Restricting the Stakes

Here is an excerpt of an e-mail that I received from a poker dealer in Deadwood, South Dakota, who is a member of the Poker Dealer Association there. It concerns the restriction of law on poker stakes in that town.

"The city of Deadwood, South Dakota, legalized gaming in 1989 with a $5 maximum bet until 2001, at which time the limit was raised to $100. The town has 12 to 15 tables in five cardrooms. Montana cardrooms (dealers and players) set the standards we practice today. Through the years, this foundation has become inconsistent. With the growing popularity of poker, we would like to incorporate standard guidelines for all Deadwood poker rooms, for both tournaments and cash games. Is there something on the subject you could suggest that would help us become more uniform?"

Here is the reply (slightly edited) that I sent him: "I am happy to help you in any way that I can. You are more than welcome to use my poker rules in your cardrooms. That is why I wrote them and make them available at no charge. Note that Version 5 of my rules is out now, which I believe to be the best set of cardroom rules anywhere. I am going to write a column on this subject in Card Player as a result of your question. I will e-mail you a copy of it. Thank you very much." So, this column is for those people who are looking for some assistance in limiting the size of poker games in a reasonable manner.

There is no such thing as a standard way of regulating the size of poker games. Personally, I believe that the size of a poker game does not need to be regulated, because water finds its own level. By this I mean that players in a $1,000 buy-in game can afford the stakes they're playing for about as well as the players in a $100 buy-in game, or for that matter, a $10 buy-in game. However, I understand that not everyone feels the same way – particularly legislators. A legislator often wants a way of reassuring the public that people are not going to lose more than they can afford. The number of people who need this reassurance before approving poker may not be very large. However, to ensure that a piece of legislation will pass – whether by a vote of the populace or a vote of the legislating body – it may be necessary to reach out to this group of people.

Political realities often override the optimum method of doing something. People who have little knowledge of the subject being voted on have a vote that counts just as much as someone who is knowledgeable. In fact, their vote in certain situations in a sense counts more. Take a look at the typical voter who was still undecided in the last week of our extremely close presidential election. My opinion is that such a person's poker equivalent is the player who holds up the game while deciding whether to play a J-2. Whichever way people voted, I am sure that nearly all of them believed they knew enough about the situation to have an opinion before the eleventh hour. They saw the outrageous things each candidate's campaign did to reach out to the undecided voter. It should not be a surprise when a legislative proposal contains an unwise restriction on poker stakes. It is not there because the poker players think it is helpful or needed. It is there to get the vote of a person who may well be ignorant about poker.

Although there is no standard way of restricting the stakes for which poker is played in order to keep them within a certain boundary, some ways of doing this are better than others. Let's discuss some possibilities, by looking at methods that have been used in certain places.

The worst method of restricting money swings in the game that to my knowledge has actually been employed by a regulatory body is limiting the size of the pot to a specified amount. In Florida, there used to be a state law limiting pots to a maximum of $10. This was asinine – and not just because the amount was ridiculously small. The method was awful. It interfered with the natural way of playing the game by preventing a player from protecting his hand with a bet at a point in the middle of a hand. To control the pot size, it is necessary to either retract bets if there are so many callers that the legal pot size is exceeded, or simply end all betting even before the $10 limit is reached by stopping the betting if a bet called by everyone would exceed the legal pot size.

Another method of controlling the amount of money changing hands is to set a limit on how much you can bet. Apparently, this has been done in Deadwood by setting a maximum bet size of $100. I think both this method and the actual size chosen of $100 are quite reasonable – for limit poker. However, the poker form that everyone is flocking to these days is no-limit hold'em. In that game, any restriction on the bet size changes the essential character of the game. Don't get me wrong, playing a game with spread-limit betting of from $5 to $100 is a decent way to play poker – but no-limit hold'em, it's not. So, simply limiting the amount you can bet puts a crimp into playing the country's most popular poker form. How can we control the swing in no-limit hold'em and still preserve the basic nature of the game?

No-limit hold'em is extremely popular on the Internet. Sites want to offer the game, but do not want to see too many of their customers losing large sums of money and busting out of action. In short, they have the same interests as the lawmakers in limiting losses in the game. Maybe lawmakers can learn from seeing what a business that specializes in poker does to accomplish this.

An Internet site that spreads no-limit hold'em controls the size of the game in two ways. First, it keeps the size of the blinds fairly low, compared to limit poker. There are far more limit games with a big blind greater than $10 than no-limit hold'em games with a big blind greater than $10. Second, it limits the maximum for which you can buy in. There is no set standard size, but I find the most common numbers to be either 50 times the big blind or 100 times the big blind.

A $50-$100 limit game has a buy-in of $1,000, and so does a $5-$10 blinds no-limit game. There is no question that a $50-$100 limit game is bigger than a $5-$10 blinds no-limit game. I would judge it to be at least as big as a $10-$20 blinds no-limit game. So, here is my suggestion: Control the size of a poker game by controlling the size of the buy-in. Putting the maximum buy-in size at $1,000 is a good way to control the size of both limit and no-limit poker. Note that you are never allowed to buy chips to make your stack size greater than a grand when using this method. This prevents multiple buy-ins from doing what one buy-in is not allowed to do.

There is another virtue of this method of capping the buy-in size. We so far have been talking only about money games, but there is also tournament play to consider. I think limiting the buy-in to $1,000 would work well there, also. Tournaments with a $1,000 buy-in would have to be no-rebuy events. A tournament with a smaller buy-in could allow rebuys, but cap the amount any player could spend in one event at a grand.

Let me emphasize that the preferred way to treat poker under the law is to simply legalize the game without trying to control the stakes. However, it is the nature of successful politics to compromise when necessary. If the stakes must be controlled to obtain legalized poker, limiting the amount of the buy-in is the appropriate method in an era when the preferred poker form is no-limit hold'em money games and tournament events.

Editor's note: Bob Ciaffone has authored four poker books, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Holdem Poker. All can be ordered from Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons: e-mail [email protected]. His website is www.pokercoach.us, where you can get his rulebook, Robert's Rules of Poker, for free. Ciaffone is the cardroom director for ChecknRaisePoker.com.