Miniraising preflop

[catlover]

As a lot of you know, I like to miniraise preflop. Various people have had reactions ranging form interest to surprise to outright hatred.

The purpose of this post is to explain my reasoning. One thing I will say at the beginning -- a lot of thought has gone into this on my part. This is not some random whim. If you want to persuade me it's wrong fine, but doing so will involve engaging my reasoning on its own terms. Kitten jokes, arguments from authority, and the like will not dissuade me.

Part of what led me in this direction -- I hate limping in!! Limping cannot fold out the big blind, gives away information about my hand, and is an invitation to players behind to take my money.

This has led me to reject the standard opening strategy of sometimes limping and sometimes making a big raise.

By basing the size of my raise on my position, and not on my hole cards, I avoid giving away information about the strength of my hand. So I need a standard raise size. The question then becomes -- how big?

I believe the most important considerations in preflop raise size are:

1) Knocking out the big blind
2) Pot size with cold callers behind me
3) How much I lose to a big hand behind me.

Let's look at each of them in turn.

1) From the point of view of getting rid of the big blind, obviously a bigger raise will be more effective. However, my experience is that the difference is very small. If they have garbage, they will throw it away in either case. If they have a good hand they will play. There a few intermediate strength hands that they will play against the miniraise but not against the big raise. However this is not a horrible thing because these hands are on average weaker than my average raising hand, and I have position on them.

2) From the point of view of someone calling behind me, it's a wash. Regardless of whether I make a miniraise or a big raise, we are both putting in the same amount of money preflop. And I'm not afraid to play with them after the flop. They have the advantage of position, but I have the advantage that my average starting hand is stronger than theirs.

3) Lastly, if someone has a big hand like aces behind me, obviously it is better if I miniraised.

So of our three situations, #1 is a slight reason to make a bigger raise, #2 is a wash, and #3 is a reason to miniraise. Taken together, I believe the balance is in favour of miniraising.

If I have the cutoff or the button, #3 becomes less important, which is why I make a bigger raise from those seats.

Based on all of this, the raising strategy I have come up with is to open raise to twice the big blind whenever all of the following are true:

A) I am not in a blind, the cutoff, or the button.
B) I am the first to enter the pot.
C) No one has posted any money other than the usual two blinds.