Poker Articles

JV'S Killer Poker:
SOME THINGS I THINK I KNOW ABOUT NO-LIMIT NOW
By John Vorhaus

Not long ago I got an angry email from someone who had bought my book The Killer Poker Hold'em Handbook. Said reader was outraged that nowhere on the cover of the book was the disclaimer that it was about limit and not no-limit hold'em. He felt like he'd been ripped off because after all in this day and age wouldn't you expect any book on hold'em to cover no-limit?

Well, sure you would in this day and age. But I wrote The Killer Poker Hold'em Handbook back in the dark ages of 2003, in the very last days before the no-limit revolution grabbed the poker world by the scruff of its neck and shook the limit right out of it. This I explained to my vituperative non-fan. No one was trying to rip him off or bait-and-switch him, I wrote. It's just that when I wrote the book, and when my publisher released it, it would never have occurred to us to warn readers that it covered limit hold'em. That was almost all anyone played.

What a difference a couple of years make, huh? Thanks to the twin jet engines of televised poker and internet poker, no-limit hold'em swept in, took over, and changed the poker world forever. Don't even bother calling it a revolution. The revolution's over. No-limit won. It won so thoroughly, in fact, that some of you reading these words may be wondering what I'm blathering on about. If you came into poker any time since the turn of 2004, say, you may have no idea that limit hold'em even exists.

Well, it does, and those of us who have made the transition from limit to no-limit hold'em have had to rethink some of our basic assumptions about the game we thought we knew. With that in mind, I'd like to share with you some of the most important things I think I know about no-limit Texas hold'em now. And this is just about cash games. Tournaments are a whole other thing.

DRAWS ARE DEATH IN NO-LIMIT.

Because your opponents can manipulate pot odds by varying the size of their bets, it's highly problematic to let yourself get caught on a draw. Conditions may start out quite favorable but turn bad rather quickly. Say you've got suited connectors and you're contemplating a call behind five limpers. You certainly have odds for that call, but what happens if you hit your draw on the flop? A foe can overbet the pot and make it impossibly incorrect for you to call.

VARIABLE PRICING IS IMPORTANT.

In limit, you bet what you can bet and hope for the desired result. No-limit embraces the art of pricing your opponents into or out of the pot. Suppose you have top pair, top kicker and there's a possible flush on board. You want to bet big enough to make sure that a draw doesn't have proper odds to call, but yet small enough that some unsuspecting foe with a worse made hand may feel like he's being offered a bargain. Without going all math-weenie on you, it turns out that against one or two opponents on the flop, a bet of about 2/3 the size of the pot is the right amount to price out the draws and price in the lesser made hands.

RECKLESS ADVENTURES ARE A MUST TO AVOID.

In limit hold'em, even if you make a bad mistake you can't get into too much trouble. The most any error can cost you is another big bet or two, and that's unpleasant but not catastrophic. In no-limit, where your whole stack can go south at any time, reckless adventures can lead to calamitous results. A typical no-limit disaster is to play something like A-Q, get all excited about an ace on the flop, run up against an A-K, and go broke on the hand. This is not to say that you can't play A-Q, but rather to say that you must be much more sensitive to the play of those around you. If you just go barreling through the hand with a second-rate holding, you'll find yourself paying the stiffest possible price.

READS ARE CRUCIAL.

Limit hold'em rewards tight-aggressive play to such a high degree that you can literally ignore your opponents altogether, follow a strict "get the goods, then bet the goods" policy, and come out winners more often than not. No-limit is much more about playing the players than about playing the cards. You need to spend a lot of time and a lot of mental energy sussing out your foes betting patterns, calling requirements, tendencies and tells. If you fail to be observant (and not just observant but keenly observant) your more attentive opponents will rip you to shreds. To put it another way, no-limit hold'em is no game for the intellectually lazy.

GOT GUTS?

When you lose in limit, you lose a few bets. When you lose in no-limit, you lose great hunks of your stack -- maybe everything you've got. At such times, your fortitude is tested. Do you have the strength of character to absorb a bad beat (or even a good beat) and still play strong, solid poker? If you tilt out in limit it's bad, but if you tilt out in no-limit it's a freaking nightmare. Maybe think about it this way. In limit poker, mistakes compound arithmetically. In no-limit they compound geometrically. No-limit poker always involves large swings. If you don't have the intestinal fortitude to handle such swings then you simply must not play.

Do all of these admonishments mean that you shouldn't play no-limit? Of course not. In this day and age what else are you going to play? Rather, you need to embrace the challenge of no-limit. It's a harder game than limit to get right, but it's also more rewarding, both financially and intellectually. It has been said, and I think it's an apt appraisal, that no-limit poker is to limit poker as art is to science. If you're ready to take it on those terms, then no-limit hold'em is a game you can play, and cherish, and win.

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