Poker Articles

Changing Limits a Big Challenge
By Andy Glazer

A good poker player needs more gears than a Formula One race driver. Super aggressive, aggressive, fast, average, moderately slow, slow, tight and super tight, just for starters. If you always play in the same gear--that is, at the same betting pace--you'll probably be a losing player, unless you're running with a weak crowd (which of course is the best kind of crowd to run with, but that's a story for another day).

Most experienced players recognize this, and so don't always play at the same speed. Sometimes they change speeds by design, and sometimes life just helps them out--a fight with a spouse causing a rock to express his anger with faster play, or a cash shortage slowing an action player down.

It's much better to change by design than by accident; sometimes those accidents help your game, but usually if you haven't shifted gears by design, that grinding sound you hear will be your bankroll burning up.

There's another kind of gear-shift that many players face, and often they're not as adept at it. That shift comes when you change limits. That is, a 2-4 player decides to try the 6-12 game, or the 6-12 player tries 20-40. Generally speaking, I think you can expect games to play differently each time the stakes triple or more.

You can have problems going in either direction. A 6-12 player trying 20-40 will probably be a bit intimidated by the amount of money at risk. If the 6-12 player usually plays far too many hands, that intimidation isn't necessarily a bad thing: it might cause him to play better. In general, though, if you're playing scared, you're not going to play well. The 6-12 player will probably also find the player styles very different at the higher limits: fewer players seeing the flop, more check-raising, etc.

The 20-40 player who moves to 6-12 will also have problems. Usually the biggest is that he won't respect the $2 chips. He's used to the $5 chips, and the smaller ones don't seem to matter as much. At the same time, he probably won't respect the opposition as much, assuming-sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly-that the players in the 6-12 game won't be as good as those he's used to facing.

As a result, the 20-40 player who moves down will probably play too many pots, and probably overvalue hands, like A-K offsuit, that win a lot of money against two or three opponents in the bigger game, but which tend to run into trouble against five or six opponents in the smaller game. To make matters worse, when the 20-40 player gets his A-K offsuit knocked off by someone playing 2-5 offsuit in early position, he's vulnerable to going on tilt and treating his $2 chips with even less respect.

Moral of the story: be very careful about switching limits. Sometimes financial concerns or game availability will force you to switch when you'd rather not. To do so successfully, you need not only to understand that the styles of play are probably going to be different at the new limit, but also to understand your own emotional make-up. You'll need to sit down and have a conversation with yourself, before you start, about what's likely to be different in your new game, and what you plan to do about it. Once you're in the middle of a hand, it's probably too late.