Spreading My Limits

So I've decided to take a break from the 20/40 limit game at least until after going to Pendleton in November. Instead, I've been playing the "spread limit" game for the past week and it has been going really well.

For those of you who don't know, Washington gambling law doesn't allow for true no-limit cash games because the maximum you can bet at one time is $500. So to get around this, the tribal casinos run what is called "spread limit." There are two main games, $3/$5 and $5/$10. So in $3/$5, you can bet anywhere from $5 to $500 at any time and in $5/$10 it's $10 to $500. The other twist is that there can only be a bet and three raises just like in a limit game. So if someone raises the $5 big blind to $15 and another person makes it $30, a third person could make it $45 to go and prevent the first raiser from making a big reraise since the betting is now "capped."

I've always had good results at these games, but I have also had a lot of trouble dealing with the swings. In $20/$40 limit, you can build a $1000 buy-in into $2000 over the course of a session and then hit a rough swing over the next couple hours and fall back to $1000 or even lose it all, but in $5/$10 NL, you could spend several hours chipping up from $1000 to $2000 and then lose the entire $2000 in one hand! That rapid swing of emotions takes its toll on my psyche and, in the past, has caused me to do some stupid things like go to the blackjack tables.

I've been taking it slowly over the past week, playing exclusively $3/$5 to start out. The mistakes these players make are so incredible. They just don't balance their ranges at all. They take such straightforward lines with their big hands and never mix in any bluffs. They give away too much information about their hands by how much they raise preflop. They only bluff in certain predictable spots. They don't fastplay big draws on the flop in the same way as they play their big hands. Basically, they just don't think about how their bets betray their hands. All that you have to do to beat these players is decipher what their bets mean and their hand is basically face up to you. The only reason that these people get away with this type of play is that very few other people are paying attention.

At the $5/$10, there are a few more good thinking players and the "fish" at least err on the side of aggression instead of passivity. The mistakes people make in this game are a bit harder to exploit. The $5/$10 players, in general, don't control the pots well with one pair hands. To exploit this, you either have to pick up a big hand like a set against their top pair and trap them for a big pot, or alternatively, you can make a big move on them by check/raising the turn on a bluff since they most likely can't call with just one pair (the correct play with one pair in NL is often to check behind the turn to control the size of the pot). Getting a set against top pair is hard to do, and making a big bluff requires a lot of guts and risks losing a big chunk of chips when they have a stubborn AA or a set themselves.

I had moved to playing $20/$40 because I felt no-limit cash games were too boring. To a large extent, they are. There's a lot of sitting around waiting for the right spot to come along to make a move. If you're not patient enough to wait for the right hand against the right opponent, you're going to spew all your chips away. But when you find that perfect spot, it feels so good to take all of someone's chips in one hand, or to win a big pot with a well executed bluff. Hopefully I can control my emotions and not get worked up too much about losing a big pot and stay focused on my game. If not, I can always head back over to the $20/$40 game :)