No-Limit Hold’em Raising Rules

As the author of Robert’s Rules of Poker, I get plenty of e-mail inquiries about poker rules. (I answer all of them.) I thought you might be interested in the area of the rules for which I get the most inquiries.

The number-one area — and it’s not close — is no-limit hold’em rules regarding wagering. How much is the minimum bet? Can I raise or reraise? Can a certain other player raise or reraise? If I want to raise the minimum, what can I make it? So, let’s start at the beginning, traveling back in time, and discuss the basis of the no-limit rules that we use today.

I first played no-limit hold’em in Vegas in 1978. Some of the rules that are taken for granted nowadays were vague three decades ago. For example, if someone bet $100 and the next player raised to $200, you were usually required to double the total bet to $400 instead of raising the amount of the previous raise. So, back then, most places would not allow you to raise $100 more to a total bet of $300. I think the rules used in most home games, especially those in Texas, required you to double the total bet. Perhaps this was the influence of the house selling you chips on commission instead of raking the pots. For example, at Charlie’s game in Dallas, a player paid $500 and actually received only $475 in chips. The more chips the house sold, the bigger the house rake and the bigger the game got. So, both the players and the house favored the “double-the-total-bet” method of computation for a legal-size raise. Texans had a much bigger influence on Vegas no-limit poker than any other group.

You may be wondering about the California influence, since more
out-of-state poker players who go to Vegas come from Southern California than anywhere else. California did not allow hold’em until 1987, because of a long-standing faulty interpretation of the state’s poker laws. (We owe gaming lawyer I. Nelson Rose a lot for his efforts to get hold’em legalized in California.) No-limit lowball had been legal in California for about a century and was popular in the Bay Area, but you could hardly find a no-limit game in the Los Angeles area. Of course, Nevada got most of its California players from nearby Southern California, so the influence of those players on no-limit rules was negligible. (However, they did have a big influence on limit poker rules.)

I was a big advocate of using the no-limit rule that the raise need be only the size of the last bet or raise. It seemed like a rule that was more compatible with limit poker. Bear in mind that in addition to fixed-limit poker, there is also flexible-limit poker (also known as spread-limit poker). In the latter game, playing $1 to $4 limit, if someone bets $1 and the next player makes it $3, you can make it $5 (according to most rules used). In addition to limit compatibility, there is also the fact that in no-limit, you might want to reraise someone the amount that he raised you. If you bet $1,000 and someone makes it $2,000, in certain situations you might want to make it only $3,000 (and not have to make it $4,000). As you can see by today’s rules, the method that my associates and I favored was the one that eventually prevailed.

Another no-limit rules question that was argued in the 1980s was whether you had to raise at least the size of the previous bet or raise if you were heads up. The argument (again, from Texans) was more or less this: If you are heads up, you should be able to do anything you want. I saw Jack Straus put that rule to good use on a couple of occasions. In a tournament, a player named Steve bet 1,100, and Straus raised him 800 more. Steve called, and then called a bigger blast on the turn. I forget what happened on the river, but Jack had flopped a set and won a big pot. Another time, Straus bet 200, Jack Keller made it 600, and Straus raised 200, to 800. Keller folded!

Other players and I did not like the “anything-goes-when-heads-up” rule. There were a lot of new people taking up tournament poker, and they were unfamiliar with this “Texas heads-up” rule. For example, sometimes a player would bet, his opponent would say “raise,” and the player who got raised would fold without even waiting to see the raise size. In theory, the player who said “raise” could raise as little as the size of the big blind if the Texas heads-up rule was in use. Tournament directors eventually agreed to stop using the Texas heads-up rule, as they wanted to protect the newer no-limit players.

Nowadays, I sometimes receive betting and raising questions about situations so unusual that I confess to never having seen them in practice, and they are not covered in the rules. I sometimes think the people who ask these questions are 80 percent lawyer and 20 percent poker player. Here is an example:

“A couple of colleagues and I are having a debate over what the minimum raise amount is in a situation in which there are multiple all-in bets (each too small to qualify as a raise). The situation is as follows: Player A bet 100, Player B bet 200 (100 raise), Player C bet 275 (all in), Player D bet 350 (all in), and Player E would like to raise the minimum. What is the smallest amount he can raise?”

This type of situation is hardly ever going to occur in practice, as no one would want to raise just a dab here. Yet, it deserves an answer. The person who e-mailed the situation to me gave a lengthy and well-reasoned explanation of why the player should be able to raise only 100 more if he wanted to. I disagreed. I do not like a two-tiered system, in which the wager is treated as a raise of 150 for the purpose of reopening the betting, but only 100 for the purpose of establishing the minimum raise size. I sent this situation to the Tournament Directors Association to get their opinion, and they agreed with me.

Another raising rule that has morphed over time is a raise out of turn. It used to be that an action taken out of turn had no validity, and the player could do as he wished when his turn came. European players were horrified by this treatment. Over there, you are supposed to be ladies and gentlemen, and your word is your bond. Vociferous complaints brought about the change that we have today, whereby you must take the same action in turn if the intervening player who has not acted checks or folds. In my opinion, you should be able to do whatever you want if that player calls a bet, as the poker circumstance has changed.

Bob Ciaffone has authored four poker books, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha 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. Bob also has a website called www.fairlawsonpoker.org.