|
Exclusive Netbettor Texas Hold'em Article: 'what you don’t hear about is the pro that made $300,000 playing in the $300-$600 mixed game at the Bellagio last year"
Limit vs. No-limit So, how did you get here? Wait, let me guess. If you’re like most of our visitors here at Netbettor, you’ve arrived at this site after having watched some poker on TV. You’ve tuned in to the WPT coverage on the Travel Channel, and watched Antonio Esfandiari, or Gus Hanson, push in $400,000 worth of tournament chips on a stone bluff. You’ve seen Chris Moneymaker call Dutch Boyd’s all-in bet on the flop with an unimproved pair of pocket 3’s, and subsequently scoop the pot. You’ve seen Phil Hellmuth blow a gasket after taking a bad beat (if you haven’t seen this yet, keep tuning in; it’s bound to happen again). And you’ve said to yourself, ‘You know what? I want to learn to play like these guys!’ Now there’s nothing wrong with that. Tournament poker makes for exciting TV, and we’re all for anything that improves the visibility of the game. But before you endeavor on a serious study of Texas hold ‘em you need to ask yourself one question: ‘What is it about this game that intrigues me?’ If your end goal is to eventually get on TV, or to place in the money in the World Series, then you’ll probably want to get more involved in tournament poker. But if your goal is to make money, and preferably lots of it, you’ll turn your attentions to tournament poker’s recently neglected cousin—limit Texas hold ‘em. As you peruse these pages you’ll notice that almost all of our advice is geared towards playing limit poker. Why? Because we at Netbettor have one objective in mind; namely, to show you, our visitor, how to start lining your wallets with poker winnings. And to that end, limit poker is where it’s at. No, it may not appear as dramatic as tournament poker. And it’s certainly less sexy. But it’s the gold mine in the poker mountain, which is why we at Netbettor keep our focus on it. Why, you might ask, is limit poker more lucrative than no-limit? To answer this I give you the following reasons: 1) No-limit games tend to die out. This may seem impossible, given the recent surge in no-limit’s popularity, but it’s a known fact in the poker world that no-limit games don’t tend to have much of a shelf life. The reason for this is that in a game like no limit Texas hold ‘em the bad players have almost no chance of walking away a winner after any given session. The best poker games are those that achieve a stable balance between luck and skill. The latter, of course, is necessary so that good players keep playing, and therefore keep the games alive and active; but the former is also just as important, since it’s the element of luck that allows the fish to occasionally score a big win. Without these sporadic wins, the fish lose interest; which leaves you, the winning player, more often than not sitting at a table with nine other guys who at least have an idea of what they’re doing. The first commandment which all winning players should obey is ‘Thou shall not drive away the fish!’ They are your bread and butter. They are the reason you keep winning. And they will continue to play, and knowingly take the worst of it, so long as they can justify their time at the table by scoring the occasional win. If you beat them often enough, and hard enough, they either a) lose interest, or b) start playing another game. I know that right now there are a bunch of no-limit games being playing online. But these games will not last, or will at least cease be profitable, after all the bad players tap out. I’ve seen this happen before; when I played in Denver , we used to have a pot-limit Omaha game that went every Friday. At first, the game was a total fish fry; bad players were lining up for a seat, and the more skilled amongst us were able to make some obscenely big scores. But after a few months the fish got tired of losing fifteen hundred bucks a night, and went back to the 15-30 hold ‘em tables. Within six months this once great game was filled with nothing but rocks and nut huggers, and the game died shortly thereafter. I’ve also seen this in home games. We start off playing 10-20, and before long someone gets the wise idea to bump it to no-limit. Every time this has happened the game has gone sour within a few months; often times it’s never recovered from the loss of bad players. If you have a successful home game running, and you’re looking to drive it into the ground, my advice to you is to start spreading either no-limit or pot-limit, as I promise you that your player base will shrink at least 50% within half a year. Thirty years ago it wasn’t hard at all to find a no limit game; but three years ago, (before the explosion of coverage on TV) you couldn’t find a no-limit game to save your soul. Want to guess what happened? That’s right, all the bad players started playing limit. All the fresh meat has allowed for the no-limit games to become temporarily profitable again, but if you’re looking to sustain a winning edge for the foreseeable future you’d be wise to spend your time learning the limit game. No, it’s not as ‘cool’. But yes, it’s a lot more profitable. 2) The online games have a buy-in cap. As you may have noticed the online card rooms usually spread a couple different no-limit games; one may have a 25$ buy in, one may have a 50$ max buy in, and one may even have a 100$-200$ max buy in. The reason they do this is twofold; first, all card room manages know that if they spread a no-limit game, and allow the stakes to get too big, they’ll eventually develop a reputation for cheating. This happens even if the game is completely honest. The reason this happens is because sooner or later someone is going to lose a whole bunch of money on a miracle card on the river, and when that card falls the guy who stood to win the pot is going to cry foul—even if he as no reason to believe the game was rigged. So, to prevent dismayed players from howling about their bad beats on the Internet’s chat rooms and message boards they cap the buy in, thereby assuring that nobody is going to lose the next month’s mortgage on the turn of a card. Second, they know that the good players will just abuse the bad players in a no-limit game, so they figure they can keep the losers stringing along for a while by putting a ceiling on the amount they can buy in for. Let me say now that I have no objection to capping the buy-in. A card room has a right to do whatever it can to preserve its reputation for honesty, and anything that keeps bad players from going broke too fast is usually a good thing. But the cap on the buy-in also brings a cap on the blinds, and this is where the problem lies for the winning player. The ‘size’ of any game—meaning the amount of money which can be expected to change hands—is directly tied to the size of the blinds. Ever play in a no-limit game with .25-.50 cent blinds? If you have, you’ve probably noticed that the pots rarely get bigger than forty bucks—even if the players all have a few hundred in front of them. Conversely, if you have game with $5-$10 dollar blinds, you’re going to build a few pots over $300, even if all the stacks are in the $400-$800 range. I once played in a pot-limit hold ‘em game where the maximum number of players allowed was set at six, and the blinds were $20-$40. Talk about a wild game! Even though nobody ever sat down with more than $1000, it wasn’t uncommon to see pots grow over $3000 in that game; and that’s with only six guys playing! So go the blinds, so go the stakes. And so go the stakes, so goes the win rate. You can screw around in a no-limit game with small antes, but I can assure you that such a game won’t be as profitable as a good $3-$6 game. And if you’re looking to make over $15 an hour you’re going to have to play in a game with at least a $5 blind. So far as I know there isn’t a no-limit game going right now with a blind that big, which means you’re going to be playing $5-$10 limit hold ‘em. Want to make $20, or $30 an hour? Then forget no-limit. There’s no game on the Internet that I know of that you can consistently take that much money out of per hour. With the cap on the buy-in, and the tiny blinds, what you end up with is a bunch of kids pretending to be Phil Ivey as they push twenty dollar pots back and forth. Needless to say, this is not the spot where the winning player wants to find himself. "you simply aren’t going to consistently make decent money by playing in multi-table tournaments with a $20 buy in"
‘But what about tournament poker?’ You ask. Again, the problem is the same. While there might be enough profit in the one-table tournaments to make them worthwhile (I have to do more research on the effect of the 10% entry fee to say for certain), you simply aren’t going to consistently make decent money by playing in multi-table tournaments with a $20 buy in. There just isn’t enough money at stake. Consider this: If you had $20 bucks to play poker with, you’d be a fool to sit down in a limit game any bigger than $1-$2 (and even then you wouldn’t have much of a stake). If you sat down with that same $20 in a no-limit game, you’d be looking at playing with a .25 blind. In both of the above mentioned games the best player in the world couldn’t be looking at making much more than $5 an hour. Now, even if tournaments were more profitable than ring games (and they aren’t), they couldn’t be three times more profitable. Yet three times more profitable is exactly what they would have to be in order for the player to achieve a respectable $15 an hour win rate. Return to Exclusive Netbettor Poker Articles Other Poker Strategy Articles: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
