Anyone play Texas Hold'em? I need your advice.

In My Humble Opinion
21

I don’t really have much to add to this thread, since the other advice is pretty good. Lee Jones’ book is, in my opinion, a great starting point for a new player, simply because it will get you ‘up to speed’ quickly and the writing style will hold your attention. One of the problems with other poker writers who are better on theory is that a lot of them are pretty bad writers.

If you move up to mid-limit games and above (10-20 and above), Lee Jones’ advice will cost you money in a couple of places, but for a beginner it’s a great book. It’s also one of the cheapest poker books.

Jackknifed Juggernaut: Is the ‘friend’ who told you Hold’em is more luck than skill the one who has invited you into the game? Is he playing in the game? If so, there are two possibilities here: 1) Your friend doesn’t know what he’s talking about, in which case the game may not be that hard and with a little study you might be able to hold your own, or 2) They’re trying to drag a fish into the game, in which case I wouldn’t think much of your ‘friend’. Hold’em requires more skill than just about any other poker game, which is why all the tournaments and pros gravitate to it. Flop games like Hold’em are also the hardest to come from behind in, which gives good players the ability to trap people who are in over their heads and take them for lots of money.

Otto: The hands you mention can be profitable in certain circumstances (mainly tight-passive games), but overall I agree with others that these hands will cost you money. They are also the type of hands that win little when they win, but are easy to misplay and can cost you a lot when your judgement is off (and everyone’s judgement goes off from time to time). So my suggestion is that IF you are going to play these hands, only do so when you feel you have a dominant position at the table and you’re playing your best. If things start to get rough, these should be the first hands you should drop. Better advice would be to not play them at all. They aren’t much good for deceptive purposes and have a low overall EV.

If you want to play looser, you’d be better off playing small suited connectors like 2-5s when conditions are perfect for it. They have about the same expectation (close to zilch in perfect situations, money losing most of the time) , but at least it will make it harder for opponents to read you and therefore raise the expectation of your good hands slightly. And only play hands like that when conditions are perfect - last to act, one bet, passive game, etc.

I used to play a daily 10-20 to 20-40 game against the same opponents, and after a while everyone knows exactly how everyone else plays. So those occasional small connector hands were important to keep people from reading me too well. But if I go to Vegas or play in a game with strangers, I NEVER play hands like this (or the Q-8 type hands either). There’s simply no reason to for deception, and I feel my edge is big enough that I don’t have to go risking my money on near-zero EV hands like this.

22

Thanks for the advice. The game was cancelled. I’m going to play a few games with some of my friends before getting involved with strangers (although I’m pretty sure these guys were harmless, since they smoke pot and play). I’ve been watching the World Series of Poker on ESPN. Although I’ve never played before, it seems pretty clear that there is a huge difference in playing with a limit vs. no limit. With no limit, the player with the bigger stash has a bigger advantage, right? Also, I believe that being able to do quick math in my head will eventually give me some kind of advantage (I have an undergrad degree in Stats). Are most of the really good players probability wizzes?

23

You don’t have to be a probability ‘wiz’. You just have to know some basic odds. Learn to know how many cards in the deck will make a hand that you think will win, divide by how many cards you haven’t seen, and that tells you your odds of success. For example, an inside straight draw has four cards that will give you a straight. In Holdem, if you’ve seen the flop you’ve seen five cards, leaving 47 unseen. Four of those cards are winners for you, and 43 aren’t.

In loose, weak games, you can post a profit by playing pure math. Call if the odds of hitting your hand are less than the odds the pot is laying you. For example, there are 15 bets in the pot, and you’re about an 11-1 underdog to hit your hand. If there were no more bets after that, and your hand was guaranteed to be the best if it comes in, you will show a profit over time by calling in that situation.

But I’ve seen a lot of ‘wizzes’ get killed in tougher games because they think it’s all about those odds. They calculate odds to the second decimal point, do division in their heads, come up with precise answers, and think that makes them good poker players. But in so doing, they didn’t notice that the player behind them is preparing to raise, or that the guy they are trying to out-draw doesn’t even have a hand. In difficult games with small pots but lots of raisng and bluffing, pot odds become just a small part of the game, and judging your opponents is everything.

What you saw in the WSOP wasn’t just no limit, it was tournament no limit. Tournament strategy is very, very different from ring game strategy (a ‘ring game’ being a game in which there is no fixed endpoint, and everyone just plays to collect as much money as they can), because of the nature of the payouts and the escalating blinds that force people to play. In the later stages of a tournament, successful players are all about managing their chip stacks, knowing where they are in relation to the payout table, and knowing how to survive.

For example, I once played in a tournament where I only had one chip left. This tournament paid down to five places, and I was in sixth postion. The blind was heading my way, and within two hands I would be forced to put my last chip in. All the other players had pretty good stacks, so I figured I was finished. But then a player made a big mistake - He had a big stack of chips, but he called a raise from another player with a bigger stack of chips. He had something like AQ - normally a decent hand (although dangerous against a raise). But in this situation he was an absolute idiot for calling - If he had the other player beat he would win very little, but he was risking his entire stack when he was guaranteed to make money if he just sat tight for a couple of hands. In this case, he hit an Ace on the Flop - and was up against AK. And he put his whole stack in and lost, and I got into the money when there was no way in hell I should have.

Another thing that makes the WSOP play that you likely saw very different is that it was probably short-handed. Playing poker short-handed is very, very different from playing with ten players. Most home games are short-handed games, and hand evaluation needs change greatly in short-handed games.

This is a problem for home players who read poker books, because most poker books are aimed at 10-handed casino games. When you’re playing a home game with 3 or 4 people, the value of big cards goes up, and the value of suited and connected cards goes down. And there’s much less of a penalty for playing loose. So players who read poker books and then sit in a home game and fold 8 hands out of 10 don’t do so well, and the maniacs who raise every hand can actually be accidentally walking into the proper strategy.

In no-limit poker, pot odds calculations change dramatically, because you can trap a player for his whole stack in the right situation. I have called to make a 4-out inside straight for $20 with $10 in the pot, simply because I know my opponent well enough to know that he has a hand and he’ll never expect me to have a straight if I hit my gutshot, and if I make that straight I’ll take $500 off him.

In no-limit poker you can also get your draws snapped off by big bets behind you, which makes position more important. In a ring game, if there’s $120 in the pot and you call $10 for a gutshot, your call is correct if the straight is guaranteed to be the best hand. However, if someone then raises behind you, you will be forced to call again, but overall you will have made a slight mistake in calling. But not more than maybe 1/3 of a bet, assuming there are more than two callers. But in no-limit, someone can bet $10, you call with $120 in the pot, then someone behind you makes it $500. At that point, you’re going to have to fold your draw and your initial $10 call is dead money.

Also, no-limit is often about waiting for a situation in which you can trap someone for a huge amount of money. There are a lot of successful no-limit players who are terrible limit players, because they play too loose, too aggressive, and trickle away all their money. They can get away with this in no-limit because their style causes other people to play loose and aggressive back at them, and they’re very good at setting up a trap in which the other player wins lots of small pots and then gets killed when he makes that one mistake.

24

In much the same way that 1 is more than 20.

25

Sorry to hijack, but I just wanted to say that I finally made some money at poker for the first time Friday. :slight_smile: It was pretty nickel and dime (literally), and it wasn’t all Hold ‘Em (altho’ I came in third in the tourney and got my stake back), but I made at least five bucks.

It was very good for my self-esteem, even though I got incredibly lucky in places (such as deciding to call an opponent’s all-in in the tournament with K-6-9-irrelevant, and my hand K-6 - probably a stupid thing to do, considering his aggressiveness - and seeing to my horror that he had K-9… Then getting a 6 on the river)…