Looking At The Flip Side

This was my bread and butter game and I still play the game now but mainly to add variety from always playing NLHE and PLO. But I undoubtedly have more experience playing limit hold'em than all of the other forms of poker combined and including all my live play as well.

But I quite often see statements that are made by so called expert players that beggar belief at times when it comes to limit hold'em. One such pearl of wisdom is in how the online limit games are no longer profitable simply because the average pot size has dramatically shrunk. Whilst pot sizes have shrunk dramatically over the past few years, in no way are the limit games a waste of time as a money earner.

I remember when the average pot size in middle limit games at the $10-$20 and $15-$30 level was in the region of 8BB. Now you will be lucky to get 5BB with somewhere between 4BB and 4.5BB being about the norm these days. So limit games have changed and players have smartened up but the fact of the matter is that players are no longer making novice errors these days…….they are making intermediate errors instead.

Let me just put one very important but little understood part of limit hold'em to you. The blinds in this form of poker represent a far greater percentage of your total win so winning the blinds in limit poker is of far more importance than it is in the NL form of the game.

Now let me give you a hypothetical hand here where it is six handed and it has been folded around to you on the button and you open raise to $20 with the Jc-10d in a $10-$20 limit game and both blinds fold. Winning the blinds is always a great result in limit hold'em irrespective of your hand for the reason that I have just quoted. But in this example you have just won a $35 pot by getting the blinds to fold.

This represents a pot size of only 1.75BB which is far less than the figures that some experts quote as too low to be playable. Now imagine in another hypothetical situation that you could steal the blinds in this way three times for every two orbits of the table. In such a scenario then you could afford to NEVER get involved in anymore action other than stealing the blinds in those three situations irrespective of your hand. You would be winning a total of $45 in blinds whilst only placing $30 in blinds yourself for a net win of $15 for every two orbits.

This is a silly example but it highlights a very important point in that you simply do not need a large average pot size in order to succeed in limit hold'em or any other form of poker for that matter. In this example we could attain an unbelievably high earn rate whilst at the same time only playing in pots with an average size of 1.75BB. What this indicates is that if you are struggling to beat tight limit games then you need to see what you are doing wrong and then make the necessary adjustments because one thing is certain, the cause of your failure will not be the average pot size when you look closely enough.

The Dean is sponsored by Pokerheaven.com

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