cross-posted from jsh06's thread: thought this was pretty interesting...How wide are you raising a limp readless?  How does this change if they defend liberally vs cbets or fold vs too many cbets?99% of the time that someone suggests forgoing a huge short term edge to protect a more profitable long term edge, i think they are wrong and fishbowlzzzz. raising limps is one aspect that i actually think this can be very true though, and something that the huge majority of regs don't consider and cost themselves a lot of EV over the long term.when villains limp vs us, we should love it. it's giving a bunch of hands in our range free equity to see a flop that would have otherwise folded to a pfr. villain gives up initiative, and we are able to lead flops with a lot of fold equity/barreling opportunities on lots of different boards. in most cases, all villain has to do to have an overall positive expectation from his sb is to raise us with a wide range preflop (barring when they raise way too wide short and we can jam really wide obv, and stuff like that). so basically, when villain is limping a wide range vs us...it's going to be pretty hard for us to have a better expectation from our bb overall. that is not something that we want to go away.when we raise limps wide (40%+), we discourage villain from limping a wide range. sure, if we know we have a bunch of fold equity preflop then that is a huge short term edge (or cbet fold equity), but my argument is that villains will adjust very quickly in response to this - starting to raise their sb more, or limp/calling more and folding less postflop. raising too wide over limps overexploits our edge, and usually guarantees that our bb expectation will diminish pretty quickly. it doesn't take a thinking player to adjust to us raising a lot...it's pretty common sense imo.students often respond, "but Hokie, we only play most of our opponents for just a small handful of games...do we really care about protecting our edge over the longterm then?" my answer is that over a handful of games, its pretty damn rare that you actually establish enough reads to know that villain is really limp/folding a super-exploitable amount, or folding to cbets a ton. raising as a bluff vs most people to see if they will limp/fold is usually -ev against an undefined range, and we should just check back and take our free equity. so i'd really avoid overexploiting this edge and continue letting villain do us the biggest favor he can: maximizing our expectation from the bb.i'm usually raising limps with a wide value range initially, probably about 30-35% of starting hands T9o+ basically. wide value bc the average villain limps too wide, if we include bluffs in our raising rang here readless it increases our frequency too much.if i find that villains are limp/folding a decent, but not huge amount (like 60-75%), i will change my range within the same frequency (30-35%) and just raise less overall value than before, but add some reasonably playable air as bluffs to my range.i'll gradually increase the amount of bluffs in my range, and decrease value from there as i find villain has a higher and higher fold % when i raise his limp, but still within about the same frequency.i've definitely had opponents before who folded almost 100% to limps, so i just raised literally the bottom 35% of hand combos and checked back everything else. why raise AK over a limp when you have 100% fold equity? our checkback range is massively strengthened by eliminating the bottom of it. can't really have a bigger oop edge on someone than that ... and by not overexploiting your edge you can sustain it for a longer time.just remember, if ur playing a thinking player at all and u showdown AK limped but ur raising 35% of his limps ... alarm bells could easily go off for him. if i feel im playing someone who could at least htink on this level, i'd include those types of hands in my limp raising range still.anyways, just to make sure i fully answer your question.<13 stx i'm just jamming any AX/22-99/K5o+/KXs+/QXs+/some low suited connectors (still 30-35%ish) over a limp semi-readless. obv raising some of the value hands in that range to a non-allin size.long post, thought about this a tonnn. i think this is another thought process of mine that is pretty unconventional. what do you guys think?***"changing ranges within the same frequency" - this can apply in a lot of different situations (3bet bluffing, c/r bluffing flops, etc). i just think its way more pronounced and important when raising limps, mainly bc im arguing we cant really create a bigger sustainable edge than what i mentioned above -- 3bet bluffing, c/r bluffing etc that's not usually going to be the case (hardly anyone is folding to a 3bet 85%+ over the long term obv). think about how hard it would be for you to pick up on your villains adjustments if they changed their range in a certain spot, but not their frequency. it's easy, even common sense in some ways for fish, to pick up on drastic adjustments of frequency. it's a ton harder to tell when someone drastically changes their range though. the only way to tell in that case is to get to a showdown, but when villain is limp folding a shit ton that's hardly ever going to happen!