Poker News

Lou Krieger

Choosing Your Starting Hands. Choosing the right starting hands is just as important in no-limit hold’em as it is in a fixed-limit game, but there are significant differences in the kind of hands you should consider playing. The trick is to push every small edge in afixed-limit game, because your profit comes from small, repetitive edges, played time after time. In a fixed-limit game, you have to base your choice of starting hands accordingly.

But in a no-limit game you don’t necessarily want hands that offer a small edge. Instead, you’re in search of hands that can grow very big. A hand such as K-J is the kind that figures to make top pair with a good side card and show a profit in fixed limit games when played under the right circumstances. But in a no-limit game, you’re not after hands that can make one pair; you want to build hands that will allow you to go after all of an opponent’s chips in one fell swoop.

Here’s an example. A pocket pair of sixes is vulnerable in a fixed-limit game because the flop will almost always contain bigger cards, and any opponent holding cards ranked higher than six can easily wind up with a higher pair than yours. While the odds against flopping a set are 7.5-to-1 regardless of whether you’re in a fixed- or no-limit game, the pay off for flopping a set in a fixed-limit game is usually not sizeable enough to justify bucking those long odds.

But when you might be able to win an opponent’s entire stack if you’re lucky enough to flop a set, you can afford to call a smallbet in a no-limit game because you know that the cost to see the flop will be more than offset by those occasions when your measly pair of sixes grows into a very big hand.

Like so much in no-limit hold’em, choosing a starting hand is more often related to your chip count and your position in the betting order than to anything else. No-limit hold’em is all about implied odds, the money you figure to win if you get lucky and make a big hand. The more you and your opponent each have in front of you, the more you can take a flyer on hands that will probably be unceremoniously tossed away on the flop, but are hands that have the potential to grow very large indeed, and will enable you to win a very big pot when they do.

This is very different than fixed-limit hold’em, where you are looking for small edges in high volume pots. The choice of which hands to play in a no-limit game is heavily influenced by stack size. That’s another way of saying that hand selection in no-limit hold’em is driven by the chips you and your opponent each have available for play, and how willing your opponent is to commit all or most of his chips with something less than the best possible hand. And don’t forget position. Having position on your opponent guarantees that you bat last. Whenever you act after your adversary, you canplay any number of hands he can’t afford to, secure in the fact that your bet will force him to release his hand more often than not.

Be wary of risking your entire bankroll in a deep stack, no-limit game. When you play no-limit hold’em you should be willing to rebuy a couple of times without putting your entire bankroll in jeopardy. If you put everything on the line, a single, unlucky card can take you out of the game for quite some time while you look to cobble a new bankroll together. That might even mean getting a job (gulp).

We’ll finish this two-part series next issue.

Filed under: Poker News