Miller, Ed. Smallll Stakes No-Limit Holdem

CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION

Do you one day envision yourself playing no-limit hold’em for a living? Or do you hope to turn your poker hobby into a lucrative side income? If you do, then you’re in the right place. In the coming pages we will arm you with the most important concepts and insights to make your dream a reality. We’ll show you how a pro crafts a strategy and then adjusts it to maintain an edge over the competition. And we won’t hold back.

But you have to be prepared for a challenge. Small stakes no-limit isn’t for wusses anymore. A few years ago, all you needed to win was a little common sense and some patience. The legions of weak players would practically beat themselves. These days the Internet is full of smart, motivated players battling it out for $20 and $50 pots. You can beat them and enjoy the spoils (which can be more than enough to let you quit your job). But you’ll have to work, and you’ll probably have to change the way you play (and think) in some fundamental ways.

We’re not going to waste your time and money rehashing common sense advice you’ve heard a hundred times before. There’s no filler in this book. From the very beginning, we are going to attack your weaknesses. We want to find the places where you mess up. We want to find the opportunities you miss. We want to find the decisions you think about the wrong way. And we want to help you fix them.

This book is example-driven. We teach many critical ideas through hand examples, most of which were taken from the authors’ actual play in small stakes games. We’ve selected hands that improve over the way a typical small stakes regular would play the hand. Some of our plays should surprise you. If you finish this book having never once said to yourself, “Wow, I would never have played the hand like that!” then we haven’t done our jobs.

Chances are you won’t learn everything here the first time you read the book. It may take several readings before you’ll be able to incorporate most of the new ideas into your game. But if you’re serious about becoming an excellent no-limit player, the effort will be worth it.

PART 1: FRAMEWORK

64 Squares

Once upon a time, there was a young boy (hint: he’s one of the authors of this book) who had a strong inclination for chess. He had an excellent mentor who would frequently set problems for him to solve. If the boy was having trouble finding the right move on a particular problem, the mentor always prompted him with the same advice.

“Sixty-four squares,” he would say.

There are 64 squares on a chess board, and the mentor was reminding the boy that to find the best move, he couldn’t safely ignore any of them. Any piece, any square could, potentially, be the right one.

When you play a lot of chess, you see the same moves and patterns over and over again. The knights go here, the bishops go there, these pawns thrust forward in attack, and so forth. Anyone who gets to be decent at chess learns to recognize these patterns of play and can replicate the usual moves as they arise. Great players, however, see these patterns, and they also see more. They see the usual moves and they see unusual ones, and they evaluate both. Typically the usual moves end up being best, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the unusual moves turn out to be brilliant. Great players make these brilliant moves while average players are stuck in the usual rut.

You can’t look at only half the board. You won’t consistently make the best moves if you play blind to many of them from the very start.

The 64 Squares principle applies just as well to no-limit hold’em. All reasonable players know that they should usually fold T4o or that they shouldn’t go too crazy holding two pair when a possible flush is on board. These are decent rules of thumb. But too many players allow these rules of thumb (and others like them) to rigidly define the way they play. And so they miss brilliant play after brilliant play.

14 SMALL STAKES NO-LIMIT HOLD’EM

This is how typical small stakes regulars play. They develop a basic game plan, and they more or less stick to it. They play a nitty game. They fold all the marginal and bad preflop hands. Every pot they play, they focus on making a big hand. If they make one, they bet and raise to try to make money. If they don’t, they might fire a halfhearted bluff, or they might just give up. If they make a mediumstrength hand, they try to get it to showdown without putting too much in the pot. The strategy is simple: make money off the big hands and avoid paying off with second-best hands.

The nitty regulars are marginally successful. In small stakes games, enough players will pay off their big hands to keep them going. But they don’t see all 64 squares. They pass up opportunity after opportunity because, though profitable, these opportunities don’t fit their game plan. Indeed, they don’t even notice these opportunities as they arise. They’ve trained themselves not to.

If you want to be a great no-limit player, you must remove those blinders. It’s harder than it sounds. In everyday life, our subconscious brains are constantly eliminating options for us, options they assume aren’t worth considering. To play great no-limit, you need to consider all the options. This book will, among other things, help you to see all 64 squares as you play. We’ll show you numerous examples where we go beyond the usual play to find the best play. And soon enough, you’ll find yourself making plays you would never have seen before.

Showdown Equity And Steal

Equity

Let’s apply the 64 Squares principle to no-limit hold’em. A poker hand, much like a chess game, can take an extraordinarily large number of paths. For example, you hold pocket threes under the gun. One possible path the hand can take is:

You fold, the next player raises, and everyone else folds.

Another is:

You raise the pot, and only the big blind calls. The flop comes 6♥6♦5♣. You bet half the pot, and your opponent folds.

Change one minor thing about that last example, perhaps a board card or your bet size, and the hand has taken a different path. But you need not be overwhelmed by the possibilities. Fortunately, we don’t have to consider each possible path individually to succeed. We just need an overall plan that generates a profit on average over all possibilities.

There are only two ways to make money in no-limit hold’em.

When you really get down to it, there are only two ways of making money in no-limit hold’em. They are:

1.Make the best hand.

2.Steal the pot.