Leaving Low Limit

The strategy described on Low Limit Holdem Strategy and Tactics www.lowlimitholdem.com including the starting hand selections is, at its core, not a low limit strategy at all. After all, the cards don't know what limit you are playing... A 1 cent table is exactly the same as a $10,000 table in terms of the rules, the cards, the odds and so on.

The reason the site was named "Low Limit" is that at the time table conditions at live poker rooms (the kind you actually go to in person and sit down) at games in the low limit range ($1-$2 through about $9-$18) were ideal for playing lots of good multiway hands. Essentially these were loose games where many people saw the flop and then, because the pot was large from all the pre-flop callers, continued on past the flop too far with very weak hands.

Now, in 2007 at the end of an unparalleled explosion in the popularity of poker which was thanks almost entirely to the World Poker Tour and its televised final tables with hole card cameras, it is more and more difficult to find this sort of extremely loose table online at the low and "micro" limits.

One of the reasons for this is that there's been a lot of poker education and access to good general poker advice from professional poker players. There's also the fact that most new poker players severely underfund their poker playing efforts and then play an extremely tight game to try to minimize their variance.

The strange truth online is that the looseness of the tables actually increases as you raise limits from micro to low to middle limits at most cardrooms. You're more likely to find loose conditions described on our main site at a $3-$6 to $10-$20 table than you will at a $0.50-$1 to $2-4 table.

Your goal as a money winning poker player should be to increase the limit you play at. This is not just to take advantage of the looser behavior mentioned above, but also (and very importantly) to minimize the impact of rake on your winnings. At most online cardrooms $3 is the maximum rake taken so a large pot of $100 at a $3-$6 table will generate the same amount of rake as a large $400 pot at a $10-$20 table but the percentage of the pot that is actually rake is much less. To maximize your profit you must continually strive to increase the limit you play at.

Texas Holdem for Fun and Profit

It's been a while since the last post on the Low Limit Holdem blog and certainly a lot has happened since last year. The biggest elephant in the room is of course the weasel-like ban on funding internet gambling sites from US sources that was tacked onto an unrelated port security bill.

Since that bill went into law late last year there are only a handful of reputable poker sites available to play at for US players Full Tilt, UltimateBet, PokerStars and Bodog Poker are among the best known sites still serving US players.and the major funding players (Firepay and Neteller) are gone from the US market. In their place are sites like Epassporte, MyWebATM, and Click2Pay.

The short and happy news is that online poker isn't going away, but the definite bad sucking news is that our legislators are engaged in some strange operation foot-bullet to make playing poker online less secure and less regulated. Take a cue from the UK and actually regulate internet gambling (including poker) and use the funds to improve the country and to provide help for the small minority of players who actually have gambling problems.

Rest assured, whatever happens with online poker lowlimitholdem.com will continue to exist and provide poker strategy, advice and discussion.