Three No-Limit Realities

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Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. An image enters the eye and hits the back of the retina. Almost immediately the brain goes to work trying to fill in the blanks. Was only half of a face in view? Just the back of a head? The brain seamlessly fills in the missing information, creating an image of what the entire person should look like. This process works out well enough to get us through everyday life, but it’s simply not reliable enough to meet a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. Many of the things we “see” never actually existed. They are merely the creative products of an active human brain.

No-limit players can be similarly tricked by their eyes and brains. Any poker writer will tell you to observe your game – that important information is available everywhere if you’re disciplined enough to look for it. It’s true enough. But our brains don’t dispassionately catalog data. Every morsel of information is automatically run through a series of cognitive filters to determine its significance and context. Two players can watch the same game and come to quite different conclusions. They both see the same raw data, but they each make sense of it their own way.

I’d like to offer you three no-limit realities. You can verify them by observing a game and logging events with a pen and paper. They have strategic significance. Yet many players play as if the opposite of these realities were true. I think their brains are tricking them.

Most Pots Never Reach Showdown

Unless you play in a crazy, loose game, most pots won’t reach the showdown. In many games far more than half the pots are won without showdown. Often the turn is the critical round: A good-sized turn bet will win a lot of pots. What’s the significance?

You can clean up betting the flop and turn. You don’t need a hand. You don’t even need a draw. You just need to bet. Sometimes one bet will do. Sometimes you’ll need two. They can’t be wimpy $20 bets into $200 pots. You have to put some oomph into it. But it works in nearly every no-limit game.

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