Building pots in No Limit Holdem

[Vince Lepore]

When, why and how should a pot building strategy be used in a NL Holdem World Poker Tournament event?

Vicne

[istewart]

Spell your name right.

[pokergripes]

The phrase "building a pot" gets used way too much, and often in confusingly incorrect ways--in my view, all it really means is increasing the amount already in play in the pot to make it possible to extract larger bets from your opps on later streets (which is why it applies in all big bet games, not just pl, although it is somewhat more important in pl since you can't overbet the pot later at all)...

In other words, if you bet a thousand at a fifty dollar pot, you are giving up a lot of action to your opps, so if you'd like to be able to extract a thousand dollar bet later from your opps with a sane bet made by you, you need the pot to be big enough beforehand to do it.

However, the foregoing description can't be applied in isolation unless the money is infinitely deep relative to the pot size, which it obviously generally is not (outside of poker hypos, anyway)--Once the stack sizes get meaningful relative to the pot size, the leverage you obtain from pot building drops off quickly (just think about the "once __% of my chips are in, I'm going with the hand" analysis for people correctly calling all in), so you need to be very cognizent of when it's a good idea to make the pot bigger based on positive ev, and when you are just going to start ensuring calls by pricing people in based upon their stack sizes relative to the pot size.

So, pot building makes a lot more sense early in a tourney than late in a tourney (all other things being equal), because the money is much deeper relative to the blinds and the absence of antes. The thing you sometimes hear people say about not trying to build pots early in the event is wrong in my view--They're correct in the sense that you can't win it on day 3 if you bust out day 1, so if your goal is just variance avoidance on that theory maybe it's right for you to sit back on day 1, but I don't much like that reasoning (seems too much to me like the erroneous thinking that leads people to want to play a short stack in a cash game--if your primary driver is variance avoidance, you should just play limit).

This is why Hero's over-limp in the DS thread was a reasonable play (once you have the data point that late positions were raising with some frequency to pick off multiple limpers)--no doubt it ramps up Hero's variance, but with a sufficiently positive impact on his expectation, that can be an entirely valid tradeoff if the goal is to win the thing (not just to last a while to impress friends and family).

Just think about Huck busting out on the second hand of the 10k event with jt against the aa, bluffing off every one of his chips out of position (I think it's linked into the DS "strange hand" string at some point in one of those posts)--if that doesn't tell you all you need to know about how the top big bet guys think about variance as a factor in major nlh events (namely, it's on the list, but it sure isn't the whole list or even the top item), then you need to book up some more before buying into big bet tourney events. Since they have absolutely no concern about having to 'splain to the little woman why they paid $10k to play two hands, a lot of the "I'd better survive for the sake of survival" pressure is off of their backs (and on yours and, to a lesser extent, mine!) [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Vince Lepore]

Excellant reply. People should read it! I wll have more to say about it later. I'm on my way to Bellagio but thought that this was such a good post that I wanted to make a comment. I don't understand why this thread hasn't gotten more play.

Vince

[jakethebake]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't understand why this thread hasn't gotten more play.

[/ QUOTE ]

me either, vicne. but maybe because it's not really the right forum.

[Vince Lepore]

Of course it's the right forum. I should have titled it Building Pots in No Limit Holdem WP Tournaments.

Vince