I wouldn’t spend too much time playing Limit hold’ em, unless it’s uber-convenient and you find you enjoy it. Because there is very little you can learn from it that will help you be a better no-limit player, and no-limit is by far the more profitable game for a good player (downside: bad players go broke faster…). It’s like playing checkers hoping to get better at chess.
Three of the biggest skills needed in no-limit is a) understanding proper bet-sizing to accomplish your goal for that bet, 2) understanding pot odds to ensure you’re making +EV plays, and forcing your opponents to make -EV plays, and c) learning hand-reading skills based on villain’s bet sizes and bet-sizing patterns. In limit hold 'em when bet-sizing is fixed/capped, none of those skills are all that applicable. For example - in limit hold 'em, it’s often correct to call any bet on the turn or river (especially heads up) because of the pot odds you’ll be getting and you’ll know exactly how big of bet you’ll be facing on the river…
Let me guess (as much to test my understanding, so correct me if I’m wrong, Turble): The Hero is betting on the turn. Assuming the Villain is on a straight-flush draw, the Villain knows that if he calls and hits, he wins, and assumes that in that event things would end up all-in at the end of the river. Therefore his payoff if he calls and hits is the pot at that point (including the Hero’s bet) plus the Hero’s remaining stack (this is the ‘implied’ part).
So the Villain’s EV for calling is (the pot plus the Hero’s remaining stack) times (the 1 in 40-ish chances of hitting his straight-flush.) He needs to risk only the current bet (he’ll check/fold if he doesn’t hit his straight flush at the end). If the Hero’s current bet is less than 1/50th of (the pot plus Hero’s remaining stack) then Villain has correct (implied) odds to call. *
An all-in is almost certainly going to not give correct implied odds for a call, but a small bet with deep stacks might.
There’s also the theory of implied tilt odds, which says that – for certain opponents – even if your EV on that hand isn’t good enough to justify calling, hitting a one-outer would put your opponent on tilt and make them play so poorly in following hands (plus a big chance to affect your table image), that it’s worthwhile to call.
It happens to be on my way home from a number of locations I work at.
Without drawing you a map, basically the situation is that I live in a city that has no casino. Driving to a casino costs mileage, and that costs money, which is no different from losing money at the table. To get anywhere, I have to drive at least 50-60 kilometres (Niagara Falls, Brantford) or even longer. Even in my cheap Hyundai, Brantford, which is 100 klicks round trip, is $35-$40 in gas and wear and tear. It would be stupid to forget that.
But my job takes me all over the province and down into Michigan and Ohio. So while it would be insane to drive to the Hollywood Toledo just to play poker, as it happens I have a customer in Toledo, so I might as well zip over there when I’m in Toledo anyway. Same with Sarnia, Windsor, Detroit, Gananoque, Ottawa, and various other poker locations that I have to drive past. If my employer’s gonna pay the mileage, that eliminates the biggest ancillary expense.
I’d never played poker in Brantford so it was worth a look. It’s a bizarre room, though I suppose they all are. Brantford is not a big town - it boasts 90,000, but that is based on a municipal boundary of ludicrously expansive size - and is about 25 miles from the nearest large city, Hamilton (about half a million.) It’s best known for two things: it’s the home town of Wayne Gretzky (everything in the city is named after Gretzky, though I don’t believe Gretzky himself has set foot in the place in years) and is the place Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
The room was very busy, though. 14 tables were running, ten ring games and four for a tournament, on a Tuesday. Many of the players knew each other and clearly played there a lot. Some of the regulars were, nonetheless, indescribably horrible.
Oh I fully understand implied odds/reverse implied odds. Just don’t quite understand is Turble’s usage here in the context of the quads hand. I mean, Hero would have to be impossibly, incredibly, uber-deep for villain to have anywhere -near- the correct implied odds to draw to a two-outer. With only about 4% equity in the hand with one card to come, villain needs implied odds of over 21:1! In the quads hand, the pot is $110 on the turn. Villain checks, and let’s say Hero bets small - only half-pot, like $60. Villain needs to make at least 22x the $60, or $1320, less the $110 already in the pot - so Hero would have to have another *$1200 *behind for villain to consider calling to hit his straight flush.
So clearly we’re not shoving to ‘make it too expensive’ for villain to draw out; villain is already priced out. No, we bet/raise for *value because we can put Villain squarely on a King that is never, ever folding (especially *once leads out on the turn, he has a King like 100% of the time).
This has gone way beyond being accessible to casual and beginning players. I don’t want to turn this into any kind of a pissing match. DragonAsh is obviously a knowledgeable NL player and I agree with most of his statements, but on this point I will have to agree to disagree.
The other area where we disagree is that I would recommend a person learn all the games. It’s sad to chose between sitting in a bad NL HE game or going home when there is a super-juicy Stud or Omaha or Limit Hold 'em game on the next table but you don’t know how to play … and mixed games can be extremely lucrative when they contain some players who are highly skilled in only game.
Me, I’ve played Limit HE, NL HE, Omaha both high and hi-lo, Stud and several of its split-pot variants, Draw, Loball, Triple Draw, and plenty of homegame goofy games, as well as backgammon, blackjack, pai gow and pai gow poker, slots, video poker, many kinds of tournaments (BJ, baccarat, horse race [and I know nothing about horses … it was knowledge of tournament tactics that gave me the edge]), etc., etc. I have filed many tax returns listing “gambler” as my occupation; the last twenty returns have listed “poker player”.
Well, I guess couldn’t resist a little pissing after all. Go ahead Dragon, I’ll let you make the last squirt.
RickJay Regarding the Getting Started book, I know you will find a lot of it trivial since you already have a bit of experience, but it will fill in some gaps for you that are essential. After you’ve read it, I would very much like to hear back from you with the answer to this specific question about your next playing session:
How many of the players at your table actually had no clue whatsoever about how to properly size a bet?
Point taken! If nothing else, just goes to show that even between [del]a fish and an [/del] two experienced players there can still be disagreements on optimal play…but of course there really is never only ‘one’ correct way to play any given hand since so much depends on the specific situation: table dynamics, other players, long-term history, recent history (did someone just lose a big pot? etc), stack sizes, and so on. It’s what makes poker such a fascinating hobby - and how often can we *make *money from a hobby?
Spoken like a true degen
We actually do agree on playing other games to improve your NL game! I highly recommend Omaha - it’s essentially being forced to play an entire hand of NL hold ‘em each street; really helps your overall hold’ em game - from learning how to quickly spot hard-to-notice outs, to understanding concepts such as blockers etc. I guess I just disagree somewhat on the usefulness of specifically playing limit hold 'em…but if you can essentially save 15%/hr over your winrate at NL, it may well be worth it, especially since you should see far less variance.
Anyway, my final words of advice:
at low-stakes live games, the name of the game is *value - *99% of your player pool are drooling calling stations that will make the mistake of calling far too much (it’s the rare low-stakes player that makes the mistake of folding too often). You can’t bluff a donkey. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be c-betting etc, just means think long and hard before making a huge bluff on the river after missing your draw. You’d be -shocked- at what people will call with.
Play solid starting hands, and play in position. You’re UTG with AT? Chuck it. Early position with K7s? Throw it away. Tempted to complete in the small blind with 78s? Muck it. Just eliminating these basic pre-flop mistakes will give you a -huge- edge over the most of the table.
Suited Aces look pretty, but the vast majority of beginners are huge losers with suited Aces. Best to avoid 'em initially…
There are, essentially, on two reasons to bet: to get a better hand to fold (bluffing) or to get called by a worse hand (for value). There are cases where the reasons overlap, but essentially every bet should be focused on mainly one of those two reasons. Try to have a concrete reason for why you’re betting before putting a single penny in the pot.
Finally - get your butt over to seatopenpoker.net and crushlivepoker.com. Bart Hanson’s podcast and videos will be by far the best investment you ever make into your poker game - the podcasts in particular will be excellent if you do a lot of driving.
Trust me, the shock is receding. Well, maybe it isn’t. I cannot believe the utter trash people ride to the river.
I played more 5/10 limit last night. (The Miller book does a nice job explaining limit, and it’s easier to calculate and predict pot odds, so I don’t mind playing it. You guys might disagree on its usefulness, but I’m enjoying it and there’s logistical advantages to visiitng that room.) Anyway, for the first hour and a half plus, I quite literally did not get a single playable hand, not one. Well, once I called on the button with something mildly promising, ace-something suited, missed the flop, and tossed it, and I got a few free looks in the big blind which resulted in nothing I could bet on.
I folded them all. Every single one. After 30 minutes I was like “heh, oh well” as, hand after hand, maniacs went to a showdown and one guy won with a pair of threes against the other guy’s queen high. One showdown actually ended in a guy WINNING with queen high. After 60 minutes I was starting to get frustrated. After 90 minutes I was thinking “I cannot believe the incredible shit these people are playing, and I am getting 9-3 offsuit EVERY. GODDAMNED. HAND.” Ten-two offsuit, fold. Seven-four offsuit, fold. The second best hand I got was a pair of deuces, but it was under the gun, so fold.
I was endlessly irritated at my luck, but I’ve never been prouder of the way I played poker. I folded every single time, time after time. It went on two hours, no hands, the worst luck I’ve ever had in dealt cards including online play. It was surreal. But I stayed patient and never once did a “fuck it, I need to do something” play. The blinds were dwindling my stack; it was that bad, the button was coming around and around and oh look, 6-2 offsuit, fold.
And it paid off. When I finally hit a few hands I won several nice pots as the maniacs continued to bet on any card with a number or a letter on it. Then the cards went cold until I had to go home, up $159, but I’m not happiest of the hands I won, I’m happiest about the hands I folded. Those were why I ended up on the positive side. More importantly is not that I won last night, but that it’ll help me be a better player in the future. Stayed cool, played the right way, even when it seemed the deck was stacked against me.
Thank for the recommendation on Bart Hanson. I do a LOT of driving and for some reason the cops don’t like it when I read books on an iPad I’ve duct taped to my steering wheel.
Thsi is becoming a discussion about me and, in general, how to learn poker, but I’m curious as to why so many players are terrible. I mean, some of the terrible people knew the dealers by name and knew each other, they weren’t first timers. ** Given that there are so many books, online resources, opportunities to practice cheaply online, and people willing to provide advice, why do so many people not play at least rudimentary, safe, tight poker?**
Online, I never overvalue a simple pair. If there is no action I might try to take the pot, but if there is any resistance I have no problem letting it go.
But at the live tables I played, I could have that same pair and be thinking “These clowns have been calling bets with Queen high all night, my pair could be good here”. Of course, thats when the clown has hit a set or something. Dealing with unpredictable fish is a poker skill all of its own.
This sounds about right. I’m a RL poker dealer and supervisor and the lowest NLHE game we spread is 1-3. If you don’t play online (and very few Americans do now) that is the lowest you can go. You were playing even lower than that. The players were probably playing at that level because they couldn’t build the bankroll to go up or got mauled at higher levels. So, they opt to get mauled at the 1-2 game. The fact that there were regulars there familiar with each other and the staff is not particularly relevant. When I got started in poker over ten years ago there were regular players who where terrible. In the ensuing decade, I have played and dealt to many of them and the same players don’t appear to have gotten any better. Tight may be right, but tight ain’t fun. Play every hand and play it hard and when you win, you will win big. Granted, you don’t usually win, but after a few years of usually not winning, you get used to it. There are many players to whom net winnings are a subordinate priority to social interaction, chance of hitting the jackpot, alleviation of boredom (playing tight REALLY doesn’t fit this purpose) and the excitement of winning a huge pot by hitting a miracle card on the river. Because they don’t play to maximize their net win, they make it possible for patient, disciplined, knowledgable players to have a net win.
Sorry, that didn’t even answer the question. In short, the lowest stakes players in cyberspace are similar to the lowest stakes players in meatspace. It’s just that the lowest stakes games in meatspace are an order of magnitude or so higher than those in cyberspace.
At the lowest stakes you find mostly recreational players who are just playing for fun, much like they go bowling or shoot pool or play golf. They don’t actually expect to win, they hope to win. Players who learn to win tend to move up to higher stakes, so bigger games will have more skilled players and fewer totally clueless ones.
Let’s say you play (Limit) $2/$4. It will be rare to find a player with any actual poker skill. Depending on the rake, you may be able to earn up to three big bets (BB) per hour.
Move up to $4/$8 and you’ll still see mostly unskilled players who get a slightly bigger paycheck or pension. You will also find those who learned to tighten up some (The older the player, the bigger the kicker.), the occasional guy who is making an effort to learn, and maybe a $10/$20 player who lost his bankroll and is grinding back. Since there are a couple of players in the game who are playing more reasonably than at the $2/$4, you may only be to win a little more than two BB per hour.
Once you get up to $10/$20, there are going to be some serious players who are earning a living. A good player will earn maybe 1.5 BB per hour. A good $20/$40 player may earn one BB per hour, and by the time you get to $60/$120, top players are earning one/half of a big bet per hour. Each step up in stakes means more pros and fewer live ones at the table.
So the answer to your question is: You just ain’t played with the big kids yet. You’re bullying the preschoolers and taking their lunch money.
Nate Silver actually talks about this in his book The Signal and The Noise (Nate was very active in the online poker world during this time, doing quite nicely for himself overall). His analysis showed that online poker was very easy to win prior to the enactment of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA.) To quote:
Nate includes himself in that last sentence - once the pool of amateurs dried up, he stopped winning and finally withdrew from online competition after losing $135,000 after passage of the Act.
Your cited numbers are fascinating, because they seem to paint the professional (which I’ll never be, BTW) as facing a rather dismal mathematics. $60 an hour - and this is even discounting variance - isn’t really that much money for someone to play as a legitimate professional. (Here I am obviously talking about your pro at a 60/120 table, not a mastermind like Stu Ungar or Daniel Negreanu.) It sounds like a lot on the face of it, but it’d be a horrible grind to play enough to pile up the cash, and of course you are your own employer and so have to account for things like health care, insurance, retirement savings, drug plans… $60 is really more like $45, so it’s a fairly normal professional’s salary but one that has to be earned at unusual hours. And, of course, unless you live in Vegas or Atlantic City, travel would likely be involved.
Do people LAST at those levels? What’s the usual career-span of a pro? Do a lot of them end up getting normal jobs and just playing semi-regularly for extra cash?
Pros plying their trade in B&M establishments almost invariably live near them. Who wants a commute on top of the grind and odd hours pros usually keep? However, there are many very skilled, professional class players who are not pros. Simply put, with the requisite intellect, discipline and dedication, one can typically do better with a “real job” than by playing poker. I was beating low stakes games for $15-20/hour in 2002 and have played in some private games that I could take $30/hour. But, I make more than that dealing, never lose money when I’m sitting box and get med insurance to boot. We have some locals who can beat the 2-5 NL games (got to be over $50-60/hour). But they have jobs like psychologist, stock broker and university professor. It can be fun for the footloose and fancy free, but going strictly by potential income, most are better of with a more boring career choice.
Pros either live near the games or they do the commute – just like everybody else.
I think most wouldn’t say they have to work unusual hours. I think they, like me, would say “I get to choose my own hours.” I like to stay up til 4 or 5am and sleep til noon.
Many just don’t want to wear a suit, don’t want to punch a clock, don’t want to take orders, don’t want to shave or get a haircut, and on and on. It’s a personal choice and, like most things in life, there is a price to pay for making that choice.
Some don’t have the formal education for an equally lucrative job, but many do. There are no dumb professional poker players; the game requires fast and deep thinking. I spent a lot of hours playing with Mason Malmuth at the Mirage on the $20/$40 in the 1990s. He has an advanced degree in statistics and was working for the US Census Bureau when he says he got tired of scribbling in a big book with a little pencil so he started playing the low limit draw games in Gardena. He published several books that still do very well, yet he was a regular fixture in the $20/$40.
A lot of people don’t last, even if they are able to beat the games. Losing streaks are very stressful and everybody runs into them. It takes a great deal of self-discipline; no paid sick days, no paid vacations, if you don’t play, you don’t get paid. You can play the hours you choose, but you gotta put in enough hours. A lot of players underestimate the bankroll they need and bust out during a bad streak; a good $10/$20 player needs a bankroll of around $8,000 to insure that he doesn’t go broke and higher limits require progressively more in relation to the limit.
Most of the homegame champs who show up in Vegas cardrooms disappear within a couple of months. Most simply go broke because the games are tougher than they are used to playing. Some succumb to the ever-present lure of free alcohol.
I could ramble on for hours. Let’s just say that most people just wouldn’t be happy as a professional poker player but some few can’t see themselves doing anything else.
Low-stakes games play a lot differently than higher-stakes games. If you only play a few times a month, or you’re a losing player, and/or you don’t have the bankroll to play higher, you just want to play for fun, etc…you’re playing 1/2 or 1/3, maybe 2/5. At those stakes, players tend to be weak-passive, they call too much, don’t know how to fold hands, etc. In general, playing tight, solid ABC poker is the most ‘reliable’ (if not necessarily the most profitable) way to win at the lower stakes (a good LAG will win more than a good TAG, but a bad LAG will go broke a hell of a lot faster than a bad TAG).
Problem is, if you only play once a week, who wants to spend their 4-5 hours at the casino folding hands? If you only play 20% of hands, and you only get 30 hands an hour, you could be at the table for 5 hours and play only 6 hands an hour, folding the other 24. Good players at the low stakes spend their time watching the other players like a hawk…but most players just get bored, so they’re playing around with their iPhone or iPad etc. Or they start trying to see more flops, semi-hitting so they continue on in the hand for a street or two, etc etc. Next thing you know they’ve been bleeding off chips for the last 2 hours, and they try to make it all back in one hand, and run into Aces etc.
I have a full-time job, so only play ‘for fun’, but I play more than most ‘recreational’ players - I average about 30 hours a month. I got into poker because I liked the math involved, and have been good enough at it that the last three family vacations have been essentially courtesy of the other guys in my player pool
I think my math-based play gives me a huge edge over the rest of the table. I’m almost always the only one at the table that knows exactly how much is in the pot at any given time, what my opponents’ stack sizes are, etc. I love it when we get to the river and villain is asking me how much I have in my stack. That’s a basic piece of information that I registered and considered the moment I decided to play a hand.
I suspect that playing poker for a living would be incredibly stressful. First of all, variance is a bitch. I’ve had fairly downswings (losing 5-6 BI in a month - that was the month I get stacked set-over-set three times in the same week), and long stretchs of essentially break-even play…if I depended on poker for a living I can’t imagine how that would affect my game. Imagine not only not making any money while being at work every day, imagine having to fork over money for the privalege of sitting down at your desk…
So unless the player has other revenue stream (i.e., coaching, etc), I suppose nearly all poker players go busto at some point or another, either because of variance, because of chasing losses, playing too high for their bankroll, etc, not to mention the all-to-common casino vices (drugs, dames & drink).
I know a handful of pros. The good ones are incredibly professional (and rare) - not just in their play at the tables, but how they conduct themselves away from the table. It’s easy to spot the ‘good pros’ vs the degenerate gamblers: The good pros will often get up from the table with more chips than they sat down with. The degen never leaves the table while he has chips in front of him. Variance takes care of that.
Boy, I hope you’re referring to Limit hold 'em, because $8000 is *laughably *small for a $10/20 no-limit bankroll, even for a good player. That’s only 4 buy-ins assuming a 100bb buy-in (and at a normal $10/20 game you’d probably be the short-stack…)
Just for reference, if you were a 5bb/hour winning player at $10/20 with a bankroll of $8,000 and a standard deviation of 120bb/100, your risk of ruin (going broke) is over 75%. Even with a bankroll of $20,000, your risk of ruin is 25%.
So how does a poker player pay himself? Once a bankroll of appropriate size is established, does s/he pay themselves out of money won in excess of the bankroll minimum?
Note: Don’t worry, I am honestly curious, not quitting my day job or building a serious bankroll. I’ve determined poker is fun to play a few times a week or when I’m on the road doing my real job, but if I had to do it for a living I’d very quickly dream of doing something else for a living.
