Be My Waterwings

[UOPokerPlayer]

In hopes of avoiding flaming, I'm going to preface this by saying I spent 10 minutes on the search function before posting.

So here's the deal. I'm going to start playing limit. And for places to start, I can't think of a better one but here.

Right now I've logged almost 100k hands on pt through various NL levels. Even after withdrawing for non-poker reasons, I've built a bankroll of 500 into almost 3k which I've committed to poker. I've been playing seriously for nine months. Through that time I went from 25nl to 100nl; where I play now. I had a good ptbb/100 for every level, though it's number decreased after each higher stake. I try not to invest too much into stats especially because variance as it is, I could just have been running well. What I do take to heart is the different thought process that goes through my mind during a no-limit hand. This is where I see my biggest improvements over time. I can read my own posts and not be embarassed. I've learned a lot from these forums as well as from books. I'm happy with how I play no-limit poker, though not perfect i have my fair share of leaks, but overall I'm solid and headed in the right direction. I used to have a goal to continually improve until i could one day battle with the goliaths at the 1000 game.

Times have changed. Though I'm doing relatively well at the NL100 game and beating it, I'm just a little tired of it. I'll probably go back, but not right now. So I'm going to play limit. Pretty much change for the sake of change. I've liked the idea of playing a game more based on lots of smaller decisions rather than big ones, It seems multi-tabling is much easier at limit, and PT is more useful as well. Finally, I watched a friend playing a good 5/10 game and was sold. ATM's for everyone.

So there is a point to this incessant self-serving ramble. The question is what would you say to a complete newbie. Not a newbie to poker, but a newbie to limit. What's my biggest, hardest adaptation? What kind of bankroll do I need? What levels should I start at? To those experienced; what advice would you have given yourself when you started playing? What did you have to learn the hard way? To those newer, What are you struggling with now? I'm ready to dive into this, but I don't want to sink. So please, be my waterwings

i just made the switch myself, and i really think i prefer fixed limit. the obvious leaks, which i find myself constantly sporting, must be overrating implied odds. i still feel sick about folding small pp's in EP and stuff like that. and i continuation bet too much.

gl sir

[Harv72b]

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What's my biggest, hardest adaptation?

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I think for most NL players making the switch, it's getting used to drawing hands, value betting, and paying off.

In NL, it's relatively easy to protect your made hands by making a large bet or raise, as you know. The same is not true in LHE; from your point of view, there are going to be times when you are completely justified in continuing with a weak draw or middle/bottom pair where you would instamuck it in a NL game. From your opponents' point of view, this means that they are sometimes correct to call your bets with these same weak draws, which can in turn lead to a lot of frustrating "suckouts". Small Stakes Hold'em by Miller, Malmuth, and Sklansky addresses these aspects of the game in detail, and is well worth a read if you haven't done so already.

In NL, you're probably used to checking through the river when holding a strong but vulnerable hand. For example, you've bet every street with QQ vs. 1 opponent, and then an ace comes on the river. Or you have AA on a rags board but the river puts 4 to a straight on board. In LHE, you don't have to worry so much about being trapped--the worst that could possibly happen in a HU situation on the river is that you lose 2 big bets after betting & calling a raise. This makes it correct to value bet the river (or other streets) with a fairly wide range of holdings, depending on your opponent(s). By the same token, since you cannot expect to win a huge amount of money by trapping your opponents, it is rarely correct to slowplay in LHE, and almost never correct to slowplay the flop and the turn. And since your implied odds are necessarily much lower, you have to be much more choosy about which hands you play preflop, especially against a raise.

There will also be times where a scare card hits and your opponent bets into you or raises. Again, in NL it's often necessary to fold to this aggression, but in LHE you cannot be stacked by your opponent. Thus, you should be calling down much more often than you're used to in NL--you should actually only be winning about 52-54% of your showdowns in small/micro-stakes limit. This percentage marks the happy medium between being a loose/passive ATM and a weak/tight "fit or fold" type of player. A good example might be if you are holding TPTK against an aggressive opponent who check/calls you to the river. If an obvious draw completes on the river and he suddenly bets into you, this should not be an automatic fold for you; in fact, against an aggressive opponent, this is usually an automatic call.

Post lots of hands here as you're getting used to these changes & are unsure about whether or not you made the right play.

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What kind of bankroll do I need?

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The accepted standard is 300 big bets for the limit you are playing. With a $3000 bankroll, you could play 5/10.

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What levels should I start at?

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Even though you're bankrolled for 5/10, you should probably start lower than that. If you can stand the tedium of playing for fairly meaningless amounts of money, I would even go so far as to recommend putting in a few thousand hands of .50/1 just to get the feel of the game. At any rate, I would not advise you to start out any higher than 2/4; the 3/6 game is probably the biggest jump in difficulty that you'll see in LHE, at least until you get into high stakes games. The high aggression level typical in 3/6 & above games will only make it more difficult for you to adjust to limit.

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To those experienced; what advice would you have given yourself when you started playing? What did you have to learn the hard way? To those newer, What are you struggling with now?

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I started out in limit, and haven't put a whole lot of time into NL cash games. Because of that, I can't really empathize with your situation; the advice I gave above is just based on my own observations from my limited NL experience, and on what I've read others say here. The best advice I could possibly give (or hope to have gotten when I started out) would be to buy & read SSH, mentioned above. I stumbled onto the book by accident myself about 2 months after I started playing, and it has improved my game exponentially since. The rest of the advice is standard for poker (don't play above your bankroll, etc.), and I'm sure you already know it.

Good luck in your changeover! /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[UOPokerPlayer]

Great post, this will really help me. I'm going to hate going down and playing 2/4, but I'll put at least one session in it.

Play at least 10,000 hands of 1-2 or 2-4 before moving up. I can't stress this enough. If you only log a thousand hands of 2-4 and think you understand it, then you'll move up to 3-6 or 5-10 and constantly encounter marginal situations you haven't had the experience to play correctly. Which means high variance. I know a "safe" bankroll here is 300 BB but very few of the posters I've read play with anything less than 500 BB. I play 2-4 and was very uncomfortable when my bankroll dipped to 400 BB for a while.

I started with a weekly no limit cash game at a friend's house. That led me to learn how to make really good reads. I still pride myself on my reads. That being said, you MUST NOT make those big river laydowns that are so crucial to expert no limit play. You'll find that few of your medium strength holdings are worth folding for 1 BB in a monster pot. (I made a few awful laydowns with QQ on the river before figuring this out.)

Also, with NL, you're probably not used to counting your weak outs such as backdoor straights, flushes and bottom pair. It's really important to value these correctly in limit. To save yourself the math, you might want to work up a quick pot-odds chart until you have the odds memorized for drawing to a 3-outer.

Good luck. I used to think limit was horribly dull - now I can't even imagine spending all that time playing NL again.

Sidenote: You from the University of Oregon, or is that a different UO?

[peterchi]

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It seems multi-tabling is much easier at limit, and PT is more useful as well.

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Absolutely. I can't multi-table NL. Granted I haven't tried more than a dozen times, but it never feels very comfortable. And I think you're right that PT is not nearly as informative for NL than for limit. Winning NL players can have such a broad range of styles, plus needing to change gears all the time. I would put in some sessions where my VPIP was close to 50, and would be very happy with how I played (this is another reason I couldn't multi-table NL; I'd need to use so much brain-power to play this many hands without turning into a disaster).

So I don't take too much stock in what PT tells me about my NL game. But I do look at it obsessively for my limit game.


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So there is a point to this incessant self-serving ramble. The question is what would you say to a complete newbie. Not a newbie to poker, but a newbie to limit. What's my biggest, hardest adaptation? What kind of bankroll do I need? What levels should I start at? To those experienced; what advice would you have given yourself when you started playing? What did you have to learn the hard way? To those newer, What are you struggling with now? I'm ready to dive into this, but I don't want to sink. So please, be my waterwings

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I've been playing almost exclusively limit since about March. My recommendation would be to start at 2/4 like Harv said, even though you are over-rolled for it and can probably beat it easily. But I'd rather have some experience at it before jumping into 5/10 or so, where you can easily lose a grand in one bad session. FWIW I'm currently beating 2/4 and 3/6 pretty nicely, and I'm a loser at 5/10 so far.

Also, be ready to feel like you have less control over your results. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since all that really matters is the long run. But I'm pretty sure that winning NL players can and should be winning a higher percentage of their individual sessions than winning limit players. Someone said that a good limit player should be winning about 60-65% of his/her sessions, and this sounds about right to me. You just have to really be ready to grind it out like a machine, and not worry about whether you won or lost on each day.

Good Luck!

[UOPokerPlayer]

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Sidenote: You from the University of Oregon, or is that a different UO?

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Just caught this.
Yeah, it's Oregon, and my second year. I'm moving down in 5 days. You go there too? I lived in the dorms last year, and tried to get a game going but that kind of fell through.