Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
If you call a limp and a player behind you raises,
If you call a limp and a player behind you raises, you should never fold hands that have great implied odds unless he raised to a huge amount. Suppose a tight player limps from first position, you limp with a 5-5, 7-6 or 9-8 in middle position, another player limps from the cutoff and the button raises to 6BBs. If the first limper folds, assuming you have more than 100BBs, you should call, hoping to flop a set or a good draw. If you limped behind with a weaker hand like 10-9, you should fold if it looks like the pot will be heads-up, but call if you can get multi-way action. Limping with the intention of folding is one of the worst plays in poker. While you should fold hands with high reverse implied odds, which you probably shouldn’t have limped with in the first place, you should usually call with hands that have huge implied odds.
The other type of limper calls before the flop
The other type of limper calls before the flop with hands such as 9-7, K-8 and A-5, which he thinks are too weak to raise but with which he still wants to see a flop. This player will tend to limp with these hands from any position while still raising all the hands he thinks are good. You should aggressively raise against these limpers whenever you have any semblance of a hand.