Hey derSchwartz, welcome back! I’ve also been on hiatus from the forums recently (will post about it in the mental game forum soon for anyone that’s curious), but I’m back and expect to be fairly active moving forward.

It’s been over a year since I played regularly on Ignition but, comparing the play there to what I see on Stars and Party, I suspect that most of the open limpers are not secretly good players. There are many great players on the American sites but I found the recreational player pool larger and much worse than on the international sites. Some extremely good players use open limping ranges at around <= 25bb and it can be very effective, but I don’t recommend it. I think it takes a lot of work to split your preflop ranges effectively, and the return is unlikely to be worth it in the short to medium term. It also creates many confusing postflop spots where ranges are extremely wide and villains’ strategies are harder to anticipate.

Personally, I tried implementing a limping strategy a while back and abandoned it after ~500 MTTs. It created crazy value in a few spots but overall didn’t seem worth missing opportunities to steal the blinds and antes. Limping is inherently better if you’re playing without antes, but definitely not required. I will open limp exploitatively against a few player types (mostly maniacs) but otherwise, I only do it from the SB. 

The nature of anonymous poker does allow for completely unbalanced play so you could try limping nutted hands if your tables regularly go crazy raising limpers. However, beware of confirmation bias; hands with multiple preflop raises are more memorable than those which reach the flop without any raising. Over a decent sample size, I strongly suspect that your best hands will win more bb/100 as raises than limps.

As for playing against limpers, my typical approach is to raise slightly tighter ranges. More or less raising as if you were in slightly earlier position, ie. raising your UTG+2 range from MP, raising your MP range from the HJ, etc. From the CO and BTN, I recommend limping behind with many hands that might otherwise be raised. Hands like A3s, J8s, 65s, 44, etc. You can realize a large portion of your equity just by seeing the flop in position, and doing so cheaply is great if you’re expecting limpers to 3bet somewhat frequently.

Once I’ve identified a weak/maniacal player, which can still be done if you’re at the same anonymous table for a few orbits, I start attacking their limps wider. I want to isolate the weak players as often as possible so that I get more opportunities to take their chips than the other regs. That’s more relevant at deeper stacks, there’s not nearly as much to be gained by playing wide ranges once effective stacks are < 40bb.

I hope that’s helpful, lemme know if you have any questions.