So I think that it is essential that you at least try and get your technically weaker opponents to commit more money to the pot and this applies whether you play poker online or live. If they are playing tightly and are refusing to commit any money unless they have a lock or strong poker hand then you need to drag them out of this state.

One of the ways to do that is by raising limpers with semi-decent hands like the one here. When a player open limps then you have to realise that the vast majority of the time, what you are seeing here is a bad player. At the very least, they have made a bad poker play and any player who has made a bad play is likely to be a bad poker player in my book.

If you desire to win money in poker then you need to be focusing on the bad players. If you see a player always open raise and never limp then this is not an indication that they are a good player. You will have to wait and see what other betting patterns are available for you to make a concrete verdict. But any poker player who open limps in no limit hold’em is likely to be weak in some way. There are exceptions when you move on up through the stakes but on the whole, a limper is a weak player and these are the players who you want to be playing poker with.

Most have a fit or fold mentality that will allow a raiser to have much the best of it post flop in a heads up encounter. Plus, you really don’t know how long the bad player is going to stay around for, he may be gone from your table in the next few minutes or the very next hand or they might hang around all afternoon. So you need to get yourself into confrontations with bad players as much as possible in order to increase your equity.

This means raising and not calling because you ideally don’t want other players to be diluting your edge against the weak player by entering the pot as well. This dilutes your equity and the best way to protect that is to raise and try to isolate against the limper.

If I were in this situation then I may slightly increase my opening raise and make it four times the big blind or in this case $4. Most players would either raise to three times the big blind ($3) or make a pot size raise ($3.50).

These are my usual raising amounts but in situations where I think that I am up against weak players then I will increase this slightly. In the higher limits, you have to be careful trying to isolate a weak limper.

In a game like $10-$20 or $25-$50 NLH for instance then you are not going to encounter all that many weak players. But if you did then other good players would quickly cotton on to what you were doing and would likely re-steal from you.

But this type of move is uncommon in low stakes play but I think that it is vitally important for players to know what they are trying to achieve when they sit down in certain games and what the reasons are for why they do certain things. I think that once they understand why strong players act in a certain way then much of the mystique surrounding expert poker will be removed.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”
Come and play better poker with bwin poker school.

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