As Lexus Replaces Cadillac, Will Pot-Limit Replace No-Limit?

Poker is the ultimate context game: holding identical cards all the way around, the right play against Opponent X can be the wrong play against Opponent Y, and the right play against Opponent X under Circumstance A can be the wrong play against that same Opponent X if Circumstance A changes to Circumstance A-1(b).

Although that general observation stands players in good stead in an almost unlimited number of poker situations, I make it here to argue that the greatest poker book ever written was Doyle Brunson's Super/System, simply because when placed in context – when measured against the then-existing poker literature – Super/System represented such a quantum leap forward that it revolutionized an industry.

Today, there are many great poker books. When Doyle first published Super/System, there was one: Super/System. (And even as great as Doyle was, he was smart enough to utilize specialists to add to his own work and write chapters about their areas of greatest expertise.) There were many other good books (particularly if you were a beginner or a low-stakes home-game player), but only one great one.

It is against the backdrop – the context, if you will – of my respect for Super/System that I not only eagerly await the revised edition coming later this year, but also question the current accuracy of one of Doyle's most famous lines: "No-limit hold'em is the Cadillac of poker games."

When Doyle first wrote that, the Cadillac was the ultimate American prestige car. If you owned a new Cadillac, you had "made it," even though there were superior foreign cars. You were one of the Jones with whom the neighbors were trying to keep up. Today, while the Cadillac is still a fine automobile, if you really want to turn heads, you drive something else – a Lexus, a Mercedes, a BMW, a Viper, and so on.

Just as the Cadillac is no longer the symbol of American affluence, I think the day has come when the other half of Doyle's famous line may have similarly fallen behind the times (in a way, then, Doyle's line continues to be correct, although not in the way he meant it). Although no-limit hold'em remains my favorite and best form of poker, I believe no-limit hold'em is no longer the ultimate test of poker skill, especially the way it is being played these days.

That status is reserved for pot-limit poker – hold'em, if you will, although I won't disagree strongly with someone who wants to claim pot-limit Omaha as the ultimate test. My argument goes back to a point I started making two issues ago, when I explained that the style preferred by most experts, "small-bet poker," is becoming more and more difficult to employ, because tournaments are becoming increasingly full of players who utilize the "shove 'em and pray" style of play.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect that the championship events at brick-and-mortar tournaments throughout the world (the World Series of Poker and its lesser known but increasingly important and wealthy cousins), as well as the made-for-TV tournaments like the World Poker Tour, are going to shift over and become pot-limit events. No-limit is sexier, it's faster (none of those boring splitting-up-the-pot moments), and, perhaps most important, it's easier to understand.

Make no mistake about it, poker is undergoing an era of rapidly expanding audiences, participation, and sponsorship, and that's primarily because of television. Television, in turn, became a viable viewing option because of "the viewer can see the players' holecards" technologies.

It is already hard enough to explain Texas hold'em and the accompanying concept of community cards to a viewing audience that grew up playing five-card draw (or watching movies or TV shows involving poker scenes from the same game). It's easy for a non-player to "get" that a player holding four aces in his hand is going to beat someone holding four jacks: The cards are right there next to one another.

Television and movie directors are still searching for the right way to explain how players combine their own holecards with the community cards, let alone the far more difficult way to show it in a series of rapidly moving shots back and forth of players checking their hands. In the MTV generation, deathly slow explanations don't cut it.

There is nothing intuitively obvious (to a non-player, and no matter how many players there are among us, we are still outnumbered) as to why someone holding the A K is crushing someone who holds the Q Q when the board reads Q J Q 10 4. Yes, a royal flush beats four queens, but it takes a while for a non-player to recognize that the cards combine that way. In five-card draw, the relative hand strengths are instantly obvious.

Nonetheless, because certain other elements of hold'em are more exciting than draw (the visible cards, the drama of a turn or river card, the extra rounds of betting), and because the reality is that few good players play five-card draw anymore, TV and the movies have finally managed to make hold'em work, by letting viewers see the holecards.

If we have to add the complexities involved in maximum bet sizes ("OK, before the flop, an initial raiser can make it seven times the size of the small blind under World Series of Poker rules") and/or the delays involved in split pots, TV loses the gold mine of an audience it has so recently unearthed.

As a result, there is virtually zero chance that the important championship events will switch to pot-limit, even though pot-limit involves many more complex decisions (most but not all of which are post-flop). Insiders may respect the winners of huge pot-limit tournaments more, but the world's most famous champions will remain no-limit players for a long time – probably longer than any of us reading this will live.

Small-bet no-limit hold'em is becoming more difficult to play because of the increasingly large number of players who are employing the preflop all-in move (mentioned above as the "shove 'em in and pray" style of play). Great players are adapting, and are becoming more willing to gamble (usually, unless they've badly misread the situation, while holding the advantage) large amounts on a single hand.

Nonetheless, this change in style is making no-limit poker more "democratic," if you will. We've just had consecutive world champions whose prior experience was relatively minimal: While the large number of entrants combined with the availability of excellent literature and computer software made this more possible than it would have been 20 years ago, I think it a virtual impossibility that two unknowns could have won "poker's ultimate tournament" if it had been played pot-limit rather than no-limit.

In other words, even though no-limit hold'em is a frightfully complex game, it is not as difficult to master as is its pot-limit cousin.

This increased accessibility to the masses isn't necessarily "bad" or "good." Indeed, some very strong arguments can be made that it is a very good development, indeed. It just means it's less likely that poker's world champion will be poker's best player; looked at from the other side of the same coin, it makes it less likely that poker's best player will win poker's world championship. It's still a feat worthy of fame and celebrity, but it just doesn't prove as much as it used to.

Two issues ago I promised some more analysis as to why small-bet poker was becoming more difficult to play, and what good players were doing to combat that. I've found that discussing some of the larger issues about poker's future have used up some of the space I'd planned on devoting to specific technical examples, so I'll have to continue with this theme again next issue. Before that, though, I want to share some feedback about one example I cited in that earlier (Oct. 24, 2003, issue) column.

To explain what I meant by "small-bet poker," I created a purely hypothetical example of a situation in which a small-bet stylist might fold despite holding an advantage, because he didn't want to risk his entire stack with just a small edge. I used an example involving A-K suited vs. A-K offsuit, rather than something like A-K vs. Q-Q, because I wanted to find an example involving a very small (5 percent) edge. Fortunately, I called my example "less than ideal" because it depended on so many artificial and unlikely circumstances – knowing your opponent's hand because he'd flashed it, and knowing that he'd call a huge bet with A-K offsuit.

Reader "CoolKen" from Evires, France, wrote me to say he loved the point behind the column, but that my admittedly less-than-ideal example was even less ideal than I had realized, because the advantage wasn't really 5 percent. True, 91 percent of the confrontations are splits, 7 percent are wins for the suited A-K, and 2 percent are wins for the offsuit A-K … but that's not a 5 percent advantage!

If you stop to think about it, 91 percent of the time the decision doesn't matter. The only times when the outcome matters (remember, I've already established zero chance of a fold) is when the bet gets called, and that's not a 5 percent edge – that's a 7-2 edge! If you're not willing to intentionally risk your chips with a 7-2 edge, you shouldn't be playing poker tournaments, because if you do, you won't be choosing between a Cadillac and a Lamborghini, you'll be taking lots of buses.

To CoolKen, my thanks, and to those of you who want to know how to battle these "all-in to win" stylists, please be patient for two more weeks. You'll need that quality to win, anyway.

Andrew N.S. ("Andy") Glazer, "The Poker Pundit," is Card Player's tournament editor and also writes a gambling column for The Detroit Free Press. He recently signed a contract to write The Complete Idiot's Guide to Poker, due out in the fall of 2004. Andy welcomes your letters.