The Poker Academy: Limit Hold’em Intro

Today I want to take the opportunity to write about something a little different: limit hold’em. You see, we are launching our limit hold’em course here at ThePokerAcademy.com in the first part of the year. This got me thinking about the differences between no-limit tournament play and limit hold’em.

No-limit tournament play starts off with deep stacks. You get to play a lot of hands from every position. Most of the time, the money is all won in the post-flop environment. You can afford to be a little sloppy preflop because the opportunity to win a lot of chips after the flop exists. You have the potential to win ten or twenty times the amount of chips you risked preflop.

Then, as the tournament progresses and the stacks get shorter and shorter, the play transitions to mostly preflop play. Many more pots end preflop with a raise or a three-bet. Other pots are all-in preflop with just a runout to determine the winner. The preflop play becomes pretty technical. You really need to understand how well your hands play against your opponents’ ranges, and what your opponents’ ranges really are.

Limit hold’em is somewhere in between these ideas. A decent amount of the money goes in preflop. But there are always three-betting streets left to make decisions after the flop. Let’s look at a normal-ish hand. The player one off of the button opens the pot. The small blind three-bets and the two of them see the flop. The small blind may lead all three streets and the player in position just calls. In this pot, there were three small bets preflop and a total of five small bets post-flop (one small bet and two big or double bets). So three-eighths of the money went in preflop. That’s 38 percent. Even if we allowed the player in position to put in a raise on a big bet street, three of ten total bets went in preflop, 30 percent of the money.

Sometimes one of the players folds on the flop or turn. Then you may put three little bets in preflop and only one little bet after the flop. Then the action is even more skewed towards preflop play.

When you start to think about how you want to construct a limit hold’em strategy, you can quickly see that the money that goes in preflop is significant. This should tell you that you really need to play your hands with a decent amount of purpose preflop. While you still get to play after the flop, and have opportunities to bet on all three streets, the leverage element from deep-stack no-limit isn’t there. In those no-limit situations, you can afford to be a little sloppy. You can take a little negative expected value (EV) preflop, because you think that you will be able to win a big pot or outplay your opponent after the flop. In limit hold’em, it is hard to make your opponent fold. It is hard to give them the wrong price to draw to straights or flushes. You can make good bets after the flop, and that is an important part of the game. But if you are regularly giving up too much edge preflop, you can’t overcome it.

So with this in mind, how do we construct a preflop strategy that is going to give us the best chance to win in the long run? We started by identifying the three elements that put us in the strongest post-flop positions. They are position, aggression and hand strength or selection. Ideally, you can play pots with all three things, but if you know you are going to not have one, the other two become even more important.

Position post-flop is a little different than position preflop. When you are in late position preflop, you are likely to have position relative to your opponent(s) post-flop, but not always. You can raise from next to the button and have the button three-bet. You very well might play this pot out heads-up and you are first to act on every street. The better your preflop position though, the more likely you are to have good position post-flop.

Aggression is an important element in gaining that post-flop position. When you enter the pot with a raise preflop, it makes it harder for the opponents behind you to play their hands. This is true whether you are making the opening raise or three-betting or four-betting. Playing aggressively preflop will lead to being in position more often post-flop. It also gives you opportunities to control the action on the flop. In limit hold’em, too often players will check to the raiser. If you’re the last preflop raiser, you get to decide if more money is going in.

The last element is hand selection. You really need to realize that hands play very differently in different situations. A heads-up pot from the button against the blinds is a spot where hands with ace-high are strong. Pots where three people have entered in front of you create opportunities for speculative hands like suited connectors to play well.

At the end of the day, you are going to be trying to play pots with position and aggression on your side post-flop. Coupling that with the right hand choices for the situations will get you off to a good start in limit hold’em. ♠

Rep Porter is a two-time WSOP bracelet winner and is the lead instructor at ThePokerAcademy.com, whose mission is to help poker players achieve better results through better decisions and that is done by teaching poker in a way that makes learning easy and enjoyable with high quality courses taught by professional players.

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