Reflections for the No Limit Poker Fan.
You watched the TV that was covering the WPT Championship and saw Antonio Esfandiari or Gus Hanson hit the jackpot of $400,000, absolutely bluffing. You saw Chris Moneymaker, with an unimproved pair of threes, after the flop backed Dutch Boyd all-in and blew the pot. You saw Phil Hellmuth go berserk after his game broke. And you said to yourself, "You know what? I want to learn how to play like these guys!"
And there is nothing wrong with that. The poker championships are an exciting TV show, and we fully support anything that makes poker spectacular. But before you devote yourself to a serious study of Texas Hold'em, ask yourself one question: "What fascinates me so much about this game?" If your ultimate goal is to be on TV or to gamble in the World Series, then you should probably get into tournament poker. But if your goal is to make money, and the more the better, then you should pay attention to the recently neglected cousin of tournament poker - limit Texas Hold'em.
To learn how to fill your pockets with poker winnings, you need to learn how to play Texas Hold'em.
Limit poker is perfect for this. Yes, it doesn't seem as exciting as tournament poker. And of course he's not that sexy. But there is a gold mine in him that makes us focus on him. You may be wondering why is limit poker more profitable than no limit? To answer it, I will give the following reasons:
1) No limit games are on the verge of extinction. This may seem incredible given the recent rise in popularity of no-limit games, but the fact that no-limit games have a short "expiration date" is well known in the poker world. The reason for this is that in a game like Texas Hold'em, weak players have little chance of beating the winner after a certain session. The best games are those that strike a strong balance between luck and skill. The latter is necessary in order for a good player to continue to play, making the game more lively and active; the first is very important for the reason that it is the element of luck that allows the sucker to win well by chance. Without these one-off victories, the goof loses interest, thereby dramatically reducing your chances of being at the same table with nine guys who have little idea of what's going on. The main commandment of the ace says: "Do not scare away the sucker!" After all, he is your bun with butter. He is the reason for your victories. And he will continue to play (and deliberately fail) only as long as he can justify being at the table with random wins. If you defeat too often and too hard, he will either a) lose interest or b) start playing a different game. I know there are a ton of online no-limit games out there right now. But these games will disappear, or at least cease to be profitable, once all the weaklings go bankrupt.
I've seen this happen. In Denver, we played bank-restricted Omaha every Friday. At first, the game was a complete rip-off of suckers; weaker players lined up at the table, and more skillful players were able to win outrageously huge sums. But after a few months the suckers got tired of losing fifteen hundred dollars every night, and they returned to the 15-20 dollar Hold'em tables. Six months later, only the candy players and rocks were left in this once great game, and soon it finally died. And in games at home, I also saw this. We started playing with 10-20 dollar stakes, but very soon someone came up with a wise idea to raise to no limit. Each time that happened, the game would fizzle out for months, and often no longer recover from the loss of weaklings. My advice: if you have a good game at home, and you dream of burying it, offer to play no-limit or bank-limited poker, and I promise, in six months you will not have half the players. Thirty years ago, finding a no-limit game was easy, but three years ago (before poker hit the TV screen), you would never have found a no-limit game. What do you think happened? That's right, all the weak players have switched to limit poker. All these innovations have allowed no-limit games to be profitable again for a while, but if you want to keep winning for the foreseeable future, it would be wise to learn how to play limit poker. Yes, he's not that cool. But definitely much more beneficial.
2) Online games have a limited buy-in. As you may have noticed, online card rooms usually offer several different no-limit games; one might have a $ 25 buy-in, another might have a $ 50 maximum, and the third might even have a $ 100-200 buy-in. They have two reasons for this: First, all cardroom managers know that if they let the stakes go too high, they will eventually gain a reputation for cheating. This will happen even if the game is crystal clear. This will happen for the reason that sooner or later, someone will lose a whole lot of money because of the wonderful card that came out on the river, and the moment this card comes out, the guy who was already ready to break the pot will certainly scream, that this is cheating - even if he has no reason to doubt the honesty of the game. Therefore, in order to hedge against frustrated players on the forums and chat rooms, they limit the buy-in, thereby ensuring that no player loses their entire house fee for a whole month due to the wrong card. Second, they know that good players are just making fun of weaklings in no-limit play, and therefore they believe that a limited buy-in will help losers last longer.
Personally, I have nothing against this practice. The card room has the right to do whatever it wants to preserve its reputation, and anything that prevents weak players from going broke too quickly is undoubtedly good. But the "buy-in" restriction comes with a restriction on the blinds, and that's where the difficulty for the ace lies. The "size" of each game, the amount of money that can be spent on changing hands, is directly related to the size of the blinds. Have you ever played a no-limit game with 25-50 cent blinds? If so, you probably noticed that the bank in such cases rarely exceeds forty bucks, even if there are several hundred in front of each player. Accordingly, even with stacks in the $400-800 range, playing with $ 5-10 blinds can build over $ 300 in a pot. I once played pot-limited Hold'em with a maximum of six players and $ 20-40 blinds. That was a wild game! The pot often exceeded $3000, even with the fact that few people sat at the table with more than $1000, and that's only with six players!
What are the blinds, so are the rates. And what are the rates, so is the winning. You can play the fool in the small stakes no-limit game, but I assure you, this game will never be as profitable as a good $ 3-6 game. And if you intend to make more than $ 15 an hour, you need to play with at least $ 5 blinds. As far as I know, there are currently no no-limit games with blinds equal to $ 5-10 limit hold'em. Want to get 20 or 30 bucks an hour? Then forget about no limit games. There is no such game on the Internet from which you could constantly pull such sums every hour. With the buy-in limit and tiny blinds, you end up with the kids running around a $ 20 pot and pretending to be Phil Ivey. Needless to say, this is clearly not the place where you would like to be.
"What about tournament poker!" - you ask. Again, the problem is the same. While a single table tournament may have enough reward to pay attention to (I have to investigate the effect of 10% entry fees even more thoroughly to be sure), it is clear that in multi-table tournaments and You won't make a lot of money with $ 20 buy-ins. The stakes just aren't big enough. Look here: if you have 20 bucks, it would be silly to sit at a table where the stakes are higher than $1-2 (and even then you will not disdain too much with the stakes). If you sit down to play the no-limit game with the same 20 bucks, count on 25-cent blinds. In none of the above games, even the best player in the world can pull more than $ 5 an hour. Even if tournament games were more profitable than commercial ones (which is not at all the case), they still would not be three times more profitable. And they must be exactly three times more profitable to allow the player to achieve respectable $15 per hour.
The poker world is constantly flooded with news of the latest coolest player. More often than not, this is someone who has won well in a couple of major tournaments. But who you never hear of is the pro who earned $300,000 last year playing $ 300-600 mixed game at Bellagio, or the guy who makes $100,000 annually playing Commerce in California. ... And when the tough new player starts to get dark and out of sight, these pros will still have 6-figure annual income. If you cherish the rosy dream of seeing yourself in the glory, then keep exploring streams from the World Series. And if you're keen to pay cash for a new Mustang next year, then I recommend playing limit games.
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