Should You Switch to No-Limit Hold'em? Reading and Adjusting to Players - Part I

Reading and adjusting to players are important skills for all kinds of poker, but they are much more important and harder to develop for no-limit hold'em. You can beat most low-limit and some middle-limit games by playing ABC poker, but you can't beat most no-limit games without reading and adjusting well. In addition, these skills are not easily transferred. The fact that you do them well in limit games does not necessarily mean that you will be equally skilled in no-limit.



Frequency Vs. Importance



Your limit results depend primarily upon how often you make the right decision, while your no-limit results are driven by when you are right. When you're playing limit poker, a few brilliant decisions will not overcome the negative effects of many bad or mediocre ones.



Your no-limit results depend primarily upon the few decisions you make when many chips, perhaps your entire stack, are at risk. If you are right at those critical times, but wrong when the pots are small, you will win. Conversely, if you are wrong at the critical times, you could win several pots, but be a big loser.



Unfortunately, the abilities needed to be right most of the time are not the same as those needed at the critical times. In both limit and no-limit, you should identify players' general style, such as loose-aggressive or tight-passive. In limit, a player's style will tell you how he usually acts, which is enough to be right most of the time. But in no-limit, you can't rely too heavily on that identification. Someone who plays aggressively in small pots may act very differently in big ones.



For example, shortly after switching to no-limit, I encountered an apparent near-maniac. He would raise preflop with very weak hands, bet with little or nothing on the flop, bluff outrageously, overbet his good hands, and so on. But he kept "getting lucky," and his stack kept growing. Everybody was overplaying hands, trying to isolate him from the rest of the "good players." We thought we were good because we played only good cards.



After about three hours, I suddenly realized that he was the best player at the table. He could read us accurately, and we had no idea where he was. He was deliberately overplaying his hands and making obvious mistakes in small pots to set traps, and we were falling into them. He was losing small pots, but winning large ones. It was an expensive lesson, but worth every dollar.



The critical point is quite simple conceptually, but very hard to apply: The way that someone plays small pots may not tell you how he plays large ones, and you must learn how he plays them. Until you do, avoid playing large pots against him without a very strong hand.



Much Less Data



Learning how someone plays large pots is difficult because they occur so infrequently. In limit, the same sorts of situations come up again and again. So, you can usually see how people have acted in similar situations before deciding what they are doing in the current one.



When you have to put someone on a hand with your no-limit stack at risk, you may have no data about how he plays in similar situations. They occur only a few times a night, and he may not have made any very large bets, raises, or calls. Even if he made a few of them, his hand may not have been shown down. You can therefore be forced to make a critical decision without knowing when and how he will risk his stack.



You also have less reliable information in no-limit. Limit starting hands are more formulaic. In limit, you can be almost certain that a good player who raised from early position does not have a tiny pair or small suited connectors. In deep-stack no-limit hold'em, he could have those hands and many others.



More Complex Decisions



When making no-limit decisions, you must consider many more factors. You have the same options as in a limit game, plus you must decide how much you will call, bet, or raise, and you must always think about the implications of everyone's stack size.



Your problem has been complicated by the influx of "television players." How can you put someone on a hand when he doesn't know what he is doing?



Lack of Good Instructional Material


Earlier columns said that most books on no-limit hold'em do not deal with today's capped buy-in games. That problem is even worse for the literature on reading players. Virtually all of the famous players who have written about no-limit hold'em don't play in those games. Does a betting pattern, tell, or other cue mean the same thing in a huge no-limit game full of experts as it does in a $100 buy-in game full of beginners and weak players? I suspect it does not, but I can't be sure – and neither can anyone else.



Regardless of the size of the games they play, nearly all no-limit hold'em writers say that reading players is critically important, but they don't tell you how to do it. They may give some general categories or descriptions: weak-tight, loose-aggressive, and so on. However, most of them provide almost no help on how to categorize players, especially how to predict their reactions to those critical situations.



For example, Doyle Brunson devoted only one page to "Categorizing Players," and he listed only two types: "low-grade" and "high-grade" (Page 544, Super/System 2). Are there only two types of players? Of course not, but he doesn't even consider any others.



Sklansky and Miller don't discuss most player types, nor do they say much about reading players. They tell you how to compute the expected value based on your estimates of the probabilities that various-size bets will be called. The math is impeccable, but the probability estimates are essentially guesses. They do not tell you how to make them.



Intuition Vs. Logic


Most of the better-selling no-limit hold'em books have been written by intuitive players, and they provide only very general guidelines about reading players, such as "be alert and observant" or "see how someone has played similar hands" (even though you may not have seen such hands).



They essentially say, "Trust your instincts!" For example, Doyle Brunson recommended: "Once you decide what a man's most likely to have – especially in no-limit – you should never change your mind. You'll probably be right the first time, so don't try to second-guess yourself. Have the courage and conviction to trust your instincts." (Super/System 2, Page 551) Of course, he does not tell you how to develop those instincts. He just assumes that you have them.



Nonsense! Most people do not have them. I certainly don't, and you probably don't, either. Because no-limit hold'em results depend primarily upon a few pots for which we may have hardly any information, the intuitive players have a large edge over most of us. They can't say exactly why they think that somebody is bluffing or has the nuts, but their good instincts often help them make the right decisions.



David Sklansky, the leader of the logical, math-based school of poker, made a related point in his new no-limit hold'em book: "I have been reluctant all these years to write a no-limit book … because I know that theoreticians without other talents will still be underdogs to talented non-theoreticians … I'm talking about skills such as … reading hands … changing gears … using deception … [and] making others play badly." (Page 5)



He did not define these "other talents," but I believe he meant the "feel" that Doyle described. If theoreticians without feel are underdogs to these people, you and I clearly need to develop our own feel.



My next column will describe a simple system for developing feel. You and I will never have the nearly magical gifts of Doyle, Stu Ungar, and Layne Flack, but this system helped me to become much better. It can do the same for you.



Dr. Schoonmaker ([email protected]) coaches only on psychology issues, such as controlling impulses, coping with losing streaks, going on tilt, and planning your poker career.