I've always maintained that I prefer to play in ring games but the fact is most of my experience in this game type comes from home games that are usually played as spread limit. I have played in no-limit games at the casino from time to time, but with mixed results. So I figured I'd better get myself some lessons on no-limit ring games first. I checked out some recommendations for books on the subject and settled on 'Harrington on Cash Games ( Volume 1). I'd just finished reading Harrington's first volume on tournaments and had found it to be quite useful, so was hoping that this book would be equally illuminating.
I had a couple of false starts with the casino games because it turns out that, although the 'Poker Zone' opens at 5 pm weekdays and at midday on weekends, the $3 games don't actually start until about 7 pm. So, having read half a cash game primer, I headed up to the casino about a month ago to give it a try. My wife came along as well and she wandered off to play the slots while I went upstairs to the poker room and bought myself in for my 60 big blinds.
I was surprised to find that play in this game was very loose and quite passive. I'd heard a little about this game from some tournament players who'd tried it and the impression I'd got was that there were some serious players in this game. This certainly wasn't the case when I was up there. There was an awful lot of pre-flop limping and post-flop calling going on and not much raising. The one exception was a player to my left who was mostly folding and very occasionally 3-betting a pre-flop raiser. The raiser invariably folded, so I never got to see what sort of hands this guy was re-raising with. Apart from that it was pretty much a call-fest and some of the winning hands that got shown down were pretty weak.
Despite all this I wasn't getting many playable hands and ended up steadily losing chips. My biggest loss came when I had two pair against a higher two pair. I ended up having to reload and by the time my wife came upstairs to see how I was doing I'd lost my original buy-in and decided it was time to call it a night.
I wasn't too worried about this poor start and continued reading Harrington. I soon realised that this book is aimed at people playing in medium stakes games against reasonably tough opposition. What's more, the main focus of the book is correct strategy for playing in deep stacked games where players have 100 big blinds or more. Neither of these assumptions are true for the Sky City cashies. The standard of play is generally pretty poor and only some of the players have deep stacks. And it also occurred to me that even if everyone had 100 BBs in front of them, my starting stack was only 60 BBs, making for a medium-sized effective stack. Despite all this I still found the general principals set out in Harrington's book to be useful and continued to study it.My second trip to the Poker Zone was about three weeks ago, on a Saturday night. As before, play was pretty loose. There seemed to be an epidemic of limp-calling at this table. The player to my right was limping in a lot and seemed to call every time that he got raised pre-flop. Players were coming and going on a regular basis, with some losing their stacks then reloading and returning to the table. I was doing okay for a while and my stack got up to about $400. I'd already decided that this was the most I wanted sitting on the table so I was going to cash out and take a break. But then my stack dropped down a little, so I carried on playing.
I noticed that the '15 seconds to act' rule was being observed fairly loosely. I couldn't see any time-keeping apparatus that the dealers might be using. As far as I could tell, if a dealer decided that you were taking too long to act then they would start a 5 second count-down. The only time that this affected me was in a hand where I was facing a bet on the river with just one pair in my hand. Then I thought that I might have hit a straight as the dealer started counting down. I quickly called to avoid my cards being mucked, only to realise that I had no straight. Oops.
My stack was down to about $300 when I hit the hand that ended my night. I had A K in early position, put in a big raise and got 3 callers. The flop came K 8 9 and I bet about 3/4 of the pot with my top pair, top kicker and got one caller. By the time the hand was over I was all-in with my pair of Kings and the other player turned over 8 9 for two pair. This was an idiot move on my part. The call of my big bet on the flop should have been setting off all sorts of alarm bells but I ignored them. Once more I fell into the trap of refusing to believe that my big hand could get outdrawn. If I'd done this in a tournament I might have lost as much as $60. But this was a cashie, so I gave away $300. That's the difference between tournies and cashies. The funny thing is, on reviewing some chapters of the Harrington book I found a sample hand that was almost exactly the same. The point of the example was, 'don't overvalue one pair hands in no-limit ring games'. Oh well.
So I've got one buy-in left. I intend to try again in a couple of weeks. Despite my poor showing so far, I'm moderately confident of doing better next time. Thinking about these games, I can see that the general standard of play is pretty low. And it's not really deep stack poker. I've come to the conclusion that the best way to approach these games is to play straightforward A B C poker; tight and aggressive and not too fancy. I'm still going to read Harrington Volume 2, but when I go back up to Sky City I think it will be a case of sticking to the basics. And I'll bring some money for the roulette table, just in case I lose my buy-in again.
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