call off 1/4 of your stack. You'd actually be wise to fold a raise to 15 unless several others are in the pot but that's open to discussion.

That said, one of the worst plays you can make is to limp with a medium strength hand -- a suited ace, ace-jack, ace-ten, two face cards -- then call a raise out of position when you're easily dominated. You're better calling with 98 than with AT even though AT is a better hand overall.

This is doubly true in a short-stack game where players have 20-50 BB only. Watch players who limp call and see if they ever put in more than 10% of their stack or have trouble hands.

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