There's check-raising in no-limit, of course, but it's a much more important and frequently used tool in limit games. Unless you are nearly certain that you are beaten, you should call a bet on the river in limit hold'em. Looked at another way, a typical limit pot might be 10 times the size of that final-round 'big bet.' That means if you make a mistake by calling incorrectly on the river you're only losing a single bet, but if you fold incorrectly you've made a pot-sized mistake that is 10 times greater than your error of folding incorrectly. The bet on the river is likely to be a very small percentage of the size of the pot, which means you're getting much better pot odds for your call than is often the case with river bets in no-limit. Put another way, you can't get as creative with your line of play on the flop, because the play after the flop will tend to be much more straightforward, and the reward for fooling your opponent comparatively smaller. Not so with limit, when your ability to make money is so circumscribed. In no-limit you can justify getting out of line early since you can use bet sizing later to cause your opponent to make stack-sized errors. I'm not suggesting that you have to always play 'fit or fold' poker, but in limit games you certainly want to lean more in that direction than in no-limit.

Accordingly, you will be more likely to raise preflop, especially in position, with medium pairs and with big cards like A x K x, A x Q x, and A x J x. When you have a strong hand, you're looking to extract extra bets whenever you can. Unless nearly everyone is in preflop, you can't get the pot odds to justify set mining or to go for other long shot draws.īecause the amount you can win in later streets is so much more limited in limit, you need to press your advantages when you have them. Low suited connectors should be less appealing to play if the hand is raised preflop. In limit, you are awarded far less when your long shots come in.

Put simply, you should chase less in limit than in no-limit. Since limit doesn't have the huge implied odds that no-limit has, it's much more important to avoid situations with long drawing odds. Today I want to explore five more ways NL players have to adjust their thinking when playing in limit games.

There I talked primarily about how implied odds work differently (and are less significant) in limit games as opposed to no-limit.īecause of that big difference, the way you play your hand in limit is going to be very different from how you'd play the same cards in no limit. In yesterday's article I discussed how no-limit players face certain challenges when jumping into the increasingly popular fixed-limit games that are part of mixed-game and H.O.R.S.E.

Texas hold em spread limited