Q&A #106: Opening On The Button and Isolating Limpers
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The button in no-limit is an immensely profitable position. For me it is far more profitable than any other position. Even the cutoff, which can offer the illusion that it’s almost as good, isn’t really close.
When everyone folds to me on the button in an online 6-max game, and I open-raise, PokerTracker says that I win the blinds just shy of 50 percent of the time. Say I raise to $6 in a $1-$2 game. Half the time, I win $3. That’s a lot. Even if I lose money on average every time my opponents don’t fold, I’m still likely to show a pretty solid profit overall because of all those $3 pots I win.
I went into PokerTracker and tried something out. I filtered my hand sample to only those hands where I opened the pot on the button. Then I removed all the good starting hands. I took out all the pocket pairs, all the suited aces, all the hands with two Broadway cards. I also took out all the good suited connectors. I was left with a bunch of suited and offsuit trash.
I was shocked by what PokerTracker revealed. Not only was this motley array of trash hands profitable, it was astoundingly profitable. Opening junk on the button, it turned out, was a mini gold mine. At least it had been over my sample of about 60,000 total hands.
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Tags: button play, Hand Reading, isolating limpers, light 3-betting, no-limit-holdem, opening ranges, poker, stealing the blinds, stoxpoker

I moved a few comments about the changes at NPA from this post to a thread on the message board. I know some people still want to talk about it, but I’d like to keep the poker posts about poker. Everyone is welcome to talk about this in the message board thread.