I often hear bad players cry foul in poker games when they lose hands or fail to hit the flop when in actual fact they very often manufactured their own downfall. Let us look at an example here to show what I mean. It gets folded around to the cut-off in $3-$6 limit who raises to $6 and you have the Kd-Jc on the button and you call. This is a terrible blunder. Remember that we are not playing no-limit hold’em here where calling raises with position can have all sorts of strategic advantages. Here the goal of limit hold’em is to win a high number of pots and not huge pots.

The structured nature of the game means that the pot size will usually be universal within a small range and so waiting for big pay offs in limit Texas Holdem simply will not materialise and so you need to fight ferociously with regards to the pots that you play for. Even if you have the worst hand here and your opponent has something like A-9 then the combination of your position and the possible dead money by both blinds folding means that a raise will usually be +EV.

In this example our hero merely calls and the big blind also calls and the flop comes Qh-8h-7d. The big blind bets and the original raiser calls and now you have basically no hand other than a shaky draw to a king or a backdoor straight. But imagine if the big blind were betting Q-9 while the caller had 10-9 for a straight draw. Had you three bet pre-flop like you should have done then the big blind would likely have mucked their Q-9. Then you are heads up with position against an inferior hand and what could be better than that?

But our hero manufactured his own downfall here by not being aggressive pre-flop. This is where you need to strike the proper balance in limit and I often see players become aggressive at the wrong times with the wrong types of hands. An example could well be the following; it has been open raised by the hijack and our hero three bets with A-6. This play is aggressive but too aggressive. You need to play more respect to the position of the raiser and the fact that your ace could be dominated. An A-6 has what is known as reverse implied odds and if an ace arrives and your opponent has a bigger ace then you are in pay off territory.

In fact if your opponent had a hand like A-9 and you three bet with K-J and the hand was heads up then you could win this pot in numerous different ways. For instance if the flop came 10-8-4 and they check and you bet and they call then you still have the initiative as many players will call a flop bet. If the turn came a queen to give you an up and down straight draw then you could continue the betting and force your opponent off their ace high hand and win the pot without a showdown.

There is a classic term in poker that signifies players who are not very good and are merely contributing money to the poker economy……their money is commonly referred to as “dead money”. This needs some clarification because the term first originated in tournament poker. It basically meant the buy-ins from all of the players whose games were woefully short of being good enough.

I can understand this to a large extent as the requirements for winning large MTT poker tournaments basically mean that a player needs to know good solid tournament strategy. They must also be skilled at short handed play when games start to break up and know the difference in hand values from tournaments to cash games and vice versa.

You need to be lucky to win a poker tournament of any kind but the skilled tournament players know how to deal with that luck when it arrives. But the term “dead money” applies to tournament poker far more than it does to cash games. When bad players get lucky during the early stages of a tournament and amass chips then they cannot cash them out. They end up losing the chips back because their unskilful play means that they don’t play fast enough when the blinds rise and the table numbers shrink.

But in cash games this doesn’t apply so a novice player is no longer the “dead money” that they might have been in the large MTT. They can quit whenever they like and take their winnings with them and if they so wished…….never play online poker again. But yet when it comes to limpers, many intermediate players see their money as dead money when this is a long way from the truth.

Seeing a single limper or several limpers is not a green light to attack them with weak or mediocre hands. Even if the stakes are low then you need an advantage in order to attack. Let us look at the ideal limper scenario. An early or middle position player limps and it is then folded to you in the cut-off with Qh-9c. Many players would raise here and raising isn’t a bad poker play. But we have to look at the reason why you are raising.

If you are raising to diversify your actions then that is not a bad reason although in low-stakes online poker it isn’t necessary. Or if you are raising to build a pot for if you make your hand then once again the reason is viable. But if you are raising simply because there has been one limper and their money along with the blinds in easy money then your thinking is skewed. The Q-9 could be dominated to begin with and many limpers defend their limps with gusto.

There are also three players still to be heard from who may either have a hand or suspect what you are doing and adjust accordingly. What if you raise and get called by the limper and miss the flop and they check? Will you end up firing multiple barrels all because you wanted to steal some blind money and the “dead money” from the limper?

Has TV changed the game of poker? I recently had a discussion with a few of my poker friends regarding our favorite poker shows. We all have seen the World Poker Tour, ESPN covering the World Series of Poker, Professional Poker Tour, Poker After Dark, and High Stakes Poker just to name a few.


I have to admit that when I first started watching the WPT I was quite smitten with both the players and the game itself. Chris Moneymaker winning the 2003 WSOP put things into high gear as far as expanding the profile of No Limit Texas Hold’em and poker in general. This was great for poker and certainly perked up the ears of players and non poker players alike. After we got over talking about our favorite players and how they have fared over the years we concluded that although TV was great for exposure to the masses but it also created a false understanding of how the game is played.
With the WPT being the first weekly poker show it only showed the Final Table of each event with brief summaries of what actually took place previously in the tournament on select players that made it to TV Final Table. The other thing that we discussed was simply the fact that early on, up until 2005, the blind structure for the Final Table was so ridiculously fast that it distorted the game and made it appear as if going all-in pre-flop was the correct play to make to novices of the game. Basically the early years of the WPT influenced players to make high risk plays when many of them did not realize the context of a poker tournament and how the various stages actually work.


By 2005 the WPT finally changed the Final Table structure and allowed the players to play some real poker without the blinds crashing down on them from the first televised hand. Today the show continues to be broadcast and shows the game of poker, particularly Final Table play, in its proper light.
Clearly the first poker show to have an influence on the public was the WPT and this brought on a number of poker players that simply would push their chips in the middle with just about any pocket pair thinking that this was the correct play to make. For me it was particularly profitable in poker tournaments because it lasted for a good two years before the general public caught up and realized that you do not want to make plays like that when you are not short stacked. By that time the profit had been made and a lot of bankrolls grew from the newer players ignorance. Now everyone knows you don’t push your chips in the middle pre-flop with small pairs, suited connectors or anything else, especially early in a poker tournament. Players now know that this kind of play is a short-stack move and now understand how to extract value from their opponents versus the swing and miss all-in technique.


One show that we all agreed upon as being the best in terms of learning the game is the Professional Poker Tour. This particular show featured professional poker player and WPT finalist Mark Seif as the in-house analyst. Seif did a great job on this show. It debuted in 2005 and only ran for one season and five tournaments. However, every single tournament had great players in every spot and there were practically no weak players in the field. This led to some extremely exciting poker and also allowed viewers an inside look into the minds of some of the best poker players in the world. It also showed how the play changes from early, middle, and late stages in the poker tournament.


By now everyone had caught on and the game went from being wildly aggressive from the earlier broadcasts to a more controlled and steady aggression that most of us are used to seeing today. With shows like High Stakes Poker and Poker After Dark the networks continue to bring you quality poker strategy shows with depth and great analysis by hosts like Ali Nejad and even some of the players themselves via in-game interviews. Like anything else the game of poker evolves as time goes on. With the game now accepted world wide as a competitive sport it will continue to spawn new styles of play and it’s players will continue to be influenced by what they see the pros do on TV. That’s good for the game and good for us poker players too.