Card Player TV Video Spotlight: Matt Hawrilenko On Limit Hold'Em

Matt Hawrilenko won a World Series of Poker bracelet in the tough $5,000 buy-in six-max no-limit hold’em event for $1,003,163 back in 2009. Despite having mire than $1.6 million in live tournament scores, Hawrilenko is best known as a high-stakes online limit hold’em player. Under the screen name ‘Hoss_TBF’, Hawrinlenko used to play in some of the biggest limit games on the internet. He specialized in limit hold’em, and competed against the other top players in the game for hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time.

In 2010, Card Player TV sat down with Hawrilenko to discuss the game that he specialized in. The first segment of the interview featured Hawrilenko sharing his thoughts on how limit hold’em differs from no-limit hold’em, starting with what type of hands play better with fixed betting than they do with unlimited bet sizing.

“They are two entirely different games. In no-limit hold’em it also depends how deep the stacks are. I think in no-limit hold’em, the deeper the stacks are, the more important it is to always be able to threaten to have the nuts in your distribution. Whereas in limit hold’em, theoretically it’s important, but usually it’s not as big a deal,” said Hawrlinko.

“So the small suited connectors, one gappers, two gappers… even three gappers, those play soo much better in no-limit,” he continued. “Whereas in limit hold’em, you’d definitely prefer ace-five to six-four suited, because ace-high can show down and win a lot, and limit hold’em is a showdown game. You have to show your hand down to win a lot more, where no-limit hold’em isn’t necessarily like that.”

Throughout the nearly seven-minute discussion, Hawrilenko goes on to cover three-betting in limit hold’em, the idea of ‘raising the turn to get a free showdown’, and more.

You can check out the entire video with Hawrilenko below:

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