Co-Author of the recently published, 'Poker Mindset' poker Psychology book,, Ian 'Piemaster' Taylor is from London UK and has been playing poker seriously for two years and socially for a number of years before that. Mainly a limit specialist who has enjoyed success at levels up to and including 5/10 and has also dabbled in No-Limit and tournament hold'em as well as Omaha. He is especially well versed in the psychological aspects of the game, and so will often write about the more human elements of the game rather than middle-of-the-road strategy.
We all have an idea of the archetypical bad limit texas holdem player or ‘fish’ as they are often called. They are very loose, very passive, chase terrible draws, don’t value bet or protect their hand enough etc. The Poker Tracker fans out there might describe this player as something like 80/4/0.2 (at a full ring table), with these stats representing the percentage of time they voluntarily put money in the pot, the percentage of the time they raise pre-flop and their post-flop aggression factor (ratio of raises to calls) respectively. These types of players are extremely common, especially at the lower limits, but also at the mid-limits and sometimes even the higher limits.
Or at least they were in 2004, but this is 2008.
2008 isn’t as convenient as 2004. In 2008 a large proportion of those terrible texas holdem players who used to donate money have either quit, got better or only play at the micro-limits where they can afford to spew money indefinitely. Sure, you will still find a few terrible texas holdem players at the internet poker tables, but maybe only one or two per table at low limits and at the mid and high limits, you may have to hunt around a lot to find any at all. As most people have noticed by now, games are getting harder. It seems a long time ago that I was winning 2 big bets per 100 hands. Margins are slimmer, because the pool of bad texas holdem players has diminished.
But that isn’t to say that there are no bad internet poker players at all any more. ‘Bad’ is a relative term, and in recent times we have had to adjust our expectations downwards a bit with regards to the type of players we can hope to find at the internet poker tables. It isn’t as easy as it was in 2004, but you didn’t expect the good times to last forever did you? Maybe the 80/4/0.2 fish are a rare species in this day and age, but there is still money to be won from internet poker players who make a multitude of mistakes. In this texas holdem strategy article we will look at the kind of internet poker players that donate money in 2008. The ‘New Generation Fish’ that you need to exploit in order to come out a winner. Let’s take a stroll around the four corners of the loose/tight, passive/aggressive matrix to see who we find there.
After listening to Ed Miller speak at last year’s ITH convention, I made up my mind that I wanted to learn how to play no-limit texas holdem cash games. Given their popularity at the moment it seemed silly not to have this game in my arsenal. Six months later I am now reasonably confident playing the game and have some nice positive numbers over a decent-sized sample. I still consider myself a relative newbie at the game. Don’t worry, I’m certainly not going to sit here and try to tell no-limit texas holdem players how to improve their game. However, what I would like to do is provide some tips for limit texas holdem players who are thinking about learning no-limit texas holdem cash games.
Limit and no-limit hold’em are theoretically quite similar. The only significant difference is the amount you are allowed to bet at a time. Naturally this means that if you are an accomplished limit player, you should have at least a reasonable idea how to play no-limit hold’em. In fact, if you have a strong theoretical grasp of poker, you may even find you can win right away, at least at the lower limits. Nevertheless, the games are different enough that no-limit hold’em provides many trappings for the limit player. In fact, the apparent similarity of the games can ambush them, as they carry habits over from their limit game that can be disastrous in the big-bet version of the game.
In this article, I will identify ten things that a limit texas holdem player will have to adapt to when playing no-limit holdem. They are the ten things that I found most fundamental when trying to master no-limit cash games coming from a limit background. Hopefully identifying them here may help other limit players looking to make the transition.
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of The Poker Mindset: Essential Attitudes for Poker Success, by Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger.
Some players tend to react very well to losing a big pot (and indeed other adversity in poker), while others tend to react badly. Experience helps in some regards. A seasoned pro with years of playing experience will tend to react better than a new player just getting used to the short-term swings. For most players, learning how to react well to hands that go badly is a journey that lasts a long time.
Welcome to the final part of this series on heads-up limit texas hold’em. In this part we will be looking at the different types of opponent you will encounter and give tips on how to play against them. (see putting someone on an exact hand, in our texas holdem strategy section) Remember that opponent selection is everything when playing heads-up. If your sole opponent is as good or better than you, or even slightly worse, then you will lose money in the long run. Also the game will be vastly different depending on who your opponent is. Think how different a full ring game becomes when a maniac sits down. Well imagine that times ten and that is how much a heads-up game changes when you get a different opponent. There is no such thing as a ‘regular’ heads-up game. How you play should depend entirely on your opponent and each game will be a little bit different.
Remember, the key to successful heads-up limit play is to have a loose, aggressive and unpredictable game. Naturally, this means that opponents who are tight, passive or predictable are the easiest to beat. So to start with we will look at these types of opponents, those who are missing a piece of the three-piece jigsaw.
I have spent a lot of time in these columns talking about bad beats, downswings and tilt, which are all related to luck, but sometimes it pays to take a step back and look at the more fundamental question. What exactly constitutes luck in texas holdem?
The first thing to realise is that luck in texas holdem is more or less zero-sum. Any money that you win at poker comes from the other players in the game. Therefore any piece of good luck you experience directly corresponds to bad luck experienced by your opponents either singly or collectively. Likewise any piece of bad luck you experience is reflected in good luck for your opponent. It’s not quite a perfect model, because all the time we have the rake chipping away at our stacks, acting as a leech on the ‘good luck pool’. But for practical purposes we can consider luck to be zero sum. If somebody’s gutshot hits, somebody’s top pair, or other winning hand, got drawn out on. If player A is getting no good cards, then players B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J are collectively winning more than their fair share of pots, with hands that might otherwise have lost.
The logical conclusion is that in any given period about 50% of hold'em players are going to experience more than their share of good luck (be lucky), while the other 50% will experience less than their share (be unlucky). What’s more, over the long term nearly all players will experience luck that approaches ‘average’. Lots of individual pieces of good luck and bad luck, but overall they will largely cancel each other out. Interestingly though, you will rarely find a poker player who considers himself lucky, but you will find hundreds that will swear they are the most unlucky player in the world. This is usually attributed to two factors:
In my last column we looked at the four stages of tilt, where each stage represents a better response (and a better underlying attitude) than the last. To recap the four stages:
Stage 1 – Anger
A player at stage 1 sees only the monetary value of a pot that he loses. When he loses a big hand, his initial reaction is to be angry
Stage 2 – Frustration
Players at stage 2 have learned to remove the more destructive emotions from their reaction when they lose a big pot. Losing big pots will still be painful, but this pain manifests itself more as frustration than anger.
Stage 3 – Acceptance Players at stage 3 understand and accept the realities of poker. They understand that the game contains a lot of short-term luck, and as a result they are destined to lose big pots sometimes.
Stage 4 – Indifference A player at stage 4 will not register any mental anguish from losing a big pot. Rather than feeling anger, frustration, or even acceptance of the hand, he will be focused entirely on how his opponents played and what can be learned from the hand. Whether he won or lost is an irrelevant detail.
To further illustrate the difference between the stages, let’s look at a limit hand example from the point of view of a representative player whom we will call Rick.
Some players tend to react very well to losing a big pot (and indeed other adversity in poker), while others tend to react badly. Experience helps in some regards. A seasoned pro with years of playing experience will tend to react better than a new player just getting used to the short-term swings. For most players, learning how to react well to hands that go badly is a journey that lasts a long time.
However, it is a mistake to think that this journey is linear or inevitable. Some experienced poker players still blow their top when they take a bad beat, while some beginners have an instinctive Zen-like calm in the aftermath of even the most horrific hand. In fact, it is more useful to think of the journey as a series of four stages, where each stage represents a better response (and a better underlying attitude) than the last.
Stage 1 – Anger
A player at stage 1 sees only the monetary value of a pot that he loses. When he loses a big hand, his initial reaction is to be angry, in the same way that someone who has had his wallet stolen would be angry.
Bluffing in limit hold'em is an interesting science. In loose games it is usually inadvisable to bluff because your opponents will call down with very marginal holdings. However, today's games are not as loose as they used to be, especially at the mid/high limits.
If you play in the tougher limit games of 2007, then bluffing is something that you almost need to have in your arsenal. Not only does it stop you becoming predictable to observant opponents, but more importantly it helps you to pick up some key pots that would otherwise have slipped away. Also in tougher games, pots are more likely to be fought heads-up, which is by far the best situation in which to bluff.
“I’m from the US and it’s getting harder and harder to fund my account or even play!”
“Bots are everywhere!”
I’m sure you’ve been hearing a lot of things similar to the above lately and unfortunately there are elements of truth to these proclamations. It’s definitely true that the games are not as good as their equivalents two years ago. It is also true that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA from hereon in) has caused a myriad of problems for US players.
I'm running badly at the moment. Well, hopefully by the time you read this I won't be, but at time of writing I am definitely courting the dark side of variance. However, I did make a pretty good play earlier today that saved me two big bets.
The game was five-handed and the player under the gun raised. I re-raised with AK from the button and the blinds folded. I hadn't played too much with the UTG player, but he seemed to be a reasonable player and hadn't made any obviously bad plays in the time I had been there. The flop was AJ5 with two clubs. He checked and called my bet. He check-called again on the turn, which was and off-suit 6. The river was the J of diamonds, he checked and I checked behind. He showed QJ and took the pot with his trips. Had I bet, I would have been forced to make a crying call of his check-raise and lost two extra bets.
I play a lot of heads-up limit hold’em. In fact, it probably accounts for about 30% of the hands that I play on a day-to-day basis. A few forum members know this and have asked for help with their heads-up game. Unfortunately it is probably more difficult to give advice on this form of holdem than any other. Any hand in isolation is virtually meaningless. The correct play in any given circumstances it almost always dependant on what you know about your opponent and how similar hands against them have played out previously in the session.
So instead I decided to write a series of articles on the subject. In the next three months, I will discuss heads-up limit hold’em in detail. Next month we will be looking at fundamental winning strategies, including how you need to adapt your play from what you are used to at longer-handed games. In the third and final part we will look at the different types of opponent you are likely to face and how to adapt to them.
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