After a stellar start to my play chip career at FullTiltPoker.NET, where in a few days I ran my initial 1,000 chips up to 100,000, lost them back down to 10,000, ran them back up to 100,000, and then went broke, I’ve been struggling. In addition to getting cold decked, where I’ve sat for hours without many playable hands, I have literally never seen so many two- and three-outers hit before in my life. An “out” is a card that’s left in the deck that can help your hand. For example, if I have a pair of aces and my opponent has a pair of kings, my opponent must catch one of the two remaining kings in the deck to beat me. Hence, he has a two-outer. They kept hitting. These soul crushing suckouts are the reason my chip stack has been so wildly variant.
After going bust, I’ve had a bitch of a time building up a stack again. It seems like every low limit table I play at is filled with noobs who go all-in with any two cards and hit them. At one point I got so frustrated with getting beaten this way that I actually started playing bad hands for all my chips thinking that they had to win. 😉 I also tried waiting until there were several all-ins ahead of me and just calling, hoping to get lucky, and triple up or better – just so I could go play at the next higher limit table where, presumably, there’d be fewer shenanigans and more serious play. That strategy didn’t work either.
So for now I’ve defaulted to the way many poker players get started building their bankrolls: I play 10/20 Limit games now. Limit games are different than No Limit games in that you can only raise one bet at a time, rather than put more or all of your chips on the line at any one time. There’s a lot less of a rush to be had playing limit, it’s a slower game, and much more mathematical in it’s play. The best hand always wins, and more often than not, the best possible hand is shown. It’s a game of odds: when it costs you one bet to possibly win 20 bets, you have the right odds to make that bet because there’s hand in poker that’s worse than a 16:1 dog. Now, if you’re drawing to one card and one card only, on the river, you only have a 2.5% chance of getting that card. But if you need say, any of the four remaining sixes in the deck, you have nearly a 10% chance of getting it on the river. That means one time out of ten you’ll hit it. If the pot is laying you 10 bets to call one bet, it’s mathematically the correct play to make that bet, despite the long odds. It only has to pay out one time out of ten to be the mathematically correct play.
So I’ve been grinding it out at the limit tables. I’ve doubled my initial 1,000 to just over 2,200, and am less bitter about losing to suckouts because they’re a lot easier to read in limit hold ’em – and they only cost me one more bet. I’m working on my reads, which are pretty spot-on, despite not being able to see the players behind the cards. Limit is easy that way. Limit is also known as “No Fold ‘Em Hold ‘Em” because so many times people call down to the river card. It’s easy to spot trips when they’ve just smooth called, the board pairs, and they suddenly raise. It’s easy to spot a flush when they hit. Limit hold ’em becomes a dance of sorts, trying to play your cards properly, yet still throw off your opponents. I have purposefully fired three barrel bluffs, knowing I was going to get called down and lose, just to put that little question in my opponents’ heads: Does he have it this time? Or is it another bluff? And so the music plays on and we dance our little dance…
I will keep playing 10/20 Limit until I have made between five and ten thousand, then I’ll move back to the 25/50 No Limit tables and hope my luck has changed and that my time at the Limit tables has reinforced some of the studying I’m doing away from the tables. After all, I want to play the game as skillfully as I can and not need to rely on luck to win.
