One thing I was noticing was the lack of bad beats in NL. This is something that answered yet another question. Why did NL players always whine about bad beats in Limit? It’s because they are not used to them!!

In limit, bad beats are a way of life, they happen all the time. In NL, you push the poor cards out of the way with the bigger bets. When you lose you are generally losing to a quality hand. In Limit, any ol’ crap can beat you. When you show your hand and wait for those chips to slide your way and some pathetic bozo shows his two pair 94 that he got on the flop and limped the entire way, you just have to grin and bear it. It happens all the time. You have to realize that in Limit the long run means more.

That is also why a NL your bankroll has less fluctuation then a Limit bankroll. I think (and you can correct me if I am wrong) that NL banks tend to move in the same direction more often, up or down. If you are good you tend to not have as many bad sessions as you would if you were as good in Limit. It’s the bad beat syndrome. Less in NL, more in Limit.

And so my education continued. I was doing well, and starting to play out side the box. Perhaps bluffing a little to much, perhaps not seeing the kind of hands that were dangerous. This was easy. Odd hands like hitting top pair in the Big Blind with a 85 or bottom two cards of a straight or the always mind bender QQ and even A7 suited when you hit your Ace and 4 people are in the pot, WHAT DO YOU DO!! Or when you have a REAL good hand like top two pair and a guy goes ALL-IN.

So many things that you just have to figure out through experience.

All of a sudden I felt like I WAS GAMBLING. And even though I bet on sports (for entertainment purposes only) and have played Limit Hold’m online since 1999. I really do not like to gamble. I get no thrill out of the hunt, I get the thrill out of the rewards OF the hunt.

That is what I think NL players have, the “thrill of the hunt.” They enjoy the bashing of clubs over each other heads. The in your face finger of going all in. I must admit that that does have a certain adrenalin thrill.

Not that I minded this thrill. After all it was helping clear my arteries. And I was winning.

I moved up to NL50 and was bringing $40 to the table.

It was at this level and 25 hours into my journey when mother variance showed her face.

The combination of going card dead and getting some pretty good 2nd best hands led to some catastrophic results. The they started to pile up.

Yet another thing I learned in the differences between Limit and No-Limit. Tilting, even if it is one hand, can lead to disastrous results.

You see in Limit you can tilt and by doing so lose a hand. In NL when you tilt you can lose your entire stack. I found when I lost my entire stack that I would sit there, a shell of a man, empty, gutted, eviscerated. I really do not think there is a worse feeling (OK, there is ONE worse feeling, that is when you tell your wife all the player has to do is kneel down on the last play of the game and you win $200, and instead they hand the ball off, it gets fumbled and a Chicago Bear picks it up and runs 85 yards for a meaningless Touchdown and you lose $200. But that is another story).

Oops, sorry, flashback! Back to the present. So I am sitting there, the chips did not come my way and I have nothing. Well, I can’t stop with that hand so in my weakened state of mind I reload. I will not continue this story, much much to painful.

I learned that I must respect the ALL-IN player. I guess he is not bluffing as much as I would think. Unless I have the nuts and know I will win, back down. I think new people to NL need to heed this warning. RESPECT THE ALL-INer.

So after 80 hours of No-Limit Hold’em I had learned a lot about the game and I had learned a more about myself. What I learned about myself was actually re-learning. I don’t like to gamble. More importantly, I HATE losing. I HATE losing more then I LIKE winning.

This is actually important when it comes to Hold’em.

Look at it this way. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the strongest emotion. When I lose a hand in Limit my emotions hit a 6 with disappointment. When I win a hand in Limit my emotion rank is a 4 in happiness.

However, in No Limit if I lose a hand my disappointment factor is a 9. And if I win a hand it’s still a 5! Somewhere I’m losing out on this deal! 6 to a 9 and 4 to a 5.

With this startling revelation I decided I need to make some money and went back to Limit where I felt more comfortable. No Limit is a great game and I will continue to play it, but not for serious money.

My goal is to keep playing NL but go a little more slowly. I’m doing the 300 Big Blind Bankroll strategy. Start at the bottom and don’t move to a new limit until I have 300 Big Blinds. In the mean time play Limit for money and NL for entertainment.
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Post Script – once back in Limit where I knew for a fact I could win I proceeded to go on a -145 Big Bet losing streak in the next 35 hours of play! The ship has since been righted but the transition BACK to limit was not without some bleeding.

Good luck, except against me!
Grinder

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!

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!