Take Me To The Limit

March 19, 2009, 9:48 pm
Filed under: Poker

With the global economic picture swirling deeper and deeper into uncertainty and your 401k shrinking at a faster rate than a wool sweater in the dryer, we are all looking for a way to make some extra cash.

Since Chris Moneymaker’s remarkable 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, in which he parlayed $40 into an outstanding $2,500,000, both brick-and-mortar and online card rooms have seen business skyrocket to unprecedented levels.

If you can toss a lasso and wrangle the dead money that is making its way to felt, you could literally be a millionaire tomorrow.

Ask Taylor Caby (GreenPlastic), co-founder of Cardrunners.com, who turned a $35 initial deposit on an internet poker site into six digits in a very short period of time.

Or Phil Galfond (OMGClayAiken), who turned $50 into actual millions (yes, count them) of dollars by playing internet poker. He now plays the highest nosebleed stakes on FullTiltPoker.com with the likes of Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, and Patrik Antonius.

No limit Texas Hold’em has been the vehicle to wealth and poker notoriety for many young, budding card sharks. No limit hold’em is known as the “Cadillac of Poker” because of it’s fast paced nature, where your whole stack of chips can go into the middle of the pot at any time. This game can leave you with two, three, or even nine times as many chips at the end of the hand as you had when you started. But of course, one inherent risk of no limit holdem is that you can lose all of your chips in any single hand.

Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson is considered the Babe Ruth of poker, the godfather of poker, and simply the best all around player the game has ever seen. Only Phil Hellmuth sports more bracelets around his wrist than Brunson, but what Brunson lacks in total bracelets to Hellmuth (1), he more than compensates with the level of respect he is given by every aspriring and established poker player alike.

Doyle Brunson started his quest for poker greatness in Texas, going on the road with Amarillo Slim and notable others, cleaning up card games in dusty, smoky back rooms in their travels. However, even Doyle self-admittedly went broke over 100 times in his early years. There are a lot of factors that go into ending up with an empty wallet, but I feel that the inescapable devil that is variance in no limit hold’em is one of the largest factors. Variance accounts for all the times you put your money in good, and get sucked out on by an inferior hand.

As a poker player, you have to account for the fact that odds won’t always hold and no matter how many times you play the big pots with 80% chance to scoop the chips, you can’t and won’t win every time. Going all in with pocket aces preflop, and seeing the pot get pushed in your opponent’s direction is a bad beat or, in a word, variance.

The goal as a poker player is to work around variance, and get the most value out of your hands when you have the best of it, and spend the least amount of money with the worst hand. Every hand should be played as if it were being played 1,000,000 times, to ensure that the way you’re playing it will make you the most money the largest percentage of the time.

The point is, in no limit hold’em, you can flop what you know to be the best hand (top set, etc) and have no option but to pay everything you have in your stack to see the hand through to the river, knowing 100% that you have the best hand at the time. When your hand gets cracked by a flush that hits, an overpair that nails a two-outer for a higher set, or any other funky combination, all you can do is sit back, whimper a little, and wish you were able to play the hand without investing all of your chipstacks.

Alas, there is a way! Although the majority of new poker players are flooding to no limit hold’em games by the thousands, there is an abundance of other games out there that the betting limits are capped and more consistent, smaller wins are the only way to accumulate chips at the end of the day. Some examples are Limit Hold’em, Limit Stud Hi/Lo, Limit Omaha Hi/Lo, Badugi, Pot Limit Omaha, Razz, and 2-7 single or triple-draw. These games allow the better players to win more often, as the bad players need to put their money in chip by chip, rather than running an intimidating bluff for a massive amount of chips as is typical in No Limit Hold’em.

A bad poker player is, in a sense, a suicidal person. If you were going to shoot yourself, one quick shot to the head is the easiest way to go about it. This is similar to a bluff in No Limit Hold’em. If you give this suicidal person a plastic knife and the only way to kill themselves is by repeatedly stab themselves little by little, he would have a lot less incentive to kill himself (or, shove his chips in the middle from behind). This is why I have found a safe haven in the tournament form of these limit games. First of all, the learning curve for these games is far behind that of No Limit Hold’em. You will find much less seasoned players in these games, as many people are just being introduced to them. Also, as far as tournaments go, the payscale is the same and your expected return on investment is the same in a Limit Hold’em tournament as it is in a No Limit Tournament. The difference is, you never have to lose a big pot in Limit Hold’em, and you never have to leave your fate to a coinflip, which is absolutely and utterly inevitable in a No Limit Hold’em tournament.

This game is about finding your edge. Mine lies in games where skill reigns king, and bad players keep losing. Too many genius poker minds go down in a fiery ball of flames by playing No Limit Hold’em, a game in which you can do everything right every hand and still have nothing to show for it.

I will be writing strategy segments on each of the aforementioned games in this blog and I hope you stick around to see the benefits of learning the ins and outs of each and every game, as it will help you understand where you can find your edge in poker, which ultimately leads to more money in your pocket, especially considering the paltry state of our economy.