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Introduction

In today’s more complex no limit hold em environment, exploiting loose passive players who limp in ahead of you is trickier than ever. It should still be a mainstay of a profitable strategy, but, increasingly, I am seeing significant leaks creep into the isolation plays of good players. In this article, I will discuss the basics of a successful isolation play strategy.

In the companion article, I will offer a step-by-step process for using Hold ‘Em Manager to diagnose and plug leaks in your isolation plays.

What is an Isolation Play?

It is simple, really. When a player limps (calls the big blind’s forced 1 big blind bet) in front of you, you raise in an effort to induce all other players to fold, so that you can play a hand in position against a (usually loose passive) player who has limped in.

Why Isolate Limpers?

In Paleolithic times, people were hunter-gatherers. If you go looking for images of how this lifestyle is portrayed, you will typically see a band of hunters clothed in skins and furs, carrying stone-tipped spears, hot on the heels of a herd of mammoths pictured in the distant background.

Hunting is sexy. The big kill, bringing down a mammoth, will supply the entire band with the necessary protein to survive a long brutally cold winter at the foot of some glacier. The big kill is not to be sneered at.

But hunting is only half of what those folks did; the other half, gathering, was equally important. Members of the band spent countless hours gathering grass seeds for flour and nuts that could be stored against the lean times between mammoth kills. Those seeds and nuts kept them alive between big kills.

I trust the metaphor is not lost on any of you. Sure, we all enjoy bringing down a mammoth, but the nuts and seeds are what keeps us alive.

Gathering Nuts and Seeds:

You should be making dozens of isolation plays such as this one per session while you are standing around waiting for a mammoth to saunter by:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $2.00 BB (9 handed) - Full Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com BB ($455.30) UTG ($253.85) UTG+1 ($104.95) MP1 ($176.50) MP2 ($298.65) MP3 ($248.60) Hero (CO) ($200) Button ($154) SB ($282.25)

Preflop: Hero is CO with 5, 6

UTG calls $2, 4 folds,

Hero bets $9, 3 folds,

UTG calls $7

Flop: ($21) K, K, 8 (2 players)

UTG checks, Hero bets $11, 1 fold

Total pot: $21 | Rake: $1.05

There is absolutely nothing special about this hand. It is routine. It is all in a day’s work. You should be isolating limpers like this almost reflexively. Doing so is a major profit center. It’s like plucking a few berries off a raspberry thicket on the way to mammoth country–There’s no risk that you’ll get fat, but these juicy morsels are nutritious and delicious, and you’d be foolish not to enjoy a few every day.

This is a key fact about isolating limpers that sometimes good players forget–your goal in isolating a particular limper in a particular hand is just to gather a few nuts or berries. The action in the previous hand, where the limper limp/calls preflop and then check/folds the flop, is exactly what you want, and is exactly what you should be expecting to have happen.

Warning: Snakes Hang Out in Berry Patches

Paleolithic hunter-gatherers knew this very well, but, I am certain, carelessness led lots of them to being bitten in their quest for a few berries.

Today’s tables are snake-infested. Even the loose passive players from whom we expect to gather a few berries have the occasional snake hiding in the tall grass. One of the main leaks that creeps into good players’ games over time is that they ignore the warning signs that there is a snake nearby.

The Rattlesnake, A/K/A The Limp/Reraise.

The limp/reraise is a rattlesnake, because it has the good manners to rattle at you before striking. Limp/reraisers are rattling at you when they reraise, indicating  that they have a good hand after all, and that your quest for a few tasty raspberries has just put your life in severe peril.

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $2.00 BB (9 handed) - Full Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com BB ($103.45) UTG ($96) UTG+1 ($263.95) MP1 ($583.30) MP2 ($75) MP3 ($677.65) Hero (CO) ($285.40) Button ($130.70) SB ($239.10)

Preflop: Hero is CO with K, J 2 folds,

MP1 calls $2, Mmm, Berries…2 folds,

Hero bets $8, Imma get me some delicious berries 3 folds,

MP1 raises to $14, RATTLE, RATTLE

Hero calls $6 But those berries looked so tasty…

Flop: ($31) 6, 6, K (2 players)

MP1 checks, Hero checks Was that a rattling sound I heard?

Turn: ($31) 6 (2 players) MP1 bets $30, Hero calls $30 Nah, must be my imagination, and there’s a lot of freakin’ berries on this bush now!

River: ($91) 3 (2 players) MP1 bets $80, Hero calls $80 Just going to wade a little deeper into that thicket for that big bunch of berries over there…

Total pot: $251 | Rake:$3

Villain showed [Ah As] and won ($248) with a full house, Hero mucked [Kc Jc] – a full house, Sixes full of Kings

Hero’s play post flop isn’t horrible, but disregarding that preflop rattling was probably a mistake.

Preflop: Hero is MP1 with A, J 1 fold, UTG+1 calls $1, Hero bets $4.50, 1 fold,

Flop: ($15) J, Q, Q (3 players) UTG+1 checks, Hero bets $7, 1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $14, Hero calls $7

Turn: ($43) 3(2 players) UTG+1 bets $12, Hero calls $12

River: ($67) 4 (2 players) UTG+1 bets $11, Hero calls $11

Total pot: $89 | Rake: $3 Results: UTG+1 had 6, Q(three of a kind, Queens). Hero had A, J (two pair, Queens and Jacks). Outcome: UTG+1 won $86

The villain in this hand was pretty loose passive. This was a standard isolation play in the sense that hero should be expecting the loose passive player to limp/call and check/fold most flops. When the villain takes the betting lead, hero should recognize that his isolation play has gone wrong. As a rule, loose passive players do not check/raise the flop. When one does so, you should be on alert and prepared to fold marginal showdown value.

Notice also the villain’s bet sizing in the hand. He is perfectly representing his hand strength on every street. On the flop he knows he is best most of the time, so he check/raises. On the turn, he gets sucked out on by flush draws, so he downsizes his bet to a blocking size that can be called by, oh, say, AJ, and other hands he is ahead of. Same thing for the river.

The Basics of an Isolation Strategy:

The most important thing to remember here is that when you are on a true isolation play (that is, that you have raised with a hand that you ordinarily would have folded for the purpose of inducing the players behind you to fold so that you can play a hand in position against a limper), that your intention is to usually just win a small pot either when everybody folds or when the limper takes the limp/call, check/fold line.

If anything else happens, your plan has gone awry.

The fact that your plan has gone awry does not mean that you should necessarily give up on the hand; what it does mean is that you should be very careful to make very careful decisions post flop, because you are in a hand in which a fish is not acting as you expected him to act. A fish acting out of character almost always means either that your read was wrong or that the fish hit a hand.

The first thing you should look for in a player’s limp is whether it is in or out of character. This common sense first step is often overlooked by players who are too aggressive in their isolation game. Often players make mistakes in isolating because they are playing too many tables or because they are too aggressive in general. Whatever, the reason, it is very common to see players make basic mistakes.

OK, that’s enough discussion on what is actually a pretty boneheaded mistake. Now let’s assume we are facing an in character limp from a guy we have 50 or 60 hands on and who is playing loose passive preflop.

Players with a big gap between their VPIP and PFR have basically four types of hands that they tend to add in this order:

Putting most limpers on a limping range is pretty straightforward. Small pocket pairs, say, 77-22, represent 2.7% of all hands. So if you see a guy who is playing, say, 10/5, he is probably limping mostly small pocket pairs in early position. If he has a gap between his EP raising range and his EP VPIP, this limping range is basically carved in stone, and you should be able to play pretty perfectly against him post flop.

When a player starts to get a bigger gap between his VPIP and his PFR, especially in EP, the next group of hands they tend to be limping are aces. You have to pay a fair bit of attention, because a lot of passive players tend to limp some good aces in EP, such as AQ and AJ. So ace miners tend to fall into one of two groups–those who prefer all suited aces to off suit aces, and those whose range will be most suited aces and all AQ-AJ or AT combos. There’s no good way to tell the difference other than getting to showdown.

That said, adding AQs through A2s to the small pocket pairs yields a limping range of 6.0% So a guy is setmining and ace mining if he has a gap of somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 or 12% between his VPIP and PFR (recall also that he has a cold calling range that is contributing to the VPIP/PFR gap). If he also adds AQo-ATo, he’ll have a 14 or 15% gap.
A true loose passive fish rarely open folds an ace, preferring to limp and try to see a cheap flop. Such a player will be limping 16% of hands, and will have a gap of 20% or so between his VPIP and PFR.

(Note: MOST ace miners also do a little bit of high card mining by limping hands such as KQo, KJo, and QJo in early and middle positions where they are not comfortable raising these hands. There aren’t a lot of hands like this in their range, and if a player is limping these hands it’ll tend to disappear into the margin of error. That is to say, he may open limp KQo but fold A2, A3 and A4s, and you won’t be able to tell the difference between him and a pure ace miner. Thus, you should assume that “ace mining,” includes a little bit of broadway mining.

Gaps wider than that require the player to also flush mine or straight mine. In addition to the suited aces, a flush mining range might look like this:

Flush miners in EP and MP tend to prefer having some high card value, but this is by no means a requirement; it’s more like a slight preference. We also know that for the loosest fish, this range is too tight, and we will often see absurd limp/calls with Q6s and the like.

This range of decent suited hands is 7.5% of all starting hands. To put all three of these classes of hands in a player’s range, we have to see a gap of at least 30% between his VPIP and PFR–these are your truly loose passive players.
If the gap goes above 30%, the player is also probably doing some straight mining with offsuit connectors, and you will be looking at a player who plays something like 43/7 or similarly delicious stats.

Bear in mind that these ranges are guidelines, not hard and fast rules. You may find a loose passive player who limps all suited kings, but none of the baby suited connectors–the gap will look about the same, but the ranges will hit different flops, so you will want to be careful to pay attention to the hands he shows down until you get a feel for his range. This is so important that if you are deciding between a thin river value bet and a check back in a hand against a loose passive who hasn’t gone to showdown yet, you consider checking back and gaining some “note equity” for later hands. Loose passives tend not to last long before losing their stack, so make sure you realize your note equity early in his session while you still have a good chance of putting the information to use. (And, LDO, don’t pass up fat value for the purpose of taking a note).

Summarizing the ranges of various loose passive players:

Factors involved in attempting an isolation play.

The mere fact that a loose passive player has open limped ahead of us does not mean that we should isolate him. Before doing so, you need to consider the following factors:

• Stack sizes
• Players left to act behind in position. If there are good players behind you, expect a call or a 3 bet fairly often. This can hamper your ability to isolate. Similarly, if anybody behind you has a big vpip/pfr gap, you will face a call from somebody in position more often than you might prefer, and it may have to influence your range.
• Fish in the blinds: Fish will call a really wide range in the blinds when the pot is shaping up multi-way (w00t! Pot odds!). This fact should also affect the range that you isolate with.

Assuming you made a correct decision to isolate and the fish called you, you have to keep in mind two facts:

1. The fish probably missed the flop, but
2. No flop misses a 44/7′s range.

In other words, his range is so wide that he probably missed the flop, but there are no flops you can look at HU against a 44/6 and go, “ok, he can’t have hit that flop.” A true loose passive fish can hit 99% of all flops; you’re not even completely certain he missed a 332 flop.

Acknowledging these facts is not an invitation or permission to play scared. Rather, it is a cautionary note that you should not call BS  because of board texture if a loose passive plays back at you. The odds are against them hitting any particular flop, but they can hit any flop.

Continuation betting becomes pretty tricky against loose passive players when you actually have a hand. Even if you have the top of your range, some flops cream your equity. The worst possible flop you can see against a loose passive player is one where there is an ace and two connected cards of a different suit than the ace. If you are holding KcKs against a 44/7 on a flop of Ad9h8h, you have about 47% equity. Change the flop to Ad9h2c and your equity goes up to about 55%. Perversely, because of card removal effects, if you have J9s on the Ad9h8h board you have more equity than if you have KK (55% v. 47% for KK).

By contrast, if you isolated a 10/5 set miner on that same flop, you’re gold; his equity on the Ad9h8h flop is a mere 12%. But if the flop comes 7c5h3d, you are flipping again (you have 55%) with KK.

Finally, as the hand histories above illustrate, you need to be very careful post flop if the loose passive limpers are acting aggressively by raising or betting into you. As a general rule from which you will deviate based on board texture and villain tendencies, you’re good against a loose passive if he is check/calling, and you’re behind if he bets or check/raises.

In the companion (paid) article, I will discuss a comprehensive, step-by-step analysis to determine what, if any, leaks you have in your isolation game.