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Introduction

In this article you will learn:

• The importance of bankroll management
• The tight-aggressive play style

No-Limit Hold’em is a poker format that challenges your skill, knowledge, and sometimes even your courage to follow your guts and to make the right move. It demands both technical skill and an instinct for the right moment.

This, and the following articles, show you a strategy that will enable you to beat No-Limit Hold'em's so-called full-ring variant (seven to ten players at a table) successfully.

You will learn …

• … that bankroll management is what enables you to make a profit in the long-term
• … what basic strategy you need to beat the lower and middle limits.
• … when to play what cards. 
• … how to evaluate the strength of your hand during later betting rounds.

After passing PokerStrategy.com's quiz and receiving the free starting capital you will gain access to advanced strategies, articles, and videos. There you will learn everything there is to know about the mathematics of poker, and why they are so particularly important in No-Limit Hold'em.

You will also gain additional insight into the concrete playing style needed to beat the higher limits and how you should react in different situations during the game.

What is Bankroll Management?

The emergence of online poker platforms has created an entirely new type of poker player. Usually these are young people from some corner of the world, who seem to appear from nowhere and work themselves up from the lowest to the highest limits within a very short time. Where others used to need half a lifetime, these people need just two or three years.

The career opportunity that online poker offers by being constantly available to the public also demands new qualities from the player himself, however. If you want to get ahead in online poker, you not only need to be a good player, you also need to be a good manager – your own manager.

Always see the money you take to a table with you as an investment, in the same way you would if you were buying shares. As someone who is responsible with their money, you would only buy those shares if they promised a good return and the risk of loss was manageable. It’s the same concept when you use bankroll management in poker.

It shows you what limits to invest in, i.e. how high your stakes should be, to find a good balance between your desire to...

• ... advance as far as possible when you win and collect a lot of money.
• ... not drop too far back when you lose and not lose too much of your poker money.

You want to make a lot of money when you win but not be hit too hard when you lose. This can be done by keeping to the '25-Buy-in-Bankroll Management' rule. It tells you how big your poker account (bankroll) has to be to move up a limit, and when you need to put on the brakes and move down a limit.

Bankroll management for the Big Stack Strategy looks like this: 

You always join a table with a full stack (100 big blinds). 100 big blinds equal one buy-in.


Example:  If you've passed PokerStrategy.com's quiz and have your starting capital in your poker account you start at NL2 (0.01/0.02). The big blind is $0.02 here and the buy-in that you take to the table is therefore $2.

The first limits Limit Big Blind Your Buy-in  Bankroll Needed NL2 (0.01/0.02) $0.02 $2 ... NL4 (0.02/0.04) $0.04 $4 $100 NL10 (0.05/0.10) $0.10 $10 $250 NL25 (0.10/0.25) $0.25 $25 $625

If you join tables of a limit that is too high for your bankroll, you will make yourself an easy target. Higher limit players are just waiting for opponents like you. Without solid bankroll management, it doesn’t matter how well you play, it is simply not possible to make a long-term profit. Even the best players in the world go bust if they don't stick to bankroll management.

Of course this means that you will start off small and it will take a while to see the first big results. This shouldn’t discourage you however.  After all, the first Apple computer was put together in a garage, and Bill Gates didn’t write his first program on a computer, he used pen and paper.

The more you play, the more experience you'll gain. Your account balance will grow and at some point you'll have won enough to move up to the next highest limit, then to the one higher than that, and so on.

It‘s like a game at an amusement arcade. You start off playing against the easy opponents, then you play against the hard ones, and finally you end up playing against the players in the last round. If you would play against those final players right away, it would be boring.

Most of the time you would probably lose due to not having enough experience in the game, since you skipped the previous levels, and for the times you got lucky and won, you would have missed out on 98% of the game.  Since poker requires you to face the difficult opponents over and over again, it is important to acquire the necessary experience on the lower stakes, before moving on to the harder opponents.

How do you make profit from playing No-Limit Hold’em?

Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain.

The title of this chapter could just as well be: How do you win money playing poker? Many people racked their brains over this, until a certain David Sklansky, professional poker player and author of a number of definitive works on poker theory, came up with the answer.

In his book Theory of Poker he carries out a little hypothetical experiment, in which two players play a game of poker but have their cards facing up on the table. So both players know each other‘s hand and are therefore able to calculate all probabilities precisely and play an ideal game.

Sklansky argues that in the long run you will always gain when your opponent digresses from their ideal way of playing, i.e. makes a mistake. On the other hand, you will always lose in the long run if you digress from the way of playing that is ideal for you.

Consequently, Sklansky named this fundamental principle the Fundamental Theorem of Poker. And as long as you play poker, this principle will always hold true.

Long-term success in poker doesn’t primarily depend on your cards or your opponents. Nor does it depend on whether you‘re playing low or high limits, or even the final table of the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas. Regardless of stakes, cards, or opponents the key to success is always the same: making as few mistakes as possible and making as much money from your opponents‘ mistakes as possible.

So if you want to know how to make a profit playing No-Limit Hold’em, you need to study what mistakes other players typically make. Most players on the lower limits and also on the tables with up to $100 buy-ins typically make these errors:

• They play too many hands and, as a result, many hands that are too weak.
• They play too passively.
• They have difficulty folding, and end up paying too much for speculative hands, for instance.
• They bluff too much and at the wrong times. Often they unnecessarily inflate pots with pure bluffs.
• They don't factor in their position at the table.
• They don't practise good bankroll management and anxiety about their money dictates how they play.

To benefit as much as possible from these very common mistakes, one simply has to do the exact opposite.

• You only select hands that are worth playing.
• You play aggressively.
• You don't have a problem with folding, if the situation becomes unprofitable. You don't get “attached” to your cards.
• You don‘t bluff much but when you do, you do it at the right time. You don't bluff when you're playing for a big pot.
• You adapt your game according to your position at the table.
• You manage your poker bankroll well and can make moves because you know they are profitable, without worrying about the fact that you might sometimes also lose the hand.

The tight-aggressive strategy

Of the points mentioned above, 3 are especially important, as they form the building blocks of the so-called tight-aggressive play mode, which is the perfect response to the frequently occurring mistakes in the lower to middle limits:

• You play tight.
• You play aggressive.
• You play in position.

Tight means that you don‘t play everything that falls into your hands. There are many cards that look weak and actually are weak. There are also some hands, however, that look strong, but aren't, such as King Jack for example.

After the flop you don’t need to see every showdown simply because you have a pair. Knowing when you are beat or when the price is too high can save you a lot of money.

There is one simple rule in Texas Hold’em: You don‘t want to be the one to just call, i.e. the one who just goes along with the bets, without betting or raising yourself. 

You have already learned that your profit is a result of your opponents' mistakes. And when do people make mistakes? When they have to make an important decision under pressure.

You will earn considerably more money with Texas Hold’em when you constantly force your opponents to make decisions, put them under pressure, and so force them to make mistakes. You can achieve this by playing aggressive poker.

At the same time you will save a lot of money if you avoid situations in which someone forces you to make a decision. If someone pushes you into a defensive position, you ought to feel very uncomfortable.

Cold-calling, which means going along with an opponent‘s raise pre-flop, is practically a deadly sin. With very few exceptions, it will lead you into situations, which are hard to control. For most cases you are limited to hoping to hit a strong hand, which doesn’t actually happen as often as some people think.

Poker legend Doyle Brunson once wrote: Position is everything in Texas Hold’em. It is tedious and dangerous to want to win money when you don‘t have position on your opponent.

So what does that mean? If your opponents have to act before you in a given betting round, you have position on them. If they have the luxury of getting to act after you, they have position on you. Whenever an opponent has to act before you, you have the distinct advantage of being able to observe their move, before needing to act yourself. You are therefore in an advantageous position in terms of the information you have, and in this game, information is a valuable commodity. In addition to this it is also possible to make more profitable moves when playing in position.

Your life as a poker player becomes so much easier and more successful if you always pay attention to this. If you want to make money off of someone, then make sure you have position on them.

Conclusion

Perhaps not everything in this article was new to you, but it should be helpful to constantly remind yourself how important bankroll management and the use of a tight-aggressive style of play are for your poker career.

As you advance higher and higher through the limits, you will adapt and create your own unique style of play. Yet no matter what kind of intricacies you build into your own style, it will always have its foundation in the basic elements that you learn about in this and the following articles.

In the next article you will find out what it means to play in position, and when and with which cards to enter the game.

To Article: How to play before the flop

LINKS
Printed versions: The Starting Hands Chart as PDF File  Related Articles: How to play before the flop How to play after the flop

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