Should You Be Concerned by a Little Thing Like the Ante?

Hi. Come on in. I'm making potato pancakes like grandma taught me. She learned how to make them in the old country. I like mine slightly crisp.

You wanted to know more about the ante. Good. Most players don't think much about it. They consider the ante to be inconsequential at the most, and an unnecessary bother at the least. Incorrect!

The ante is really a much larger subject than it seems upon first thought. I'll attempt to show its importance with an example.

Here's a lesson I learned about the importance of the ante some years ago: I was playing in a $10-$20 draw game in California, and was tired after 10 hours of continuous play. As I put out my $2 ante, I noticed I had $200 in my stack – exactly the amount of my buy-in. I was dead even. It felt like a good time to leave, so after throwing away a trash hand, I picked up my chips and cashed in.

While driving home, I thought back over my playing day, as I usually did and still do. I was looking for flaws in my game, mistakes that I could correct. I realized that having broken even, I had anted the entire day at no cost to my bankroll. It had come from my winnings. Winnings? But I had broken even. What winnings? I began to calculate in my head the cost of the antes for the day.

Assuming 30 hands an hour at $2 per ante, that's $60 an hour for 10 hours: $600! I had to have won $600 during that playing session, but never was I aware of being more than $200 ahead. The continual antes kept draining my profit. I was a $600 winner but the antes made me a break-even player. Inconsequential? Hardly.

Every pot you win is made up in part by the antes. Even games without an ante, but with a forced bet from the high or low card, or a blind, in effect, do have an ante. While the antes are the smallest part of most pots, they do add up. Three wins an hour in a full stud game with a $1 ante adds $24 worth of antes per hour to your stack. Six wins adds $48, and so on.

The ante would not be a factor if you were to win an equal share of all of the pots played. You'd just keep getting your money back. But you – being a smart, skillful, and, therefore, winning player – do not win an equal share of the pots played. This is because, being a discerning player, you do not enter as may pots as most players. So, the ante is actually a loss to overcome.

A game with a high ante may be too much to overcome for the conservative player. He'd have to loosen his playing requirements or find a game with a lower ante structure, and thus a higher profit potential from the standpoint of the ante.

Low-limit players usually don't have an ante to contend with, but if you play in a game with an ante, you must think about ante-stealing. Ante-stealing occurs anytime you raise on third street, trying to win the antes and low-card money without opposition, when you do not necessarily hold a hand of value. You are "stealing" the antes. If done correctly, it can be quite profitable. If not done at all, it will drain you if you don't win enough to replace the antes you put in on every hand.

For example, in a $10-$20 stud game with a $1 ante and 30-40 hands per hour, it's not too difficult to see that if you were to just sit and not play a hand, your stack would deplete by $30-$40 every hour. That's a lot to overcome. You overcome it by ante-stealing.

Ante-stealing is almost always done from a late position in the medium limits, after all or most of the other players have acted. If everyone has folded when the action gets to you, and there is only the forced-bet low card in the pot, it would be extremely foolish of you to fold and surrender all of that money lying out there to what is probably a nothing hand. So, you raise, he folds, and you profit.

When another player has already voluntarily entered the pot before the action gets to you, forget about stealing the antes. He came in with something, and if you don't have "something," fold and wait for the next hand.

Steal as many antes as you can as often as you can.

Every game is different as to how much ante-stealing you can get away with. It depends on the aggressiveness of your opponents. Pay attention, so that you won't put your foot into any traps. If they are tight noncallers, steal a lot. If they are loose-aggressive types who play back at you, steal less. But, steal you must or watch your stack deplete a dollar at a time.

We sure wiped out most of those pancakes. I'll have to make them again sometime. Now I tire and need rest. Take those last two and kill the light on your way out.

Editor's note: Roy West, author of the best seller 7 Card Stud, the Complete Course in Winning (available from Card Player), continues to give his successful poker lessons in Las Vegas to both tourists and locals. Ladies are welcome. Get his toll-free 800 number from his ad on Page 91.