Hockey Players Play Poker Too (from Bwin.com)

Written by Chris Wassel | 25 August 2010

Should beginners learn no-limit hold’em cash games first?

There is often a debate as to which form of poker a novice should learn first and foremost. Many players simply do not get no-limit Texas Hold'em at any stage. They come to poker having seen poker on television and think that playing no-limit is all about nerve and guts and making big bluffs. Then they go online and make bluffs too often and lose their money. Hopefully many of these people then come to realise that there is far more to no-limit play than meets the eye.

So just why is no limit poker so difficult for many people? I think that there is one major important reason for this and it is to do with the actual structure of how the game is played. We all know that no-limit hold’em is played with two starting cards unlike the four in Omaha. What this means is that the average winning hand in hold’em is far weaker than at Omaha. It also means that players do not have a hand most of the time in heads up situations.

This is fairly common knowledge of course but it is this knowledge that gets an awful lot of players in trouble in cash games. Players become too aggressive far too often with hands that simply do not merit it in full-ring game situations. Also in tournament play then the average stack is far less than what it is in cash game play and this applies almost certainly to SNG’s.

So when players come across into deep stacked cash games from other forms of poker then they are not used to having to make deep stacked multi-street decisions. Usually an all-in shove is the optimal choice during the later stages of tournaments or even in cash games if you buy-in for the minimum. So it is clear then that the finer points of deep stacked cash game play are intricate and subtle and a novice is certainly better off erring on the side of caution and maintaining a lower variance style when they first start out playing deep stacked cash games.

So what I am suggesting here is that starting out your poker career by playing deep stacked no-limit games is really asking for trouble in my opinion. I would much rather advise players to start out playing shorter stacked or maybe SNG’s and gain their experience playing no-limit hold’em in easier forms of poker. I certainly do not think that a novice player should sit down in a NL50 game with $50 which is 100 big blinds and the maximum allowable buy-in.

It is so easy to lose that money in cash games and one hand and the money is gone. The ability to make big bluffs based on the knowledge that your opponent is likely to not have anything leads to many a player getting into trouble. But in no-limit then your bluff is usually far more than what is in the pot and so your strike rate of pots won needs to be very high to compensate for this. It only takes one or two expensive failed bluffs to totally destroy a session.