Poker News

Ashley Adams

Rockingham Park (known familiarly as “The Rock”) in Salem, New Hampshire is now home to a huge poker room. I visited the Rock, and noticed, in addition to a lot of tournament and live hold’em action, a most unusually structured low stakes stud game.

Here are the specifics. Eight players each ante $1.00, with a $2.00 forced bet. Players may bet $1.00 or $2.00 on any round. There is a 10 percent rake up to a maximum of $5.00. That’s like a $10-$20 game with a $10 ante!!! Wild, no? It caused me to think about what an optimum strategy for such a game would be. I should tell you in advance that most players were extremely loose and passive. About five people saw fourth street typically and nearly that many - usually at least three or four — stayed until the river.

There is an old poker adage that one should play tight in a loose game and loose in a tight game. Many people follow that adage as if it’s gospel. This game is an excellent example of why the adage is best discarded.

You should be enormously loose in this loose game. The huge starting pot makes even remote drawing hands that can turn into monsters profitable. Low pairs, 2-flushes headed by an ace, even two big cards are surely worth the initial bring-in or even an initial raise. This is especially true if your opponents are not likely to ram and jam the pot constantly - allowing you to draw cheaply on subsequent betting rounds. Adding to this is the strong possibility that some of your opponents, lured by the huge initial pot relative to the size of the bet they must call, are also likely to be playing sub-standard hands.

A good way of thinking of an optimum strategy for this game is to imagine that an anonymous donor put $1,000 in every pot before you started to play. How would you approach a $2 limit game with that alteration? You’d want to be in every hand that you had any chance whatsoever of winning. And you’d want to do whatever you could to convince other people not to be in hands that they had even a microscopic chance of winning.

Consider this hand: You hold Ah 6h/7d. A player to your left brings it in with the 3c. Five players call. The action is to you. In a standard $10-$20 game you’d fold this dog. But in this weird variation you should absolutely call and probably raise if you think it will knock out any players behind you. You are getting 11-to-1 odds on your call ($22 in the pot for your $2 call). This is a huge potential return. Of course this assumes that your cards are reasonably alive. If your aces and hearts are exposed elsewhere even the relatively enormous pot doesn’t warrant playing this hand.

Much of your play on later streets will be dictated by whether your betting action has any effect on your opponents. Can you get them to fold with a raise, a re-raise, or a check raise? If you can then you must use these tactics to limit the field, decreasing the people who are competing against you for the inflated early pot. If you can’t push your opponents out of pots, then you should satisfy yourself to call the bets of others until you are either certain that you will win the hand - in which case you should bet and raise to build the pot you will surely win; or check and call all bets until you are certain you have lost the hand.

Though I couldn’t get a seat when I visited, I’m eager to return and test out my theory of winning play. But I have to hurry. I understand that New Hampshire state regulations may allow for an increase to a $5.00 maximum bet in this game - changing the strategic considerations considerably.

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