1️⃣ The BTN limp is often a sign of weakness. It reflects a marginal range you can exploit.
2️⃣ Favor ISO shoves with your strongest hands: recreational players call too often with dominated hands.
3️⃣ Avoid shoving slightly EV+ hands that unnecessarily increase variance.
4️⃣ Call with hands that have good postflop potential, but stay selective: you’ll be out of position in a 3-way pot.
When the BTN chooses to limp, they’re entering the pot with a hand they don’t want to fold nor raise.
This means their range includes a few strong hands occasionally, but mostly medium-strength hands.
Here’s the average limp range for recreational players on the Button across all stack depths:
As in many similar situations, ISO shoves (or ISO all-ins) are highly effective against recreational players, who tend to call way too many dominated hands.
Shoving directly allows you to:
Here are the recreational players’ calling percentages from the BB and BTN when you shove:
Prioritize shoving hands that dominate the opponent’s calling range and play poorly postflop, such as strong Ax and pocket pairs.
Then, as the effective stack shrinks, progressively widen your shoving range:
Avoid auto-shoving every hand that appears profitable.
For example, ISO shoving small Axo hands with a deep stack might be slightly more +EV than calling, but it's a high variance play that we generally want to avoid.
The following image illustrates this well — it shows the EV difference between a shove and a call at 25 bb:
Example: shoving A3o is slightly better than calling — long-term gain is about 0.04 bb.
But that gain is minimal and doesn't justify taking a significant elimination risk this early, especially if you have an edge over your opponents.
On the other hand, hesitating to ISO shove hands like AJo or TT is a common mistake.
Letting your opponents see a cheap flop denies you value and gives them a chance to outdraw you with weaker hands.
The alternative to ISO shoving (and folding) is calling — and that’s what you’ll do with most of your hands.
Completing the SB lets you see a flop at a low cost versus two opponents.
And since the BB squeezes very rarely, this can be profitable.
Here are BB squeeze frequencies:
But keep in mind that playing from the SB in a 3-way pot is tricky:
Avoid completing trash hands like T3o or 85o — they rarely realize equity and expose you to costly postflop mistakes.
Limit your calls to hands with decent postflop potential (e.g., 65s or 22).