The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

No-limit Texas hold 'em is considered the best poker game out there: "The Cadillac of poker". At any given moment, all of your chips could be in jeopardy and there is a lot more to it than simply catching lucky cards. If you have a good but not great hand, how far are you willing to push it when faced with a big bet? Are you willing to make a stone cold bluff at a huge pot, knowing that if you are called your day is done?

I tried taking up a couple of new poker games: Seven Card Stud (SCS) and Limit hold 'em. I chose SCS because it's a fairly well known poker game and a lot of people know how to play it. I also chose Limit hold 'em as I wanted to compare how the strategy changes when the betting is capped and how often you can enter pots with marginal starting cards.

Both of these games, along with no-limit and I suspect every other type of poker, require you to pick decent starting hands. 2-7 offsuit is a junk starting hand no matter what format you play and no matter if the betting is fixed. Big pairs are a good start, and playing connected and suited cards are worth a gamble, too. The problem in no-limit is that if you decide to limp in with suited connectors, you have to worry about facing a big raise that would force you to throw away your cards. With Limit and SCS, you simply don't have that fear.

Both Limit and SCS also make it cheap to "chase" your hand. For instance, if you need one more card to make a flush, because the betting is capped, it is usually the correct play to call or bet at the pot in hopes of landing it. And if you don't land it, more than likely it was relatively inexpensive for you to see if you catch your flush card. In no-limit, your entire chip stack is at risk. If the bettor before you announces all-in, the odds are usually not right for you to chase your flush card, you will fold and have lost all of your previously bet chips for nothing.

Betting in both SCS and Limit hold em still allows raises. For example, if the betting structure in limit is $10-$20, for the first two rounds of betting it can still be raised to a maximum of $40, while in the last two rounds it can be raised to $80 total (done in $10 and $20 increments). So if you are chasing a flush card, you can check, the next person can bet a max of only $10, and you can call it without raising and see the next card for cheap. Things can get expensive if the pot is multi-way and raises are coming from all sides and you may decide to fold, but for the most part, if you can control the raises, the pot odds say you are almost always right to chase and call it down to the river.

More times than not, these games require that you have a hand to win a pot. In no-limit, this simply isn't the case. You can bluff out at a pot with absolutely nothing and take it. While the betting structure in SCS and Limit goes up substantially in relation to everyone's stack size it's a bit easier to bluff, but earlier in the game you cannot get away with it 95% of the time.

An interesting feature in SCS are the "up cards". The first two cards are dealt to you face down, but the next four cards are dealt face up (The 7th card is also face down). So you can look to see which cards are out there and figure out if the cards you are looking for are "dead", and based on the bets and raises of the opposing players, figure out what hand they are representing and decide if you want to continue. A good memory of what cards have been thrown away is helpful, so if you have a pocket pair of 9s and you see a 9 on a opposing board, hitting your three of a kind isn't so likely, and you can make a better decision if you want to continue with the hand. And a lot of times, too, you will inadvertently make a winning hand when trying to make a different winning hand. For example, if you have 8-9-10-Jack and are trying to catch a 7 or Queen to make a straight, sometimes you might land Jack-Jack and make three of a kind and win with that hand. Luck can really be an ally for you (but of course not always, as your opponents can get just as lucky).

All in all, each game has it's own pros and cons, but playing these games helped me appreciate no-limit a lot more. There truly is more skill involved and it is a lot more difficult. The drama of risking your entire chip stack in one hand is an exciting proposition for both players and the audience that cannot be duplicated with other poker games. By starting with the hardest version of the game, everything else just seems that much easier.