I’ve been toying around with NL again, playing mostly $50 cash games at Party and Stars. I’ve also been reading up on some hand analysis threads and I’ve noticed something interesting - and slightly ironic. As with the “NETeller effect” I’m of course suffering from the problem of having a tiny sample and being quick to judge by it. But that’s my prerogative.

It seems as if NL players think more in terms of “good” or “bad” than limit players do. “This is a good hand” or “this is a bad hand.” There seems to be few degrees between what’s good and what’s bad, and that surprises me. The irony of course is that in a game where you can size your own bets exactly the way you want them, the idea of having fewer levels between good and bad is… Well, ironic. Limit hands are always dissected according to pot odds, and as a limit player you get good at doing just that; counting your outs, figuring your odds, judging your relative position and potential implied odds and making a decision. Looking at NL hand analysis threads (not necessarily just at CardsChat) there’s a lot of “you’re out of position: fold” or “don’t play A-9 in middle position.”

It’s like a collection “tips.” Rarely are the tips qualified or adjusted for the situations they’re being applied to, and not enough people seem to be willing to challenge conventional wisdom. “Don’t slowplay top pair” and “don’t give people odds to chase flushes.” Conventional wisdom soundbytes are good for helping a beginner avoid the worst mistakes, but they’re not divine truth. Averaged over all possible situations, the right move is most of the time to fold A9 in middle position, and you should generally not play mediocre hands out of position. But when someone posts a hand for analysis, we don’t need the oversimplification of the conventional wisdom, we have all the time in the world to analyze the situation from its very core.

I dunno. It seems ironic to me how the people with the most freedom of action in the poker world also appear to be the most willing to view things in black-or-white, and how the rigid action of fixed limit hold ‘em breeds a nuanced sense of grey. It shouldn’t surprise me though, because while a NL player often just needs to decide if they’re ahead more than one third of the time (being asked to call a pot-sized bet), a fixed limit player often needs to look at whether or not he’s ahead more than, say, one time in 9.

Where am I going with this? What I’m suggesting, I guess, is that perhaps no-limit players would benefit from looking at the world in a more nuanced way than the soundbytes let them.

In closing, a good example of how I feel limit and no-limit players think differently - that is, how they approach a decision differently - is from Dorkus Malorkus’s analysis of Tenbob’s MTT where, and I forget the details of the hand but bear with me, TB is faced with a decision of whether or not to call a pot sized bet on the turn with KhJh on a board of Th-9h-x-x (both rags are lower than J) and DM’s immediate reaction was that he should probably fold his flush draw. My immediate reaction was “overcards with a flush draw and an inside straight draw” and THEN looked at what the odds were. Now, DM - after some consideration - decided that the inside straight draw and overcards might actually sum up to enough outs to warrant it, so we would have both reached the same decision, but what I thought was interesting was the line of reasoning and how the immediate reaction from his part was “big bet, bad hand, probably fold” and my reflex was “holy scooter, tons of outs, happy call!” DM overlooked the inside straight draw when he made the first comment, and I suspect that it was a combination of him having a cold (get well soon!) and simply not being used to looking for inside straight draws.

I’m thinking like a limit player, and in big pots we look for reasons to call. No-limit players tend to look for reasons to fold. In this particular example, the differences just showed so clearly.