Im all for beeing balanced but you cant deny that playing explo is still the best in NL. Think its more important finding out his range here than what hands you need to defend vs this line.

First, Can you tell me more about your sb vs bb first to act ranges. Why do you want to limp 90% (answer if you want).

But importantly, have you played enough of hands so that this guy know that thats how you play your range?

To me this line looks really bluffy. If he know you limp alot and then stab he can raise tons of GS and all Open enders etc. After your flop call i think he has you on like 6x+ and some draws and the turn gives one str8 so he can fire the turn again. At the river your range looks really alot like Ax. At the river it doesnt make any sence I dont think to overbet if he caught a flush. If I where to explo bet this river and differnt bet sizes with value and bluff I think making 3/4 bet with value to get tons of crying calls with your Ax and overbet the pot with bluffs since you will be in a tough spot.
For him to get here with some backdoors i guess he needs at least a gutter to start raising with so combos are not that many. There is just so many natural flop draws that miss 54,89,T9,T8 compared to the value hands like 85,and backdoored 89s,T9s,T8s etc. Maybe he is good enough to VB all 2 pair plus like this, then it changes things drastically, but I think that is unlikely.

Ax8s must be one of the very best hands to bluffcatch with. You block all the 8s9s Ts8s and 85ss so his already narrow value range gets even smaller.

SB limp strategy is nuts because limp/lead provides auto profit against most opponents and against aggro players who 3bet a lot, normal strategy becomes problematic. I limp/fold junk, limp/call better hands and limp/raise polarised - yes, also AA/KK is a limp with this strategy vs regs. Against recs I use explo-limp strategy where I open strong hands, and limp rest. If BB starts to harass my limps, I switch it up. Most of NL endbosses use SB limp strategy for quite a while now.

There are no HUD's at GG network, so no stats. I don't know If he knows that this is how I play - if he assumes I'm reg (which he should), he should assume I'm using SB limp strategy and as I mark him as good, he should know how it works.

I was thinking if calling Ax8s is better than AK as AK works as a bluffcatcher. We got 2 combos of AX8s here, so calling those instead of non spade AK would be better?

Thanks for the answer! I see advantages with both strategies in NL. I use mixed limp strategy in PLO.

Yes I think Ax8s (3combos) is much better than AK here. He will never have AQ-A9 here so the blocking factor of the 8s is more important here.
The 8s is just such a good card to have here bc we block lots of the hands he reps here 84ss 89ss T8ss. The only backdoors that make sence left is 95ss and T9ss so you basically block more than half of his flush combos.

Thank you! Do you 3bet flop (or x/r turn) with any bluff combos?

Hey @MilfGrinder do you know why most NL endbosses use limp strategy? Because the rake at those stakes doesnt really matter and then and only then this strategy makes real sense. I think up to 200nl it is -ev due to the rake.

I see two problems with your approach, that is practicability and profitability.

The first is that the math you are doing there is way to complex to do it at a table and on top of it, it's wrong because you underestimate the complexity of spots. E.g. when you balance a range between bluffs and value bets, in order for the simple if-then-else-formula to work, your hand must be polarised between air that will always loose (even against his bluffs) and the absolute nuts, because your value bets must always win in order to make such simplistic assumptions. If you derive from there, the math no longer applies.

To make it even more fun, before you start calculate to two-digit numbers like 53.65%, you need to weight your actual bluff/value-bet frequencies with the relative pot-sizes. To give a simple example: When you pot the river on a missed draw 33.3% of the time with bluffs and 66.6% of the time with the absolute nuts, it's not a balanced range by definition. If the 33.3% of the time the potsize is 2BB and the 66.6% of the time it's 300BB, it's actually very close to just value-bet 100% of the time, hence highly unbalanced.

These are just a few starting points and those stuff becomes just very, very complex and there are way to many spots and each of them occurs so seldomly that unless you agree to play a 500k hands or so against an opponent, it does not make a lot of sense.

The second is, that you are doing a lot of math and I do not really get the point of why you are doing that. If you are making a play based on some theoretical ideas, it must add EV to your game in order to be profitabel. Where does this EV come from in your case? Having a GTO-Range does not give you EV. It's not even giving you an EV of zero; the EV of a GTO Range is by definition negative. So by trying to generate a perfect range, you are simply killing your bankroll.

I've read a lot about GTO ends up in a EV of actually zero, but that is another mathematical fallacy that many people have in calculating EVs. Calculating EVs is very similar to calculating required energy for an operation: Normaly the speed does not play an important role and you can simply go by Newtons Laws, but there are some spots where it becomes incredibly important that speed becomes the driving force and that's where you need to take it into factor and that's where Relatity Theory comes in.

EV calculation is in general measured by equity of a hand against another, a hand against a range or a range against a range. Those equities are the driving force in the formula. Rake, the speed in the physics of poker, is playing a minor role in these EV calculations. However, if you are playing GTO, you are eliminating all other forces in the formula, as Range Equities are balancing out; rake remains the only and thus driving force. If you'd be really (and I doubt you can) playing balanced, you will end up broke because with every hand you are loosing to the house.

Hence, GTO is seldomly a concept to actually play by. It's a starting point from where exploitative tendencies can be derivated from. If you want to use it as a defensive strategy, it's not a good idea to choose such highly non-central spots. If you think an opponent is tough, why not simply avoiding tough decisions out of position until you have a better read? And when you are really going to see him so often at the tables, balancing towards non-exploitative ranges shouldn't be your answer whereas "sitting to his left the next time" would be a much easier way of dealing with the situation.

My SB win rate improved with limp strategy, that's a fact. Especially explo-limp strategy is very profitable vs fun players.

@thedarkcoder I know the math is not correct and I don't want to pretend I play GTO, I don't. I only did that range work to get an idea what my range is on the river and therefore find out if I'm not overfolding way too much vs player who I expect to be able to exploit it, not to make a perfect range. I don't do GTO calculations or stuff like that at all because 1) I don't know how, and 2) It's waste of time as PIO does that way more precise and efficient, unfortunately I don't posses it. And trust me, I try not to sit on the right of tough players, but sometimes it's impossible when there is fun player and as I table start, sometimes I have to battle it out.

@MilfGrinder Yes I would defo have a 3bet range on the flop thats not value. And I will have some bluff shoves on the turn too, not many but some.

@thedarkcoder Sickest rant Ive seen in a while.