The Making of a No-Limit Player

There are many attributes that a successful no-limit hold‘em poker player must have. Doyle Brunson once famously remarked in his landmark book Supersystem that you “gotta have heart”. This statement typifies much of what is required to play no-limit hold ‘em well. It is also something that many players fail to fully take on board.

In order to play no-limit hold ‘em well then you must learn to live with variance…..or in other words risk! Your poker bankroll (presuming that you have one) is there for a clearly defined reason. If you were to ask one hundred players, why they have a poker bankroll…..then you would get all the usual answers.

“I need it so that I am not risking household money” tends to be a common one. Another is “so that I can withstand the variance without going bust” tends to be the most popular. Both of these reasons are entirely valid of course and are necessary in many cases. However in nearly every single case, I do not hear one of the most important (if not THE most important) reasons ever quoted.

Millions of poker players end up playing far too tightly for their respective bankrolls in a style that can only defined as “weak tight” or “tight passive”. If a player like this had thirty buy-ins at NL50 then the chances are that with rakeback that they would never lose this money or the chances of them losing it would be low and especially if their post flop play was decent so that they only ever put themselves all-in with a very strong hand.

Your bankroll is there for another vital reason, it is there so that you can make plays that you otherwise couldn’t make with a smaller bankroll. Plays that pressurise your opponents and create fold equity. Plays like three betting with a mediocre hand because you expect that your opponent is stealing the blinds.

These plays are obviously aggressive plays and with it, this creates greater variance. This tends to be the poker players worst enemy and millions of players fight this so fiercely as to end up losing an awful lot of money over the course of the year by playing too tight. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong in sacrificing value to reduce variance, many strong players do this.

But many weak-tight players simply take the concept too far. They have 30 and even 40 buy-in bankrolls and most of them are playing so tightly that they have never had more than a 10 buy-in downswing in their entire life.

If you are going to break free of this self imposed prison that you have created for yourself, then I advise reading financial books on how professional speculators risk money (huge amounts of money) and live with that risk every single day. If you cannot live with risk as a poker player then your upside will be minimal.