Gambling City
Winning Starts Here

The ability to be able to bet whatever you want leads to more players getting into trouble in no-limit hold’em ring games than any other form of poker. In limit hold’em even though the game is still amazingly complex, the fact that the betting is structured makes life a whole lot easier for the people who play the game. The flip side of course is that limit hold’em became the first game to be theoretically solved and Nash equilibrium strategies were being used in greater and greater frequency meaning that the higher limit games became impossible to beat.

However in no limit play then the novices and intermediate players were finding the game very difficult to crack and there is one very important reason for that. This is because there is a far greater emphasis on understanding odds and probabilities, taking odds and laying odds. In short then you need many of the skills of a bookmaker to be a good NLHE cash game player where you can buy in for 100bb and end up playing with far more. To better highlight why players often get themselves into trouble then a simple look at blind stealing is instructive.

Let us say that the stakes are $1-$2 and you have a $200 stack. It has been folded to you on the button and you raise to a conventional 3.5bb to $7. This $7 raise stands to win only $3 and so you are laying odds of 3-7 which is more than 1-2. Now let us say that the big blind calls you. The pot would be $15 which when rake is accounted for would be around $14.50. The flop comes and you have missed and the big blind checks. You make a c-bet of $10 which will probably work a high percentage of the time against a single opponent.

You have risked $17 so far in the hand but if your opponent folds then your stack only increases by $7.50. Because you have taken very short odds then your strike rate of pots won to pots lost needs to be very high and this is a major reason as to why you cannot just open raise from position with the soul intention of blind stealing. You clearly need to have other strategic reasons to raise than just stealing blinds. A major reason is to escalate the stakes of the game if you feel that you have an edge over the opposition. Realising that you are raising for other strategic reasons should prevent you from launching crazy multi-street bluffs in the wrong circumstances when you miss the flop in heads up situations.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk