Small PP in early position

68Trebor

 I play at 20nl, 6 max, and think I have a leak in my game when it comes to small pocket pairs, 22 up to 77, in an early position.
 What is the best way to play them when first to act, in early position, and playing a 100+ BB stack.
 
 1. Fold - not really an option as must be losing out on long term value.

 2. Limp - Hate to limp and then what do you so to a raiser who has position on you.

 3. Raise - Usually only getting called by either a better hand or a coinflip hand that will be playing all streets with position on you. Not going to like many flops either, unless hitting the set.

 HELP!

Talon

  As far as i can see this is a very simple question. To deal with the three options in turn


  Limping:  Absolutely the worst thing you could possibly do. Would be far quicker and easier to just burn your money instead as this is ultimate weakness and just bad play.

  Folding: There is absolutely no problem at all with folding these hands when you are liable to be playing the streets OOP and you are not overly comfortable with it unless you set up which is only on about 1 in 7 flops anyway.

 Raising: If you are going to play the hand then this is the only option of choice. Firstly it allows you to build the pot up for if you do hit. Secondly the showing of strength preflop can get your opponents to put you on a hand bigger than what it is which will make it easier to take them off the pot on the flop. And thirdly although most of the calling range of opponents would be putting you in a race situation it is important to remember that if they have an unpaired hand then they will only hit 1 in 3 flops themselves which makes it easier to get them off the hand.


  Saying this though it does require notes on the oppos in the hand and their tendencies and calling ranges to make this play profitable rather than just relying on setting up.

BorinLoner

Well, you're missing the biggest benefits of raising: 1) When you hit the set, the pot is bigger and you get more value. 2) You give yourself the lead in the pot, making it easier to represent a made hand on future streets.

Passivity is the road to ruin in my opinion. Nothing wrong in the middle stages of a tournament with folding small pairs in early position but in cash; make the raise, take control.. If you're 3-bet you can always go set-mining on the flop, dependent on stack sizes, pot-odds, implied odds, etc.

pod1

can i ask a question, if you raise with small pps from ep everytime, surley you are going to get 3 betted a lot more . i can only talk about the levels i have played and there are  quite a few players who will be reraising with any 2 BECAUSE you are raising from ep. are you folding to a reraise (and show weakness) do we now flat and hope to hit our 2 outer oop, do we re raise and HOPE he hasnt got an over pair?.

Dudeskin8

You should be raising from UTG with lots of hands, high broadways, all pairs, maybe even the odd SC it is only 6-max remember, so with this your range is balanced so you don't ALWAYS have 22-77.

Of course earlier the position the narrower the range but I think small pairs should defo be in that area for UTG

BorinLoner

When we're 3-bet there are some meta-game questions and some pot-odds & implied odds questions.

Obviously we need pot odds of 8/1 to make a call to set-mine based on this alone and that's very unlikely. So we have to ask whether we think we can get enough value from our opponent on that 1/8 occasion to make it reasonable to set-mine. That's assuming we'll be check-folding most of the 7/8 occasions when we don't hit the set. If we think we can stack our opponent, or win a large amount, when we hit our set then the costs of the times we miss are going to be offset.

The meta-game problems are all about our opponent. There are some players that we can 4-bet pre-flop and some players who we can bluff out of pots on later streets even when we don't hit our set. That's going to be more difficult if we're out of position of course but, like most things in poker, it's more player dependent than anything else. It's impossible to give a set of catch-all instructions.

Dudeskin is right; balancing our range is very important. If you only raise utg with premium hands your opponents will notice and you'll lose value from those hands. They'll also be aware that when you limp you don't have a big hand. If you're going to have a wider raising-range than premium hands, small pocket pairs have alot of value.

NColley

are u checking what stacks the other players at the table have before you make your decision?

no point raising ep if mr never fold in blinds has like 25bbs, or mr 3 bet monkey has 60bb.

if u are getting 3 bet by someone with position on you alot then you should think about 4bet/calling with the lower pp's. Of course they have to be capable of folding to the 4bet enough of the time to make it profitable vs the times you are crushed.

tbh I don't think getting into 3/4 bet wars at 20nl is the right way to go, prob just move to a diff table/seat if can.

BorinLoner

I appreciate wanting to avoid tough situations such as players who are 3-betting us alot, but if we want to improve it's the tough situations that will teach us the most. Don't run away from these guys, try to develop strategies to beat them.

Points about our opponents are all meta-game questions. 4-betting a calling station or a rock is not a good idea but 4-betting a loose-aggressive player can be. It's all about your reads. That's the real skill of the game, after all.

Your stack size questions are fair but since we're talking about cash tables we're assuming that everyone is deep - 100BB or so. Tournament poker is very different beyond the early stages.

pod1

this was the point i was trying to make, just saying" raise" from ep i think is wrong. mixing it up a bit surley has more benefits (player dependant obviously). balancing your range is important but not as important at nl20 than at higher levels. limp  4 betting looks very strong (not to be used too often), passive tables you can try and get to a flop cheap. in other words never say never and try and mix it up a bit.

BorinLoner

I say never limp, mainly because most players don't know what they're trying to achieve when they limp. They're just hoping to see a cheap flop. The benefits to a player that plays a standard game are tipped well in favour of raising this spot on every ocassion. If you limp you need to have a plan for it.

When limping we're making it difficult for ourselves to get big value from our hands when we do hit the set. We're also making it highly unlikely that we'll take the pot down without hitting our set and almost impossible that we'll take it down pre-flop. We'll certainly never win the dead money of the blinds if we limp.

Limp-raising is something we can do occasionally but we need to have a good sense of our opponents' and, more importantly, our own table image. It becomes a levelling war when we're doing things like this and, quite frankly, players that are experienced enough and good enough to do this sort of thing profitably on a long-term basis aren't the type of players that are asking for advice on how to play these hands.

I would never encourage anyone to limp-raise because the people that are good enough to do it don't need my encouragement.

EDIT: I felt the need to highlight "occasionally"; as in to mean once in a blue moon and we can only do this against players we have an intimate knowledge of. Players we believe are good enough to read us for AA or KK, but not good enough to see through our bluff.

pod1

fair enough :-)

68Trebor

 So, as I expected, the majority verdict is to raise. This is what I hoped would be the concensus and validates my reasoning. The next question is what to do next in the following situations. I understand a lot of people will say it depends on the player, but let us assume you have little or no history with the player in question and we are all playing 100BB's. I am pretty comfortable with how to play when I have position so let us also assume we are going to play the rest of the hand out of position.

 1. We are raised pre-flop, do we fold, call or 4-bet. Remember the hypothetical situation above.

 2. We get called pre-flop and the flop has 2/3 overcards. What do we do here.

 Cheers For the help so far.

BorinLoner

I think we've addressed some of this before:

1) When we're raised it is a big moment to ask ourselves about our opponent. We need to have a good idea of his 3-betting range. If he's only making this bet with AA or KK, this is a perfect spot for us to set-mine: If we hit the set on the flop, we can be confident that he'll pay off big bets with a made overpair. If he is loose-aggressive and could be doing this often with KQ type hands or worse then this could be a good spot to 4-bet and show great strength. You say "Let's assume we have little or no histroy with the player" but this is important when considering 4-betting our hand. If we get our read wrong and 4-bet someone who's only ever holding AA or KK, we're going to be 5-bet and will be forced to fold the hand without ever seeing a flop and losing more than we needed to.

The other issue when facing the pre-flop 3-bet is the question of pot-odds and implied odds. Basically, how big is the bet we're being asked to call now and how much more of his stack do we think we can win the times that we flop our set. We've mentioned this before but we'll miss our set 7/8 times, so we have to be getting the correct implied odds to suggest that we'll win enough on the 1/8 flops we do hit to cover the losses from the times we miss and fold on the flop. If the 3-bet is really big and our opponent doesn't have enough behind to give us the implied odds to cover our losses when we miss, then we should fold.

So I suppose if we have no information on our opponent it becomes an entirely odds based decision... but even this is player dependent as we need to know how often they'll c-bet hands they've missed or how often they'll bluff or carry on with one-pair hands, etc, in order to work out how much we stand to win. Being totally readless is rare in poker, though, as we'll usually have a basic idea about whether our opponent is loose, tight, etc...

2) If we've called a 3-bet pre-flop to hit our set and we believe our opponent is reasonably tight, then we should just give up on most ocassions that we miss. The phrase in fashion is "no set, no bet" for these situations. It's not a hard and fast rule because this is poker and we can always try representing boards or getting stubborn, believing our opponent is bluffing. This is poker and we don't always need to have the best hand to win but generally speaking, if you've called with the intention of set-mining, it's usually best to stick to the plan and check-fold on the ocassions that we miss.

Deviate from this if you like. We learn more when we make funky plays than when we simply follow a standard line. Maybe you'll find better ways to win hands or you could reenforce the logic of what you perceive to be the "right" play.

AMYBR

Only read OP, but scrolling down I can see ppl have gone into a fair bit of detail

Simple as far as I can see though.  We oughtnt really be modifying our lines based on specific hand selection, Are we really going to announce to table our range is polarised between small PP's and bigPP's AX hands?

No.  Its all part of the process of disguising our range/strength. Every hand has points where it can go south/flop badly.  IMO we ought to just play as normal.  The hands we elect to play shouldnt be so easily categorised by our opponents, be it 33/ 67s or KK

rancid

very simply raise