Filtering Advice in No Limit Holdem

At this point in the poker boom, most of your major chain bookstores have devoted at least a few shelves, if not an entire case, to the plethora of holdem strategy guides currently on the market. At the Barnes and Noble near me, for instance, poker has earned six shelves filled with a hundred titles, more or less.

One of the interesting aspects of this collection, and just about any collection of poker books, is the utter lack of texts devoted to No Limit Holdem cash games. You’ll find plenty of books on limit, on no limit tournament play, and even a few titles devoted to Omaha and stud, but very few books that are completely devoted to NL ring.

One reason for this imbalance is certainly demand centered; tournament poker has fueled the television boom and limit is still the primary game spread by casino card rooms. So, on one hand, you might expect to see fewer books on No Limit ring simply because fewer players are asking for such books. On the other hand, no limit cash games are very popular online, so there is a base of players that want to learn. So why isn’t anyone jumping in to teach?

The answer I’ve come up with is pretty simple, but also fairly instructive as to how you should filter any specific strategy advice you come across regarding no limit holdem. Simply put, no limit is context-specific to such a point that the broad majority of general advice is fairly useless. Unlike limit or tournament play where several external constants ensure a certain consistency in game play, no limit is a game of constantly shifting variables. For instance, if you’re drawing to a flush against one opponent in limit, you know exactly how much you’re going to pay to see the next card, and know within a reasonable amount how much you can expect to win if you make your flush. In a tournament, the finite nature of your chip stack and the certainty of increasing blinds ensures that some plays are fairly automatic.

No limit lacks just about all of these constants (one obvious exception is stack size, which can often control the direction of a hand completely), and the result is a game where proper strategy can shift wildly from hand to hand. As a result, attempting to generalize strategy for specific scenarios in no limit is a tough job at best. Take this simple question applied to limit and then no limit, and just how tough it is becomes even clearer: How should I handle flopping bottom two pair in position against a player betting into me? In limit, you only have three possible answers – call, raise or fold, and folding is a bit unusual. In no limit, you not only have some additional answers (due to the variable of raise size), but each of the answers has a broader set of consequences, each with an additional set of variables based on your opponent, table image, and so on. The point here is that answering the above question correctly for limit might take a few more questions and a bit of discussion, while answering the question correctly for no limit would take a great deal more investigation. More impressively, several scenarios in no limit, unlike tournament or limit, simply do not have a mathematically “correct” answer.

Now that I’ve taken about 5 minutes of your life establishing that no limit is, in fact, a different game than limit (gasp!), I’ll try to wrap back around to the point of the article – how the knowledge of this difference should impact the way in which you consume no limit strategy advice. I’m going to drop down to some bullet points here in the hopes of speeding things along for you:

* First, you should be very wary of advice that claims to offer a ’one size fits all’ approach to specific scenarios. If an article, book, or friend of yours says anything that begins along the lines of “Whenever I have a flush draw, I always …”, or “There’s only one thing to do when you flop a set …”, you’re probably getting bad advice. This is not to say that the advice given might not be valuable in certain scenarios, but anyone who thinks no limit should be approached so bluntly is, in my opinion, not thinking about the game correctly.

*Second, you should always take general game play advice and run it through the set of variables that you have experienced directly. When you read general advice about, say, how to handle AK heads up when you miss the flop, think about the action the author suggests and how the people you play against every day would react. One example: do your usual opponents behave more passively? More aggressively? Why? A great way to learn about poker – whether it’s live game play or online poker strategy – is to compare what others suggest to what you actually do. In doing so, you’ll often unearth a conceptual gap between the two that will force you to think about poker on a more theoretical level as opposed to a practical one – investigating why plays work instead of just being content to know which plays work.

*Third, you should beware of these absolutist tendencies creeping into your own way of thinking about the game. I know plenty of players who have run into this wall, and have had several experiences myself where a lot of money was lost (or not made, same thing) because of this type of rigidity. Just because you won a monster pot slow playing a flopped flush on, say, PokerStars or Royal Vegas Poker once doesn’t mean that’s the right way to play a flopped flush – only that it was the right way to play that flopped flush at that particular point in time. I can’t overstress that point. Don’t make me try, it would be pretty boring for you and me both.

It’s my opinion that no limit cash games are the most challenging form of holdem in a theoretical sense (with tournaments close behind). Several authors have taken up the task of sketching the broad outlines of correct strategy (my personal favorites are Brunson’s Super System, Ciaffone and Rubens’ No Limit and Pot Limit Poker and Harrington on Holdem which, while ostensibly a tournament strategy book, cross-applies well to ring), but the details are always going to be left to each player to complete as he or she sees fit. Hopefully knowing the limitations inherent in the advice of others will help you to fill in those details as profitably as possible.

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