Limit ring O8 is by far the best way to start, for a couple of main reasons.
- It teaches starting hand selection better than tournaments. You can sit and grind it out waiting for powerful
hands to play in loose ring games, but you will often reach a point where you are forced to play marginal hands in tournaments. It's better as far as a learning process goes to just be focused on your hand and its possibilities than being concerned with other things like blinds and stack sizes.
- In loose limit games, getting quartered (winning half of the high or the low pot) is much less of a concern than in pot limit, as you may well profit despite getting quartered if a lot of players stick around.
Limit ring O8 is very mechanical though - I have trouble playing just one table of it anymore because you will have periods where you're foldfoldfolding, or your big hands aren't hitting and you're check-folding a lot of flops (
bluffing in low limit ring O8 is invariably a really stupid idea).