Poker strategy essays
Game selection
in high stakes No Limit Holdem
By Eric Nevlys
When you enter the world of high stakes,
No
Limit Texas Holdem you have crossed the threshold
into an exciting and somewhat foreboding place. These
games feature the most pressure, the highest amounts
of money and the best players. They also offer the
greatest rewards and most intense challenges in all
of poker.
To be successful in this world, you
must be well equipped, and possibly the most important
skill you need to have must be exercised before you
ever sit at the poker table. To really reap high stakes,
No Limit Holdem poker profits, you must be a master
of game selection.
At the highest stakes No Limit Texas
Holdem games, you will tend to find three
types of players. Professionals, players who think
they are professionals and "whales," players with
a lot of money to burn who want to challenge the best
and aren't worried about how much money it will cost
them to do so. You may already see why it behooves
you to find the best games.
So how can you find the right high
stakes, No Limit Holdem game to sit in? The only answer
is observation. Watch the players and how they play.
The ones with the big stacks are often strong players,
but they could easily be players who continually rebuy
as soon as they get low, or weaker players on a lucky
streak. By the same token, a very strong player could
be experiencing a bad run of luck and be down on chips.
Watching the play of the game will be the only true
indicator.
If the game is live, it may be tough
to get close enough to get some really good information.
However, clearly if you recognize the majority of
the players from television, this may be a game you
want to avoid, unless the players you recognize are
those who have won a single big tournament, as they
may have gotten lucky and vastly overestimate their
playing abilities. Additionally, players who make
a big show of how high they are playing are often
in the "think they're professionals" category, although
very savvy pros may act obnoxiously or overly boldly
in order to appear much more maniacal than they really
are.
Online poker games offer a much better
chance for observation. You can see which players
seem to be overly aggressive, trying to bully their
opponents out of every flop, and which ones pick their
spots. You'll see who is winning by sucking out and
which players are making genuinely good plays. If
you've reached this level of play through playing
at the lower stakes, you probably already like to
observe your opponents to try to pick something up
before you sit down at the online poker table, so
this should come naturally. If there are only one
or two high stakes games and the games seem to have
more sharks than fish, you should probably play at
the highest middle stakes no-limit game instead. If
your goal, like most professional players, is to have
the highest win rate possible, a middle stakes game
full of amateurs is probably going to suit your needs
better. If money really isn't the issue and you just
want to challenge the best, feel free to sit down
at the shark game. Be aware that those players will
be smelling blood and coming after you though, so
you'd better have your best poker game ready if you
want to survive.
Find more Texas
Holdem tips at Learn-Texas-Holdem.com.
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