Mugging Limpers

Often to advance into the deep stages of a NLHE tournament you need to accumulate chips in spots in addition to those when you hold premium hands. The most common example is stealing the blinds; but by now this is such an obvious play on the button / cutoff. I've read that Andy Bloch / Layne Flack have another play - they raise under the gun to steal the blinds! This is because a raise under the gun - usually means aces / kings / AK and so the other players need to find an exceptional hand to play back. In theory to be raising under the gun they must have a monster.

A play that I have found works well is that of picking up limpers money. Say the blinds are 50 / 100 and I am in late position with 3k in chips. If there are 3 limpers infront of me - the pot is 450 (incl blinds). I tend to play fairly tight and so my raises tend to get respected. In this situation I can raise to 500 to try and pick up the pot. I am risking 500 to win 450. So the play really only has to work about 50% of the time to be +EV. I find that the blinds and early position limpers are unlikely to call as they are worried about players re-raising behind them (who may have been slowplaying a monster). The later position limpers tend to fold too as they probably just called with marginal hands such as J10 due to the pot odds offered by the multiway pot. So the EP players fold because of the LP players and the LP players were only ever in because of the EP players and so fold too (if they were strong they would have raised before wouldn't they?).

If I get re-raised - easy decision I fold. However, if I get called it's really not that bad. I have position and my opponent is only likely to hit the flop 1/3 times. I tend to think that limpers have similar hands such as A10, KJ, JQ, K10 etc so if a player calls with AQ, I believe that a number of his 'outs' are dead as they were held by other limpers and so are now in the muck. This is why I tend to make this play with hands such as 78s, 89. I don't want to be dominated by making this play with A10 and be up against AJ.

I have only started making this play the last few weeks and it may work better for me than others due to my tight table image. But I estimate that I win the pot uncontested pre-flop about 65% of the time, but get re-rasied 15% (and so fold) and get called 20% of the time (of which I win on the flop 40%). So I estimate that I win over 70% of the time - which certainly is + EV play.

Any thoughts on this type of play / and any suggestions on any other plays to get chips when holding less than premium hands.

Dan Harrington refers to this situation as the Squeeze Play. An added bonus is that if you do it enough you may get an observant opponent to go all-in when you actually do have a Monster because he/she thinks you are putting on a move. See Harrington on Hold em volume 1 for more on this play.

Actually this is a variation of Harrington's Squeeze play that uses the same idea. His play involved a raise and a cold call before you act. You reraise, the original raiser folds fearing the cold caller and the cold caller folds fearing the type of hand that would reraise into a multiway pot. I've used this play a couple of times. It tends to work well in late stages of tournaments but not too well in early phases when the fish (or those who do not respect raises or position) are still playing. I've used it in free rolls and it almost never worked until you got down to 300 players left out of about 6000.

In Harrington's example, he executed the squeeze from the button. Ideally, I think you'd want to be in the Big Blind so there's no chance of someone behind you holding a monster starting handing. Had David Williams been holding QQ instead of AQ, Harrington might have gotten burned.

You can get burned in any move you try if an opponent holds a monster. The example I remember was a hand between Arieh, Raymer and Harrington where Arieh raised UTG, Harrington sensed Arieh was weak and making a move, he figured Raymer made the same read and called Arieh's raise as a result. Harrington then re-raised and both players folded marginal hands out of respect for Harrington's conservative table image.

I remember this play because I saw Raymer's recollection of it from the WSOP final table interview before I read Harrington's book. Raymer gave his point of view of the play almost the same as Harrington desribed it from how he thought Arieh and Raymer would play it. Raymer said he didn't even remember the hand before seeing the footage from ESPN and didn't think twice about folding to the raise.

[Guthrie]

Yeah, but if one of those limpers has a card with a picture on it he'll go all in. Then what do you do?