SIGABA said:

Tighten up your raising requirements when you have that many limpers.  Don't do it with suited connectors and small pairs.  Depending on how comfortable you are playing post flop, set your range from that.  In the example I gave above, I would raise 444 – 555 with 66+, ATs+, AJo+, KJs+, KQo+.  I would limp along with 22-55, A2s-A9s, 56s – QJs.  That's what works for me.

 

I don't know about raising 66-88, even 99 might be stretching it when you're shallow unless you aren't going to fold to a shove. The nice thing about most of the hands you suggest raising is that they play a lot better heads up than they do multiway, and they don't mind having to fold to a re-raise because they play pretty badly against strong ranges (AJo is a perfect example of a hand like this). Or they are good enough to get it in against a re-raise.

Unlike AJo, 66 plays better multiway than it does heads up, and it hates having to fold to a re-raise from AA because there's so much value in flopping a set vs AA.

The fact that you have both a raise-folding and a raise-calling range, by the way, does mean that you are somewhat balanced with your raising, and that's a good thing. Balance matters even when your opponents don't have reads on you or know how you're playing.

* Little Bovada tip:  

If you have someone UTG, and he limps then way overshoves to your raise, players on Bovada tend to do that line with very strong hands (and maybe 10% of the time with random bluffs).  If it's a maniac then forget this, but if you only have a few hands with this guy, this is a good assumption.  But only UTG and sometimes UTG+1 when UTG folds.  I would narrow your calling range when that happens to JJ+ and AK for UTG, and TT+ and AK for UTG+1.

I doubt this is Bovada-specific. I mean, anyone making a huge limp-shove needs to have a pretty strong range for doing it, and without a good read on someone you should ony call such huge raises with very strong hands. The fact that they are risking so much relative to the pot means that even if they are doing it with too wide of a range, they aren't exploiting you because of how much they stand to lose when you do call.

SIGABA said:

The fact that you have both a raise-folding and a raise-calling range, by the way, does mean that you are somewhat balanced with your raising, and that's a good thing. Balance matters even when your opponents don't have reads on you or know how you're playing.

Why would balance matter if players are annomymous and you never get a read on anyone for more than 100 hands?

Balance is one of the most misunderstood concepts in tournament poker. Many players believe that playing in a balanced way matters only when dealing with players they encounter on a regular basis. In a tournament setting, where they expect to play a few hours at most with a given opponent, they see no reason to worry about balancing their ranges.

This logic gets it backwards. Balance matters more when playing against unknown opponents with unknown tendencies. It is the best way to play when you don't know what to expect.

Loosely speaking, balanced play means that whenever you bluff, there are also value hands you would play in the same way. Likewise, whenever you value bet, balance requires that there also be bluffs that you would play in the same way.

The closer that your ratio of bluffs to value bets comes to the pot odds that your bet offers your opponent, the more balanced that bet is. For example, if there is 500 in the pot and you bet 500, your bet offers your opponent 2:1 on a call. To be perfectly balanced, you'd need to choose one hand to bluff for every two hands you would value bet.

Of course this is all theoretical. You only play one hand at a time, so you have to know your own play well enough to be honest about what other hands you could have played the same way up to this point. From that range of hands you could hold, you must think about which you would bet for value and then choose an appropriate number with which to bluff.

That level of precision is nearly impossible to achieve in real time. In practice, it's generally good enough to recognize whether you will have a wide or a narrow value range in a given spot and then to bluff more or less often.

For a simple example, suppose that you raise from UTG and get called by the BB. The board comes out Jh 7h 2h 3c 8d. The BB checks and calls bets on the flop and turn and checks again on the river. Again for simplicity's sake, you decide that against this opponent, you would only value bet the nuts here, and with that hand you would make a pot-sized bet.

Considering your own UTG range, you determine that you would have played Ah Kh, Ah Qh, Ah Th, and Ah 9h this way, but would have folded A8s and below pre-flop. This gives you four combos of hands to value bet.

A pot-sized bet offers your opponent 2:1 odds, so you need one bluff for every two value hands in your range. That means you need to identify just two combos with which you would bluff. The best bluffing hands have little showdown value but good blockers to your opponent's calling range, so you might as well bluff when you have the Ah in your hand but no pair. AQ has marginally less showdown value than AK, so while it doesn't make a big difference, you might as well choose those hands for bluffing. To have two combos, you could bluff with a black queen and but not with the Qd.

This would be a balanced river betting range. No matter how often your opponent called or folded (giving him the option to reraise complicates matters a bit, so let's say that your bet is all-in), he couldn't exploit this range.

The argument goes that since you'll probably never be in this spot against this player again, you shouldn't care about being balanced. You should just make the best play with whatever hand you have.

With the nuts, it's easy to see that betting is the best play. But what is the best play with Ah Qd? With Ah Qc? With Ac Qc for that matter? And how do you know?

At this point the proponents of this argument might say that if you think he'll fold you should bet, and if you think he'll call you should check. I agree. This is exploitive play, and we'll come back to it in a moment.

But what if you don't know what he'll do? To exploit a player, you have to know something, or at least be able to guess something, about how he plays. If you have literally no clue, then betting with a balanced range is the best you can do. Bluffing too much rewards him if he turns out to be a loose caller, and not bluffing enough rewards him with more than his share of pots when he holds a hand that would have folded.

In this situation, balance is useful precisely because you are dealing with an unknown opponent. It has nothing to do with how you will play against him in the future and everything to do with making the best decision in the here and now.

You ought to have some reads on an opponent against whom you play regularly. You can use those reads to craft exploitive ranges that are more profitable than balanced ranges. If you expect him to fold too often in a certain spot, then you widen your bluffing range. If you expect him to call too often, then you can stop bluffing.

Then again, a regular opponent probably has some reads on you as well, and he may even be trying to predict what you expect him to do and how your shared history will influence his play. This dynamic is often called a “leveling war”, and your ability to play it better than your opponent is what determines just how exploitive you can be. Against players whom you believe to be better than you, it's usually better to err on the side of balance, as they are more likely to get one step ahead of you in the leveling war.

If you're going to play exploitively, as you should in most situations, then you should be conscious of what exactly you are trying to exploit. You should be able to identify leaks or likely leaks in your opponents' play and say, “He is a calling station so I will not bluff” or something to that effect.

If you can't at least make an educated guess about what a player's leaks are, then you ought to strive for balance, even if you know you'll never see him again.