Q&A #113: No-Limit Games Really Can’t Be Too Loose

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Recently I published an answer to the mother of all poker questions, Can A No-Limit Game Be Too Loose? The short answer is, no. For the long answer, read the article.

This really is, however, the mother of all poker questions, both because it’s an extremely important question and because for many players it will never, ever be put to rest. In particular, I got a couple of comments on the original article that I’d like to address.

The first comment comes from Eric:

Well, I’ll give you an example maybe you can comment on..

I was at a game on Thursday, where it was all in, pre flop, every hand. No one had any choice, because there were two guys at the table that were making it that way. (I got up and moved to the other game in the place) 1/2, 200 max buy-in, both guys were approaching 400 when I sat down, and one was approaching 1000 when i left

Here were my thoughts:

The basic idea is that you call them a lot. You want to call most when you’re in position and can be fairly sure the hand will be heads-up against you and the guy going in every hand.

For instance, if the guy moves in under the gun and you’re next to act with A7, you fold. But if the guy moves in under the gun and everyone folds to you in the big blind, you call with A7. You call with KT and 66 also. Basically in that situation you call with any hand that has a decent edge over a random hand.

The stronger your hand, the earlier a position you can call. Obviously anyone could wake up with AA or KK, so you need to have a bigger edge over a random hand to fade 7 players behind you than just 1 or 2.

In addition, I’d like to point out that it often seems like these crazy guys that move in every hand are winning because they have 3 or 4 buyins in front of them. But often they’ve actually bought into the game for more buyins than they have in front of them, and they’re actually down for the session (sometimes down many, many buyins). So if you see someone moving all-in every hand with an $800 stack in a $200 buyin game don’t assume he’s a big winner. He could be down 15 buyins and then up 3.

Ok, now on to MTDog-7’s comments:

I don’t agree here in Montana we have a POT Limit of $300. What can happen is someone moves all in and you get several callers the more callers the less the cost so with 6 players in the pot it’s only $50 each. This all before the flop. To win you don’t play big pairs but suited connecting cards as Ace, Kings and Queens get busted by trash in most every hand. I have seen 10 players in the pot for cost of $30 each. This is not Poker just a lottery. It maybe true in a true No Limit game it can’t be too loose, in a Capped Pot game it can be too loose.

Just so everyone understands, in the game MTDog describes, the pot can never exceed $300. If you bet $150 and get called, the pot is its maximum size, and you’re effectively all-in. However, other players can also call the bet, and the bets get scaled down so that the final pot size does not exceed $300. In other words, say you bet $150 and get called in two places. Your $150 bet will be reduced to $100, and all three players will be all-in for just the $100. If three players call, the bets will be reduced to $75. For four, $60. For five, $50, and so on. This game has a capped pot size, but it is played with no-limit rules until the capped pot size is reached.

Now my answer. MTDog, you can win consistently in this game. It is not too loose. In fact, games like this one are beatable over the long term with a rather simple strategy.

Before I talk about how and why this game is beatable, I want to talk a little about the psychology of games like these. When people talk about ultra-loose games, they often compare them to another gambling game. MTDog called this game a “lottery.” Loose games are also called “bingo”, “crapshoots”, “keno”, and so on. There are two key characteristics of these games poker gets compared to: 1) Their strategies are simple and once an initial choice is made, the player has no control anymore over the outcome, and 2) They aren’t beatable.

Ultra-loose poker games share the first trait of these games, but absolutely do not share the second. Yet I think many people assume since it shares the first trait that it also must share the second. Absolutely not true.

When people think of poker, they think of hand reading. They think of bluffing and value betting. They think of using wits and guile to outplay the other players and take their money. Indeed, many people think that the ability to profit at poker depends on the ability to employ these skills. If you want to win at poker, you’d better be able to push people off hands, trap people, and so on. If your game doesn’t allow you to use those skills, it’s not beatable.

This assumption about poker, that one depends on employing these higher level skills to turn a profit, is false. In fact, often you can generate more profit in games that require only the simplest of strategies to beat.

If you want to think of poker as a lottery, let’s talk about the lottery for a second. The lottery is a losing game because the sum of the payouts ends up to be less than total price of all the tickets sold. But it doesn’t have to be that way. One could imagine a sort of subsidized lottery where the payouts were actually greater than the sum of the ticket prices.

For instance, say the lottery commission decided that they would reward anyone who matched even one number on a $1 ticket with a $5 prize. Since the chance to match one number is significantly better than 1 in 6, you could literally print money playing this lottery… turning $1 bills into $5 bills nearly at will.

Yet the game would be just as mindless. You pick 6 numbers at random and hold your breath. But it would be profitable.

Ultra-loose poker games are somewhat like this. After you go through the relatively simple process of deciding which hands are worth playing and which require a fold, you just put your money in and hold your breath. Sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t, but after thousands of hands (if you’re doing it right), you’ll be way ahead.

MTDog is wrong that suited connectors are better than big pairs in this sort of game. Big pairs are the best hands in hold’em in all circumstances, and loose games are no exception at all. For instance, a pair of aces beats five random hands nearly 50% of the time. Whereas, T9s beats five random hands only about 22% of the time. Even a pair as weak as pocket eights fares better than T9s in this test.

If you don’t like comparisons to random hands, let’s compare each hand to the following hand range:

22+,A*,KQ-K7,QJ-Q9,JT-J8,T9,98,87,76,65,54,**s

That is, any pocket pair, any ace, K7 and better, Q9 and better, J8 and better, any two suited, and offsuit connectors 54 and better. That represents roughly half of all possible hands. Pocket aces wins 45% of the time against five players with that hand range. T9s wins just 18% of the time, barely better than average. Again, pocket eights outperforms the suited connector.

Here’s the bottom line. It may not be fun to you to play in a game where every hand is all-in preflop and big hands get busted with regular frequency. You may not think it’s challenging, and it may not represent your ideal of what a poker game should be. But it can definitely be very, very profitable, and games like this are most certainly not too loose to beat.

To finish up, I’d like to address one or two points from MTDog’s followup comment:

Okay here the deal on the $300 Pot limit in Montana. The State law is that there will be no more than $300 in any one Pot. So if I bet $150 and next player calls it’s $150 to that player, then a another player calls it’s $100 and the fourth it’s $75 and fifth $60. Now the early players get a refund so it’s only $60 to each. So what happens is that stack size does not matter beyond $150 as that’s the default max bet. What also happens is because you can’t be pushed out and quality hands can not be protected them selves GAMBLOORS are rewarded for their donk raises and calls with hand like 83 os.
once you get the the fifth caller in a capped pot, pot odds make it proper to call with ATC.

I played 6 hours in game like this last night 75% of the pots capped pre-flop and I took an number of pot in late position with calls with hand like 9Ts, T7s, 68s , 89s ect. AA busted, QQ busted, KK held up folded to pre flop raise. JJ held up once bust 2 times. 22 made set 6 times by myself and other players. Pocket Aces held up twice busted 7 times. Selective memory………..I don’t think so.

“once you get the the fifth caller in a capped pot, pot odds make it proper to call with ATC” This isn’t true. In a game like this one, you only have “pot odds” to call preflop if your hand will win more often than the average hand. So that means that, yes, it’s proper to call with T 9 if five players have entered the pot and you give them each credit for the hand range I specified above. It’s proper because the T9s will win about 18% of the time, while the average hand will win only 1 in 6 times or about 16.7% of the time. (I’ll assume that the blind money gets consumed entirely by the rake.)

But T 9 would be a losing call since it wins only 14.5% of the time. If you resolve to call only with hands that win more often than the average hand, over the long run you will win a lot of money from this game.

Finally, MTDog’s observations about the game are right on the money. Hands like T9s and T7s and even 22 will definitely win their share of pots. And if you were to just watch the game and record the winning hand for each pot, you’ll see a lot more “ragged” hands like T9s and 22 win than “premium” hands like AA or QQ. But that’s because a whole lot more ragged hands get dealt than premium hands, so it’s entirely reasonable that ragged hands will be the winners more often than not.

Furthermore, when premium hands do get dealt, they aren’t even favorites to win the hand. Pocket aces is just barely 50/50 to win a pot against 5 random hands, and it’s solidly less than 50 percent to beat 5 hands drawn from a typical hand range. Pocket aces will get cracked more often than not. And weaker pairs will get cracked even more often.

However, pocket aces is a huge money favorite. Say pocket aces wins half the pots and loses half. When aces loses, it loses the $50 bet. But when it wins, it wins $250. If you’re roughly 50/50 to either lose $50 or win $250, you’ll end up making a whole lot of money over time.

And that’s how these loose games can be so profitable. Sure, premium hands get cracked all the time and often the hands that win pots look pretty ragged. But the premium hands win significantly more often than the average hand, and that fact makes them big money favorites. If you play a game like this and stay disciplined, playing only hands that win more often than average, by the end of the year you’ll have won a small fortune.

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