Playing Any Two Cards

I read something interesting yesterday by Matt Matros. In PL and NL games, he advocates limping into the pot with ANY two cards in late position (button and cutoff) if there are at least two previous limpers (and you have "chips to spare"). He says that most of the time you will miss the flop, but when you do hit it big (2 pair of bigger), the implied odds (i.e., the amount you will get paid off) makes this a long-term positive EV play.

Now, Matt is a Yale math major graduate, so I am going to accept this as true on its face, but to verify it I'm going to start incorporating it into my game and keep track of the results. I think the most important thing is to be able to get off the hand if only a part of it hits. 82o is not a powerhouse into a JT8 board, but into an 8-2-A board, it's great.

I've been doing something similar to this from the SB for a while now with reasonable results; i.e., if there are more than a "few" limpers and I believe the BB will just check unless he has a big hand, I generally complete the SB bet and see a flop. More often than not, I miss, but occasionally I hit it pretty big and my hand is well disguised. This morning I played a hand from SB. I had 94o and I completed. The board came A-9-9. I checked and just let the guy with the ace (there had to be at least one guy with an ace, right?) lead the betting through the turn and river. Of course I check-raised the river, which is always fun when it works. This was in a limit game and I made a tidy sum on the play (well, actually I made enough to recover from some earlier bad beats, but that's another story ;-)

All-in for now...
-Bug