Watch out for the guy in the hoodie with sunglasses on sitting in his chair backwards and thumping his foot like a rabbit every time he has a pair. 
“Getting Started In Hold 'Em” by Ed Miller is the correct answer to this question.
I endorse Phil Gordon’s books as well (they are much more entertaining) but the beginning book is Miller. If you buy it and apply its lessons you stand a very, very good chance at any low limit table.
I’ll second that. I bought it after it was previously recommended here in a different thread (perhaps by RickJay at that time as well) and two months later played my first nightly tournament in Vegas. Entered three times, won once, but was in it late in all three and had a blast. Even got a nice little card protector “trophy” for my trouble. Next trip, I’ll give the cash games a try, but to be honest, the tournament tables seemed to be a lot more fun to hang out with anyway.
The obvious form of tilt is the guy that just lost a big pot or took a bad beat. Usually they are more prone to calling lighter for the next few hands if they’re in a pot.
(On the flip side, if you just lost a big pot or took a bad beat, then pick up a big hand, you’re extremely likely to get paid off: players will put you on tilt when you start shoveling money into the middle. This past weekend, I got stacked for £450 after flopping a set, and villain in the hand hit a runner-runner flush on me. *Very *next hand, I pick up pocket kings and win all my money back when a guy thought I was tilting because I was pushing the action so hard).
A more subtle form of tilt: players that tighten up after winning a big pot because they don’t want to give up their gains. These players are more likely to fold to aggression for the next few hands.
You need to play with the same players for a long time - over several months at least - to get a decent read on the latter form of tilt; the former type of tilt is extremely common and can usually be spotted right away.
It’s been ages since I read a poker book. Ed Miller’s book is very well-known and highly regarded, as is Dan Harrington’s Cash Games series. That said - many of these books may well be a bit dated. You’re probably better off hitting sites such as 2+2 and checking out the cash game forums for better discussion of current games.
The only other thing I’ll add is that, again in my experience, it was easier to make/not lose too much money at no-limit, rather than limit Hold 'em. Somehow, my beginner’s head said to me, “Well, if the bets are limited, then there will be less of a risk of me putting a ton of money into a pot, just to have someone else take it on a suck-out.” Doesn’t work that way. It’s a very different game than no-limit. The small-ish bets make it easy to stay in a hand too long, and conversely, you can’t throw a large bet down and scare others out of the pot easily.
Despite the scary (to a newbie) potential for an all-in hand, no-limit was much easier for me as a rank beginner. Someone goes all-in and I’m looking at a pair of 9s? No brainer - I’m out. I wake up with aces? Throw a bunch of money in to narrow the field. I found that cheap no-limit was the easiest place to play a by-the-book tight-aggressive game as a beginner and be reasonably successful.
My wife, on the other hand, prefers Omaha Hi-Lo on the cheap tables. Especially in our local poker room, you get a lot of people at the Omaha table who are really Hold 'em players waiting for a table to open up. Again, with just a little bit of self-study in Omaha (which is more different than you might think from Hold 'em) she’s able to hold her own against people who think it’s just Hold’em with a couple of extra hole cards.
YMMV, of course.
I don’t have a cite, but there are supposed to be guys who have mastered control of the dice to the extent they can put the odds in their favor. They arrange the position of the dice in their fingers, put the minimum force in the throw, and claim that through practice they can increase the chance of certain combinations coming up as needed. If it’s true that the casinos are on the lookout for these guys and shut down games when they spot them playing then there may be something to it. However I haven’t seen anything but popular media reports about this, it may all be nonsense.
ETA: Well here’s a bit of info from Wikipedia on dice control. Inconclusive though. It’s not simply a matter of changing the odds on any one throw, the odds have to change enough to make the game favor the player instead of the house.
Of course, the reverse of this is that one unlucky break in No Limit and you lose every penny. An unlucky break in Limit and you still have money.
Limit can be a very frustrating game because not only do you lose to chasers, but you have to be the chaser. If you have a lot of preflop callers and you flop a flush draw, you will almost always have the pot odds to chase your flush draw, so you have to throw the money in over and over knowing you will probably lose but that the odds dictate you take the losses because the wins make it worth it. Since a flush draw comes after the flop about 35% of the time (granted, not all flushes, even A-high flushes, win, so your pot odds are a bit worse than that) it’s not at all unusual to have sessions where you have 14 flush draw opportunities and hit none. Then you’ll have a session where you have just 7 but hit 4, and the money’s piled up to your eyes.
I again recommend Miller’s books for Limit play. Personally I’d argue Limit is easier to start with; No Limit adds a lot of complexity in bet sizing and takes away a lot of the opportunities to make bets based on pot odds.
Having said all that there’s a lot of truth to what you say. Indeed, Miller and many others point this out. A simple strategy at low limit NL is simply to buy in with a shorter stack, wait until you have a great hand, and push it all in. Mathematically, with sufficient discipline this is effectively an unbeatable strategy in a cash game; you can literally hold your own against the best players in the world. You won’t make a ton of money (you can only win with a short stack a few times before it’s a big stack) but it’s an unassailable tactic. That allows you to learn the game gradually.
I guess the long and short of it, if we return to the OP, is that the best game to playing a casino is always poker. Even a beginner can read some basic strategy books and, with discipline, play an immensely fun game with better odds than almost any other casino game. $200 can last you a whole weekend at poker; it’s gone in no time at all at a slot machine.
What a coincidence; I’ve never lost money at poker, either.
Those change machines are wicked fun!
Heh.
It’s very easy to overdo this, though. In a very loose game you always have to factor in the possibility that the hand you are drawing to is dead or likely to be run down. The ultimate example of this is in Omaha Hi, where a second-nut flush draw is just about useless.
But you’re right for the specific example of a flush draw in a loose holdem game - they’re usually worth drawing to. One reason is that they are easy hands to play in a loose game - you either hit your draw or you fold. The hands that will kill you are ones like KTo - hands that are likely to flop top pair with a weak kicker, or a pair with a higher card on the board, or if they flop two pair they put a straight draw on the board. It can be very hard for some players to fold top pair when they are staring at a big pot, and even harder to throw away a hand like KTo before the flop when a lot of players have already called.
Loose games also suffer from the ‘school effect’, where a player can make a poor call with a weak draw, and it still hurts you if you have the best hand but it’s vulnerable. The general rule in poker is that if a player makes a mistake that costs him money, that mistake earns you money. In loose games this isn’t always true.
Hence the advice to beginners to play tight, tight, tight. Fold KTo.
It can lead to some head-shaking moments but if you play the “How Much Would I Have Lost If I’d Called” game it sure does add up.
I don’t get it. If a player makes a mistake that costs him money of course it will earn me money, on average. It has to. It might not in any given hand, of course. One hand is a binary thing; you lose or you win. But over the long run Player A’s -EV errors are always to my benefit.
I am sure one can provide specific examples where Opponent A making a specific type of -EV error results in a +EV for Opponent B that hurts me. Those aren’t super common, I wouldn’t think.
I know. Sometimes when the machine is hot, I go on these unbelievably long streaks. It’s like I can’t actually lose my money (unless I drop it on the floor and it rolls away, of course). I just get worried that the casino will catch on and chase me out. Bastards!
They happen all the time in loose games. I wrote an article about it once for Poker Digest and included all the math there. The reason those calls can hurt you if you have the best (but vulnerable) hand is that the number of ‘outs’ you have to remain the best at the end can be very small, and if that player takes away even one of them it can hurt you. What happens is that the error he makes earns money for the people with the best draws, and under some circumstances can take away money from the person with the best hand.
Imagine a situation where there’s a big pot and you’re holding the best hand with top pair. 8 people are still in - one with a flush draw, one with a straight draw, a couple with underpairs that can win if they hit their second pair or make trips. Now somebody calls with a hand that has only two outs. They’re not getting the odds to call, so they are making a mistake. But if those two outs come out of the 14 cards that you need to remain the best, you just lost 14% of your pot equity while gaining one small bet from the loser.
I can dig up the article and post a couple of math examples if you’d like, but the upshot is that these situations are more common than you’d think in a very loose game. that’s especially true in loose aggressive games where the pots are huge. In such games you’d almost always rather have the weak draws fold, even if they’d be making a mistake to call.
A long time ago I used to hang out some on the rec.gambling.craps newsgroup. There are several people who claim this ability and had had discussions there with a few of them. The ability they’re talking about is called “setting” the dice. The discussions went something like:
Them: I can set dice.
Me: Oh yeah, then how come you’re hanging out here and not living it up on your private beach?
T: It takes a lot of work - but [some other person] has calculated that you would just need to shift the probability of rolling a seven, from the usual 16.67%, down just a few percentage points, to shift the house advantage to your favor. That’s what I do.
M: OK, let’s go with those numbers. If you want to show that you can decrease the probability of rolling a seven by four percentage points, then you would need to roll the dice about fifty thousand times, and document every single roll, to be able to see that difference. Have you done that?
T: I don’t need to prove anything to you.
M: It’s not to me that matters, it’s to yourself - without taking that data, there is no way for you yourself to know whether you really have this ability.
T: [To someone else] I can set dice.
It was the same every time - the people claiming this seem to think that they got winning results, but none of them documented it, and didn’t have the numeracy to realize that they couldn’t know themselves without the data.
What CurtC just said, to a certain extent. Of course the only way of changing odds on 10,000 throws is to change the odds - very, very slightly, on one throw. I’d think it would take superhuman control of your hands and of the environment.
On the other hand I’m sure that I changed the odds of dice when I was playing Risk - unfortunately my talent increased the percentage of ones I got.
Just want to correct myself here:
I was in a hurry and was running out to pick up my kid. You’re not losing 14% of pot equity. With one card to come and 14 ‘outs’, you have about 31% pot equity. If someone calls and takes away 2 of those outs, your equity drops to 27%. So his call is costing you 4% of the pot.
Maybe an easier way to look at this is to imagine an extreme situation where you have the best hand but there are 8 other people in the pot, and they have so many draws to beat you that there are only four ‘safe’ cards left in the deck. Now the last guy calls with a two-out hand, and those outs happen to be two of your four cards. You just lost 50% of the equity in the pot, even though the other guy is making a large mistake by calling. The people who really benefit from that call are the ones with the draws that will beat him even if he makes his hand. So clearly in multi-way pots its not as simple as, “I always benefit when other players make mistakes if I currently have the best hand”.
But you don’t need such extreme situations for this effect to happen. And in every multi-way pot where the best hand can be beaten, the players on a draw share in the equity gain from another player’s playing error. Even if the situation is such that you gain slightly, your volatility goes way up and depending on your bankroll size you still might want that player to fold. A $.50 gain in equity might not be worth an additional 10% chance of losing a bit pot.
In terms of strategy, the upshot is that this makes position more important, and it means you should be more aggressive with raises when you have the best hand but it’s vulnerable.
For hand selection, it means avoiding hands that flop best-but vulnerable hands and loosening up on hands that either hit the flop big or can be thrown away. Suited connectors and pairs go up in value, and offsuit big cards with gaps go down in value.
When you have the best hand but it’s weak and there’s a large-ish pot already, your goal should always be to get everyone out of the pot. Don’t smooth call to induce more action. If you’re in early position and an aggressive player is in late position, check-raising can put a bunch of people in the position of facing two bets to call, and you can thin the herd.
If you’re in late position and someone close to you bets, raise for the same reason. Even if the game is so loose that it’s hard to get people out of the pot with a crowbar, making them pay two bets for their call will hopefully raise the size of their error to the point where you no longer lose from it. The other advantage of raising in this situation is that it will often give you information about where you stand. If I’ve got KTo, the flop is K98, and it gets checked to the guy on my right who bets, I’ll raise then watch the field carefully. If I get re-raised from someone in early position, I’m either done right there, or if I judge that another K or a T will help me I might pay one more small bet since the pot is huge. But on the turn if I don’t improve I’m gone. But if you just call after a late position bet, and six other people call, you know nothing about where you stand and the decision on the turn gets even harder.
And also, you have to be ready to get off a hand even if you suspect it’s the best if there are a lot of draws against you. For example, if you hold KTo in last position in an unraised pot and the flop is Ks9s8c, there’s an early position bet and six callers, the best thing might be to simply fold. Even if you’re the best, the odds of remaining the best are poor. Of course, reading the table is critical - if the callers are people who usually call anything, maybe it’s worth it. But if the game is a little tighter than that on average and suddenly you get a bunch of callers, you can suspect multiple draws and maybe even someone slow-playing a big hand. Time to go.
In my experience, there are very few low limit poker players capable of laying down a hand like that in such a situation.
Furthermore, assuming any could control the way the dice landed, they’d have to do it while retaining a fairly ‘normal’ throwing style. If the pit boss saw you carefully tossing the dice in a way that only caused them to slide when they landed or maybe roll over just once, you’d soon find yourself barred. The fact that no one gets barred playing craps should tell you that this isn’t possible.
I do, however, think it might just be possible to ‘clock’ a roulette table without the use of a computer. The theory is that if you know the initial positions of the ball and the wheel, and you know the velocity of the ball, you can predict which number will be under the ball when it comes out of the track. This doesn’t give you perfect prediction because of the randomizers built into the wheel, but when done with precision it can give you as much as a 30% advantage over the house.
This has been done in the past with a computer. Imagine having a computer in your pocket wired to a toe switch and a tactile sensor. Then the ball starts, you tap. When the ball comes around to the same spot, you tap again. Now the computer knows the velocity of the ball. Tap again when the 0 comes in front of you, and tap a fourth time when it comes around again. Now the computer knows the velocity of the wheel. Tap in code to enter the number that the ball was over when it started, and when the ball lands on a number, tap in the value of the number.
This is the data collection part. Do this a few hundred times, and the computer can tell whether the ball is governed purely by chance or whether there’s a bias to the wheel. If there’ s a bias, you switch the computer to ‘run’ mode and do the same thing. Now the computer uses the tactile sensor to buzz out the encoded predicted ball number. You have to do this fast and ‘late post’ your bet. But it’s been done, and people have gained up to 30% over the house this way.
Of course, it’s also a felony to use a computer in this way. The question remains, is it possible to train a human to do that without the computer? I’m not sure, but people are capable of some pretty astounding accuracy in some areas. I don’t know if a person could be trained to do that or not. I suspect not, but I wouldn’t rule it out as remotely possible.
If you’re playing craps, the dice have to bounce off the wall. Having the dice slide to halt after six inches won’t help you.
Ah, I understand now, and to be honest after I thought about it a bit I realized this sort of thing is more likely to happen than I’d though in very loose games. All your advice is extremely sensible and of course keeps going back to the same basic advice given to all new poker players; play tight and don’t play too fancy.
You don’t often see games THAT loose, but you do see them, especially in very low-limit Limit games. The 2-5 in Brantford is ludicrous.
I’d humbly suggest that the ability of a human to do that is so vanishingly rare that it doesn’t really matter - when combined with the ability to keep changing dealers, and also the ability to simply “ring the bell early” and crack down on a player that’s otherwise winning more than you would like, Casinos are not going to lose much to such people.
What I would suggest - that as computers and technology keep getting better and better, computers will be able to be used more often to “beat” the wheel. The obvious answer (and what I have already observed) - bets must be entered before the ball is spun.