I was thinking about leaving the game when The Stranger sat down. We’d been playing $25/50 Limit Holdem six handed for about an hour, all regulars. I had position on Karen, by far the most dangerous player at the table, and while this was making life a little easier it was also restricting my ability to exploit the two relatively weak players on my left. The last few orbits had mostly involved blind swapping. Frankly nobody seemed that enthused about the game.

Then The Stranger put $10k on the table.

I blinked. And despite this being an online game at PokerRoom.com I could sense Karen sitting up straighter in her chair.

“No action at the $10/10 NLHE,” typed The Stranger into the chatbox. “Guess I’ll slum it here.”

I rubbed my hands together, entered the note “Claims 10/10 NL reg; BI 25/50 10k!?” and checked PokerTracker was importing.

When a no-limit player sits down at a LHE table, disparages the game, and shows what a big shot he is with an excessive buy-in, the only way the situation can be better is if he is also drunk. The Stranger was, or so he claimed. I immediately took my Karen doll out of its shoebox and started sticking pins in it while simultaneously doing my best to isolate my new mark.

He played too many hands, but not that many. He overvalued suited connectors, but not by that much. His blind defenses and steals weren’t bad, but he tended to give up too easily post-flop. And he really hated it when his made hands got outdrawn.

“ARE YOU FKN SERIOUS!?!?! Fkn card catching contest can’t protect your hand how do you people play this? THIS ISN’T POKER!!!1!”

“We people” had heard similar complaints from previous no-limit visitors and remained very quiet as the action continued. Losing top two to a rivered flush blew The Stranger’s starting hand range and nostrils wide open and accelerated his demise. After an hour or so he was stuck nearly 3k. To give him credit, he was a good enough player to leave before he lost any more.

Whether he was also a good enough player to figure out why he got crushed I don’t know. It’s true that his inebriation and subsequent tilt inflicted much of the damage, but even sober and playing his best I suspect that the cumulative effects of the small mistakes that no-limit players invariably make would leave him a significant loser. And it’s also possible he’d never detect those mistakes because… well, Limit Holdem is nothing more than a card-catching contest, isn’t it?

According to Blind Straddle’s Research and Marketing Department, most of you are no-limit players. You may therefore be wondering why you should continue to read an article that looks suspiciously like it’s going to be a defense of limit poker. I could claim that in what follows there will be many nuggets of poker wisdom that will benefit you irrespective of the form of poker you play. I might even suggest that capricious fashion may swing to LHE and learning a little about it now will give you a head-start for when that happy day arrives. These things may even be true. However, fundamentally you should keep reading because the following may amuse you.

I was reminded of the encounter with The Stranger a few weeks ago as I was dipping into Mason Malmuth’s Poker Essays Vol. III. In “Pot-Limit Players,” Malmuth notes that pot-limit (and equivalently no-limit) players invariably do badly when playing limit and mentions a few reasons why. I’ll touch on some of the technical ideas in a moment. However, before researching this article I suspected that “big bet” players do poorly at limit poker largely because they are contemptuous of it.

Regular readers may be stunned to discover that I “research” articles at all, but sometimes it is unavoidable and in this case it was also illuminating. I stopped by a couple of poker forums and poker groups on Facebook and asked people what they thought of limit poker in general and LHE in particular.

The first thing I noticed was a geographical divide. Respondents from the United Kingdom invariably associated Limit Holdem with something unfortunate happening to their “wedding tackle” (genitalia). I confess I was not at all prepared for this. Given that I spent my first twenty-five years in London I usually assume I’m attuned to those from the Old Country. My current working hypothesis is that most respondents were from places far removed from London such as Liverpool and Preston where different fashions hold sway. Indeed, I’m still completely flummoxed by one particular response from “up North” in which the threat to one’s wedding tackle stemmed primarily from a class of post-graduate deconstructionist artists.

Players from both sides of The Pond found common ground in the complaint that it was impossible to protect hands and force folds in LHE. However the issue that really surprised me was the characterization of Limit Holdem as “slow and boring.”

And then I discovered that I’d asked a poorly-defined question. Because most of the players polled were tournament players, whereas I am primarily a cash-game player and had tacitly assumed that we were discussing cash games.

There is a world of difference. The editors of Blind Straddle are accomplished limit players, but as one remarked recently: “Limit tourneys suck. They’re long, boring, and torturous, with a short period of hopelessness at the end.” The fact that he made this observation while announcing his plans to play a couple of limit tourneys reveals something about his personality that I may elaborate upon if I ever find myself writing for a different publication. Suffice it to say that company parties are not exactly “up-beat.”

When I revisited the question with my initial pool of respondents, but now specifying LHE cash games, I found some grudging recognition of the pace and aggression of the game and even a couple of people who enjoyed it. (There was again one individual whose wedding tackle somehow got involved with a ferocious lemur, but I don’t regard that as my problem.) However, it was impossible to ignore a background murmuring that LHE simply wasn’t… well… as skillful as NLHE.

Since I far prefer LHE to its big-bet cousins I couldn’t help myself leaping to the defense of the limit game. It’s not often my ego steps up to the plate when money is involved, but none of us like the implication that we’re going to school on the short bus. The important point is that in formulating my response I finally crystallized some of my hitherto nebulous thoughts that you butch big-bet players may find useful.

Part of the reason LHE may be considered less skillful than NLHE is the reason it was introduced in the first place. One problem with NLHE is that weak players lose quickly. Exactly why this is a problem may not be immediately obvious, but fundamentally one can fleece a sheep multiple times but only decapitate it once. Thus when I started playing in US casinos, NLHE cash games were virtually unheard of. LHE made more long-term business sense since many of the weakies kept returning to the tables.

If you break these facts into symbolic logical statements you’ll discover they say nothing about the skill required to beat the two games. Since that’s probably not the sort of thing well-adjusted people are likely to do, let me give some specific differences between the two forms to illuminate the topic.

One alleged reason that NLHE is more difficult (and thus requires a higher skill level) than LHE is that you get to choose how much you bet in the former. Whoop-dee-do. Actually, let me rephrase that. One can make the case that bet-sizing is a technically-challenging skill that, by definition, is absent from LHE. However, the reality is that many competent NLHE players do a mediocre job of optimizing their bet-sizing. They can still beat the game quite handily despite their sloppiness simply because of the size distribution of pots won over a session. As an example, a player’s big pot of the night may be 150 BBs making up most of the profit for the session. What doesn’t show up immediately in the bottom line is the 40 BBs the player left on the table by underbetting the flop.

More generally, and as noted by Malmuth, fixed limit and pot/no-limit betting structures require a different approach to many poker situations. Of central importance is that in big-bet poker you can always, by definition, make your bet any sub-multiple of the pot. (Clearly no-limit and pot-limit differ in that only the former allows bets greater than pot.) This allows a player to set the calling odds for an opponent, thereby pricing out draws and accomplishing other well-known maneuvers. In contrast, in limit poker the fraction of the pot you can bet varies widely between hands. Sometimes a bet will price out some draws, at other times the pot will be too large to do so.

It seems to me that contrasting these two situations illustrates a skill trade-off. In big-bet poker we are compelled to do a little math to decide how much to bet in a given situation. That requires some skill. But the fact we have that choice of altering our bet size means we can often make the hands play out easier. If we read our opponent for a flush draw we bet accordingly. We are essentially manipulating the odds and thus our opponent. In LHE we don’t have any math to do in deciding the correct size for our bet, but because we encounter many different pot sizes we have to rely on other plays to manipulate our opponents and achieve the goal common to all forms of poker of maximizing our profit.

It’s natural to feel that our preferred form of poker, automobile, or brand of coffee is in some sense the best. That is usually why we chose it in the first place. What we should try to avoid, however, is the mistake made by The Stranger of assuming that as a NLHE player he would walk all over a LHE game.

Poker is fundamentally a betting game. Understanding how and why strategy changes significantly between betting structures is, in my view, a topic that many players neglect to their cost.

Kat Martin is a poker player and coach from London, U.K. who has accidentally spent the last eighteen years living in Kansas. The death of online poker in the U.S. has compelled him to relocate to Las Vegas. If you would like to buy his house, please e-mail him at gamekatpoker@gmail.com.