Decisions and Leverage in Limit Hold'em

In a recent issue of Card Player (Vol. 17, No. 8, April 9, 2004), Rolf Slotboom, one of my favorite writers, wrote about the ongoing debate over the relative skill level required in limit, pot-limit, and no-limit poker.

Rolf cited Poker Essays, where Mason Malmuth made the following points:

"Taking a simple example from Texas hold'em, let's compare limit with no-limit play. Suppose in a multiway pot you flop top pair; it is a pair of jacks, and you are in an early position. How should you play this hand?

In Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players, which I co-wrote with David Sklansky, and which was written for limit play, we point out that this is a tough situation. Specifically, in today's modern structure, the bet on the flop in limit hold'em is often not large enough when compared to the size of the pot to make it correct for drawing hands – including holdings such as bottom pair – to throw their cards away. On the other hand, if you try for a check-raise, hoping to reduce the field to a small number of players, and no one bets, the free card you have given may easily cost you the pot. In reality, the situation is usually much more complicated than what I have described. You also must consider the size of the pot, the texture of the flop, the number of players you are against, their playing characteristics, your kicker, whether the pot was raised preflop and its implications, and a whole lot more. Given these factors, it doesn't seem that limit poker is an easy game; in fact, it is not an easy game to play at the expert level. No wonder some of the old-timers complain that in limit hold'em you cannot protect your hand.

Now, suppose you are playing no-limit hold'em. The same situation would be quite easy. You would simply bet enough, perhaps about the size of the pot, to make it incorrect for a drawing hand to call. If someone does play, he is either making a mistake or you are in trouble. It is as simple as that, and bad players do make a lot of costly errors in no-limit hold'em."

Slotboom stated that although Malmuth's remarks were controversial, his viewpoint was very understandable. "Limit players," according to Slotboom, "would claim that limit poker is more complicated, as they have more decisions to make, while big-bet players would claim that even though this may be the case, their decisions are much more meaningful, because one single mistake may cost you your entire stack, rather than just a single bet."

Both Malmuth and Slotboom seem spot-on in their analyses, so where's the dispute and why the controversy? I'm not sure I see any points of strategy or poker theory in dispute, only some differences in how the question is framed.

Let me explain by taking you back to Malmuth's example about whether you should come out betting or try for a check-raise when you flop jacks – I'm presuming your kicker is big enough so that it's not an issue here – and are holding top pair in early position. The decision to bet or try for a check-raise doesn't seem all that tough, at least it's not difficult in terms of the theory underlying the choices confronting the player who flopped a pair of jacks.

What is tough is assessing the impact or leverage that this decision will have. After all, we don't make decisions in a vacuum at the poker table. Decisions are made to move our opponent to take one action or another. Malmuth points out that the " … bet on the flop in limit hold'em is often not large enough when compared to the size of the pot to make it correct for drawing hands – including holdings such as bottom pair – to throw their cards away." He's right. It's not the choice itself that's hard to make, it's the fact that all the options available to the player who is trying to protect his hand are inadequate to the task.

Betting won't scare anyone off. Trying for a check-raise runs the risk of giving a free card, and in some games the cost of a double bet might not even be sufficient to deter someone from chasing you. The weapons at your disposal are inadequate. It's like trying to hit a whiffle ball out of a big league ballpark. Even Barry Bonds would fail at that.

Malmuth and Slotboom are not the only theorists who have commented on the inadequacy of weaponry available to limit hold'em players. From time to time, others have suggested a structure for limit hold'em in which betting escalates a little more dramatically than it does now, thus giving a bettor some leverage that he might use to protect his hand.

The quandary Malmuth described is not easily resolved. But, in my opinion, it's not the difficulty of the decision that's the problem; it's the fact that whatever choice you make has a low likelihood of succeeding due to the inadequacy of whatever strategic ploys can be brought to bear on your opponents when playing limit hold'em.

Trying for a check-raise and betting out are both inadequate to the task, since neither option is likely to move your opponent off the dime, and that negates the very reason you make a choice in the first place. If you're the guy with the pair of jacks, you want to either push your opponent out of the pot or pull him into it as long as he's paying too high a price to play. But if neither weapon is up to the task, it's not the decision that's tough, it's the inadequacy of the options available to the player initiating the action. You know what you want to do, but you just can't get it done with the tools at hand.

From where does this inadequacy stem? It's part and parcel of the game's structure. If you were to modify limit hold'em so that bets prior to the flop were one unit, bets on the flop were two or three units, and bets on the turn and river were four or five units, you'd have an entirely different game. Deciding what to do when you flop a pair of jacks in early position and want to protect your hand would be easier. Much of the time you could bet a sufficient amount to make drawing incorrect, and if that were the case, you'd win if your opponent folded. In addition, you'd have a positive long-term expectation if he called when the price was just too high to justify it.

The question of whether limit or big-bet hold'em is more difficult has been around for a while, and it's not going away anytime soon. Big-bet poker creates tough choices because the implications of a wrong decision can be catastrophic, while limit hold'em produces many situations in which none of the options available to a player will enable him to knock an opponent one way or the other.

The recent surge in poker's popularity has produced one possible compromise in game structure: the introduction of no-limit games with a fixed buy-in. These games, in which there's a cap on the amount a player can buy in for – a typical game features blinds of $1-$2, with a maximum buy-in of either $100 or $200 – provide no-limit decision-making and the ability to protect one's hand with a big bet. But because of the cap on the buy-in, they also mitigate the catastrophic nature of a single bad decision. While some players derisively refer to these games as big-bet poker with training wheels, the game structure straddles a middle ground between limit hold'em and real big-bet games.

Does this mean I'm calling for a change in the way Texas hold'em ought to be structured? No, I don't think so – not yet, anyway. But it's an issue worth thinking about, and if the structure of hold'em can be modified to improve the game, everyone benefits at the end of the day.

Raise your game with Lou Krieger at http://www.royalvegaspoker.com. His newest book, Winning Omaha/8 Poker, is available through Card Player.