Today's No-Limit Hold'em World

My last column was a bit of a love letter to the poker youth of today. It is very clear that they have had a tremendous impact on the game and have revolutionised it in every sense. Unless you actually played in pre-boom conditions, you would find it hard to imagine how very different the game as played today really is. A good case in point is no-limit hold'em. In the best part of a decade of playing cash games, I never played a hand of no-limit until this year. It simply didn't exist as an alternative, for the simple reason that it burnt out bad players far too quickly and broke up games. Nothing is worse for keeping new blood than remorseless busting them again and again when they first start playing. Today, the game is thriving, driven by massive TV coverage of tournament play, and it has become my game of choice. Amusingly, theorists like Sklansky have said that no-limit hold'em currently is being played as if it has "imaginary antes" as well as the usual blinds, as the action generated in a typical game online is far in excess of what theoretically, best practice, should exist.

So, having discussed the good, what about the bad? Do these uber-kids have any flaws? What do they sometimes get wrong? If I were to have a broad criticism, I would say that they do have an over-reliance on prescriptive, one-style strategies, normally of a very aggressive nature. This means that when they butt up against an unorthodox foe, they sometimes struggle or make less profitable moves.

A good example of this is a particular type of loose, aggressive, poor player. Now, the conventional wisdom for combating "aggro" players such as these is to raise or reraise them with light values in order to isolate and get a chance to play them heads up. But this particular subset, which is a sizeable one, I term the "fight every fight" players. That is, once they get involved in a sizeable pot, which can mean as little as there has been one preflop raise, they will scrap for it remorselessly, betting, raising, and check-raising with a huge range of values, making the usual approach fraught with dangers. It can be very difficult, especially in no-limit hold'em, to play a guy who is giving a lot of action, especially when by definition you are playing with less substantial values yourself. After all, most of the time in no-limit, neither side has much of anything. Time and time again, I see Internet players treading the same tired path, only to wilt under a barrage of bets. In fact, incredibly, these players start to actively avoid the "live ones" and miss out on a potentially huge earning opportunity. The best example of this used to happen when I played pot-limit Omaha on PokerStars. There was an infamous, slightly female-sounding name, tournament player and all-around gambler who used to tear the shorthanded games to pieces. She was insanely aggressive and used to pound the table into submission. However, I used to love her, and spent many an hour following her from table to table, to such an extent that she used to sit out when I joined the game. So, what is the best tactic for handling these types of opponents?

One of the classic strategies is the Muhammad Ali-style "rope-a-dope." That is, play a lot of hands, even if the foe has raised preflop, and just let him keep on betting. Go passive. This approach can run through all the streets, with maybe a surprise value raise on the river. To examine further this reasoning, let us number crunch a simplified example. Let's say you are in a raised pot and are facing a $90 bet into a $90 pot from such a "fight every fight" player. You believe you are almost certainly ahead of his range, but not with a mortal lock on the pot. Perhaps you have an overpair or the like in a shorthanded no-limit game. Now, the classic approach to this would be to raise here, but if the foe has nothing, or even is just a bit canny, he may simply fold. But if you play possum to his action, he may keep on betting, either as a pure bluff or with some kind of draw. This kind of passivity is often a red rag to these raging bulls, and you may win an additional $500 or so more than his initial bet through the streets. Conversely, as you are basically committed to seeing a showdown, you will lose a similar amount if he hits his long-shot draw. It must be added that this isn't easy, especially as the board becomes more threatening. Facing bigger and bigger bets as your hand potentially dwindles in size can be a galling prospect.

The math of this is fairly straightforward, and it works out that his draw will have to get there on the river at least 60 percent of the time to make "rope-a-dope" a worse strategy than simply raising the pot and taking the profit. Hopefully, it is clear that this kind of opponent will keep hammering with much, much less than this. Aggression and fast play are sometimes no substitute for simply stopping and thinking about how best to actually tackle a particular poker problem, no matter how contrary the answer. And even if the antes are imaginary, you can still spend them.