Interesting comment made by Tanenbaum...

[SparkyDog]

I was looking through Barry Tanenbaum's CP articles when I ran across this comment that didn't look quite right to me (I'm a limit player, FWIW).

"Well, that, my friends, is one of the beauties of no-limit hold’em. You can actually throw away the best hand quite frequently, and still show a profit."

Is that true? Intuitively it seems next to impossible to turn a profit at any form of poker if you're constantly getting runover, especially post-flop.

[kurto]

makes sense to me... you can throw away a lot of small pots with the best hand. It just takes 1 big pot to make up for 10 little ones.

[zaxx19]

Yes it is correct...

I think some limit mentality has creeped into the NLH forum.

[mishafp]

It is absolutely correct- especially if you are playing with people who will pay off your big hands. If your big hands double you up a lot of the time, and you hardly ever double anyone up, you can afford to do a lot of folding with best hands and still be a winner. now that is not to say that developing a table image that you can be run over will be very good for your win rate....

[suspicious_mind]

I´m not sure but I think he was talking about players who bluffs too much, overplays hands etc you can throw away marginal hands and wait for a big hand to call these players down and still make a profit. Of course you could make more if you called them with your marginal hands as well but sometimes it´s not clear if your opponent is a good player or just a maniac.

An example:

A player buys in for the full amount and posts on the BB.
You make a small raise with AQ UTG, only BB calls.
The flop is AAK, BB moves all-in, you have him covered.

If you knew this player was a maniac and would do this with a lot of hands you beat then you could call with AQ but since you don´t know that you can play it safe and only call with the nuts knowing that he is making a big mistake in the long run if he has anything less that AK.

[stankybank]

I think what he means is that quite often enough a good winning player will be throwing away winners, however, if this same player can avoid making the big mistakes others make and can extract enough from their profitable hands, they'll have an almost certain chance to end up in the positive. Whether or not this profit is greater or less than the amount compared to not throwing away winners depends on how often you do throw away the winning hand.