Why You Can’t Beat Low-limit Games: Plan Your Strategy

The first parts of this series proved that low-limit games’ costs are so high that you can’t win without a huge edge over your opponents. You need lots of information to get that edge, and recent columns told you how to get it. This one discusses four planning steps that will increase your edge:

Write strategic plans.

Avoid tough players.

Attack easy players.

Reduce deception.

Write Strategic Plans.

Hardly anyone – even very serious players – writes strategic plans for low-limit games. Some top pros make them, but you may believe they’re unnecessary for small games against weak players. That’s one reason you can’t beat these games.

No matter how smart you are, you can’t plan well while playing because: (1) The strategies you’ve read don’t fit these games; (2) You don’t have enough time to think strategically; and (3) You naturally focus on your immediate decisions, not your overall strategy.

Most books recommend starting hands that don’t give you a large enough edge, and many of their post-flop recommendations don’t work in high cost games. Additionally, because most authors play in bigger games against much better players, they naturally recommend strategies that don’t fully exploit your much weaker opposition.

When you’re playing, you must quickly decide what to do, and you often forget important information or don’t think far enough in advance. If you doubt the value of written plans, just answer a simple question: How many times have you made a costly mistake because you forgot something or did not carefully plan what you would do later? When that happened, didn’t you angrily ask yourself, “How could I be so stupid?”

When you write plans, you’ll see that ideas that seemed reasonable don’t fit together. They may all be good ideas, but until your plans are written, you can’t see the holes and the contradictions.

A few people make a different objection: “Writing plans creates rigidity. Poker situations constantly change, and I want to adjust quickly.” That objection sounds reasonable, but it suggests you may misunderstand the planning process.

Good planners don’t write a script and follow it regardless of what happens. They analyze the situation as carefully as possible, anticipate many possibilities, and then prepare several contingency plans: If this happens, I will…. If that happens, I will…

Let’s digress for a moment. Competent generals write contingency plans because they know that battles are extremely unpredictable. They want to anticipate and be ready to react quickly and effectively to whatever the enemy does. Unless you think you’re smarter than the generals who have spent their lives preparing for battle, you should write and frequently update three types of plans:

General strategies for adjusting to different types of games such as loose-passive, tight-aggressive, and shorthanded.

Specific strategies for adjusting to important players, the ones you encounter frequently, especially ones who give you trouble.

Specific strategies to develop yourself.

Future columns will recommend ways to prepare these plans.

Avoid Tough Players.

The meaning of “tough” and “easy” depends upon you. “Tough” players are the ones who give you trouble, even if they lose heavily. “Easy” players are ones you usually beat, even if they lose less than some tough players. For example, I have serious problems with loose, aggressive, tricky players, even heavy losers. Conversely, I do well against tight, passive, straightforward players, even ones who don’t do badly. You may have a very different pattern.

Avoiding tough players is always a good idea, but it’s critically important in low-limit games. Never forget that you can’t win without a huge edge, and you probably can’t get it against tough players. So, if one or more of them is in the pot or the blinds and you don’t have good cards or position, fold.

You probably don’t want to fold some fairly good hands, and you may hate not protecting your blind, but you must never forget that you need a huge edge to overcome the high costs. If you doubt that you have that edge, just fold and wait for a better opportunity.
Of course, you shouldn’t completely avoid tough players, but you need much better cards and position to play against them. If you have good reasons to believe that your cards are significantly better than theirs, of course you should attack them, especially with position.

Attack Easy Players.

Please forgive my repeating this point, but you must never forget it: Virtually all of your profits will come from the easy players. The costs are so high that you can’t get a large enough edge against anyone else. If you don’t attack them, you have no chance to beat low-limit games.

Of course, you must attack intelligently. An earlier column recommended being very tight-aggressive. That principle always applies, but you must adjust for your opponents’ toughness. Be extremely tight against the tough players and looser against the easy ones. The easier they are, the weaker hands you should play and the more aggressively you should play them.

If one or more easy players have limped, you should frequently raise with somewhat weaker hands than usual to knock out the players behind you, giving you isolation with position. It costs you only one small bet and can greatly increase your profits. Position is always desirable, but it’s particularly valuable against easy players. Once you have isolation with position against easy players, your options greatly improve.

For example, if your opponents rarely check-raise and never check-raise bluff, you have an extremely unusual choice: You can bluff more frequently, and you can also make thin value bets. You almost never get that choice against good players. You can choose between two contradictory actions because their checking clearly says that they don’t have good cards.

Reduce Deception.

Deception is much less valuable in low-limit games than in larger ones. It costs more and yields fewer benefits. Deception usually requires making a theoretical mistake on one or more hands because you hope to confuse your opponents and increase your future profits.

You gain much less because so many low-limit players pay little attention to the action and don’t remember how you play. Your theoretical mistakes are more costly because so many pots are multi-way and go all the way to showdown. The more opponents you have and the more likely a hand is to go to showdown, the more your theoretical mistake will cost. The bottom line is that, when compared to larger games, you lose more now and gain less later by deception.

Does that mean that you should always play straightforward ABC poker? Of course not. It just means that you should pick your spots carefully. Be deceptive only when you have carefully studied the situation and have good reasons to believe that deception will increase your profits.

If you’re heads up with a smart, observant player, you must be deceptive. Otherwise, he’ll outplay you, now and in the future. But be deceptive only when it increases your expected value. Don’t try to deceive oblivious players, and don’t make theoretical mistakes in multi-way pots. ♠

“Dr. Al” ([email protected]) coaches only on psychology issues. For information about seminars and webinars, go to propokerseminars.com. He is David Sklansky’s co-author of DUCY? and the sole author of four poker psychology books.