There was a fun thread a bit back about how bad pre flop limping is, and in general, I agree that pre flop limping is mostly bad, especially in many of the concrete situations where you are going to see it. It’s also probably one of the easiest parts of your game to modify, making it a nice target for coaching beginning players.
But obviously, a lot of players clearly win money with strategies that involve an abundance of limps, and even open limps. If those limps are -EV, then their edge post flop against their pool of players would seem to be sufficiently large to offset what would mathematically look like a bad initial investment. And so on the scale of the worst poker plays you can make, I don’t think limping likely ranks all that high.
And so that brings us to the question for this thread: what are the worst possible plays you can make? I’m thinking more about plays people really make, as opposed to what the optimal strategy might be if you wanted to lose all of your chips as quickly as possible.
So with that in mind, I ask the question: what are the worst poker plays?