High Stakes NL to High Stakes Limit Transition

[ninjia3x]

Quick question,

Is it harder for a regular High Stakes NL player become a winning high stakes limit player? or the other way around?

[AaronBrown]

I'm not sure there's a general answer, some people seem to take more naturally to one or the other. It also depends on the type and level of competition. But if I had to guess, I would say it's harder to avoid losing a lot of money in no limit, but harder to win consistently at limit. Therefore a good no limit player would find it harder to move to limit and keep up her win rate, than a good limit player moving to no limit. But for average or poor players it would be the opposite. An average no limit player would find it easier to break even at limit than an average limit player would moving to no limit.

Generally people get experience in both types of games before getting really good, so the conventional wisdom is no limit is harder. You can have leaks in your game that are only annoying at limit but are disastrous at no limit. But people I know who have switched later in their careers seem to find no limit easier.

[afreeman]

I'm anything but an expert, but my sense is that the NL-->limit transition would be easier, for a couple of reasons:

First, NL places a greater emphasis on skills that can really only be learned by direct experience (e.g. hand reading, tells, etc.). Limit places a greater emphasis on recognizing and exploiting marginally profitable betting opportunities, and those skills are generally more "learnable". To put it another way, I think you could take a NL player and have him grind through 100k hands on a simulator and probably end up with a pretty good limit player. The opposite is not true.

Second, NL is inherently more complex and thus requires a deeper general understanding of poker. Selecting the correct bet size is a hugely significant part of good NL play. If you agree that both games are fundamentally similar, then you must agree that adding another significant decision factor must make NL more complex. Those that have mastered these complexities would thus possess a deeper understanding of hold'em as a whole.

Finally, maybe this is why it is possible to write a computer program that can perform acceptably well at middle limit play, while the best NL bots can only beat the lowest-level games. See www.poki-poker.com or search for research papers by Darse Billings or Aaron Davidson on Google for more details on the difficulty of trying to program good NL play.