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I was getting bored, sure I was winning, maybe not as much as I was accustomed to winning but life was good. Yet, my pea sized brain was yearning for learning.

I was no longer reading Limit Hold’em books twenty four hours a day even though I should be. I should always be reading and sucking in knowledge or relearning concepts that I had forgotten over time. Yet, I was bored. I felt the need to learn something.

My buddy came over one Friday night and said he didn’t feel like playing limit, it bores him. Then he said something that perked us both up, he said, “Let’s play in a no limit (NL) cash game.”

Hmmmmm - We have played many NL Sit-N-Go’s but never a cash game. SO! We logged onto a NL10 (No Limit $10 max buy-in) game and then nervously sat down short stacked with $3. Now remember that $3 is less then a small bet in my normal Limit game so this was not a lot of money. But, we were excited none the less.

After a few orbits of folding we were dealt KK and there were a few limpers and a very tiny 2 blind raise. The absolute thrill of GOING ALL IN with $2.70 was amazing and after we had won a hand with KK we both laughed at how foolish it felt to have our hearts pounding at winning $3. We quickly logged off with our winnings so we would not squander it.

And thus, my fascination began with No Limit Hold’em.

Not being a guy that takes obsession lightly I quickly made a game plan. Buy many books, purchase software to play many hands, scour the internet while said books arrive in the mail, ignore wife, no wait, cross that one out, make sure to pay attention to your wife, then immerse yourself into the forbidden wonders of real gambling.

Real gambling? Yea, looking back I have to say that No Limit Hold’em is gambling. Yet, I have never considered Limit Hold’em as gambling. Limit Hold’em is more of a process, certainly not gambling. No Limit poker, also called Big Bet Poker was the first time I actually felt that I was gambling.

How odd.

Perhaps it’s the fact that in every hand there is a chance you will have to bet a ton in order to win, in fact you will need to bet more than you actually win! Even if you know you might not have the best of the situation. In Limit, it’s just a process, I do this and he will do that, he does that then I will do this. Over and over.

That is the difference. In limit once you have the basic 300,000 iterations of what can happen in a hand down you can go on auto pilot 90% of the time. In No Limit, at least for a newbie, it’s a whole new world. You are constantly looking at the size of players stacks and how they are acting or how much they are betting and how much is in the pot and so forth.

This last sentence is interesting as I have a B&M player buddy that does not play online that would come over and watch me play Limit. He would comment on stack sizes. I always found this odd because WHO CARES!! But as I found out, it’s a big deal in No Limit.

Then there are the starting hands. In NL, I be gamblin now! I get to play hands I would never play in Limit. What I found out was that hands like 54s can be played in mid position for 1 tiny bet because of implied odds. You can hit a HUGE hand if you have your miracle flop, or, you can dump them with ease if you miss.

That is why when I would lose my AA to a player that hit his 34567 runner runner straight and I would kindly ask him to explain his STUPID ASS play and he would proudly explain that while we were all playing the high cards he would play the low cards.

WELL - that is just super duper in No Limit and I can understand that perfectly. Implied odds and all that. However, in Limit you don’t get those implied odds and the problem is that if you hit a pair, you actually HAVE a hand. In NL if you hit a pair of fives do you really want to be putting in BIG bets to protect it?

So my education into NL continued, I played hundreds of hands with Poker Academy Pro (software) and read four books and moved to from NL10 to NL25. I started to increase what I brought to the table. I was no longer short stacked but would buy in a 1/2 the max amount. Mason Malmuth says it is a myth that being short stacked at a table is a disadvantage. It is actually an advantage if you are against Large stacks.

The reason is that Large stacks play a looser game (as they should) so when a short stack goes against a large stack, the short stack normally has a better class of hand. He also stated that people should sit down at a table short stacked and once they get the feel of the table should buy more - or - if they are new to the game they should play short stacked.

Yet another advantage is if you are short stacked against two large stacks, and you go All-In the large stacks are now going against each other. One of them might push the guy that could beat you out of the hand.

Still - I could understand the advantages of having more money in front of me. I was slowly moving on from less than one half the buy-in to one half and then seventy percent. And I kept winning.

…to be continued

For the further adventure in Grinder’s sometimes gambling and sometimes processing poker journey feel free to check out his blog, Grinders Warehouse. A Curiously Entertaining Blog!