Quick, name a Duke graduate who had a single major with no minor or certificate.
You can probably count the number of people who had just one area of concentration on your right hand, and for a good reason—it’s important to have versatility in your studies and also have your main area of study complemented by other subjects. What you learn in mathematics not only complements your physics studies, it’s pretty much essential to understanding physics.
In poker, it’s no different. There’s often an unsaid but very common assumption that when I tell people I am a professional poker player, they assume I am actually a professional no-limit hold ‘em player. No-limit hold ‘em is definitely a game I play on a consistent basis and I enjoy it very much. But it is far from the only type of poker game I play for a living—in fact, I would doubt it’s 50 percent of my total playing time.
Just off the top of my head, there’s pot-limit Omaha, limit Omaha hi-lo, razz, seven-card stud, seven-card stud hi-lo, 2-7 low draw, 2-7 triple draw, five-card draw, badugi and baduci. Have I blown your mind yet? That doesn’t even include random home games that you would never find in a casino, such as baseball, deuces wild and follow the queen.
Now clearly, I’m not going to be playing every single one of these games every day. In fact, of the games listed above, I probably play less than half seriously and admit that I have no idea how to play badugi and baduci properly. But that’s not the main point here.
The main point is that by playing so many different games, you begin to learn the different aspects of poker that get especially magnetized in certain games. Let’s look at the five games that I play the most: no-limit hold ‘em, pot-limit Omaha, limit Omaha hi-lo, razz and seven card-stud.
No limit hold ‘em will teach you to read your opponents and understand their thought processes very quickly. Unlike limit games, where paying off a river bet with a marginal hand might only cost you a tenth of your stack, in no-limit you need to understand your opponent as close to perfectly as possible or you will go broke, and quickly at that. Similarly, because of the greater bluff potential, you have to understand your opponents folding and calling tendencies in order to run effective bluffs.
Pot-limit Omaha, meanwhile, will force you to learn the math of the game. For example, did you know that on a board of Jc-10d-3h, if you have Ad-Kc-Qd-9c you are actually a 55 percent favorite to win over Jh-10h-5s-6s? You have no made hand and your opponent has two-pair, but you have so many cards that can improve your hand that you are the favorite here. This game will force you to understand how many cards can improve your hand, what kind of cards will kill your hand and what the odds are when you have X number of cards that will make you a winner.
Limit Omaha hi-lo makes you look at the versatility of every starting hand. In this game, the best high hand (set, straight, flush, etc.) and the best 8-card low hand (i.e. A-2-3-4-5 is best) split the pot. In an ideal world, however, you want to have both hands locked up, so you look at all the possibilities of every starting hand. A hand like A-K-Q-J is strong in pot-limit, but it has no potential to win the low. A board like A-K-4-5-8 might mean you have the best high hand with two pair, but you are still splitting the pot with a hand like A-2-3-5. A hand like A-K-2-3, on the other hand, is very strong, because you can win the low and the high. There’s nothing better than winning a pot on a board like A-4-5-9-10 because you have the 2-3 for the straight and the best low hand possible.
Razz will (sometimes begrudgingly) teach you to adjust on every round of betting to your opponent as the best hand can often change on a dime. The best starting hand in razz is A-2-3, but against a hand like 8-7-6, a very marginal starting hand, it only wins 50.5 percent of the time. That’s not to say it’s a game of pure luck, but rather, you are forced to figure out every street if you are ahead or behind and if you can draw to a better hand rather than just jamming.
Finally, seven-card stud teaches us the importance of relative hand strength. Because you have four of your seven cards exposed, you have a lot more information about your opponents. You might have a 4-5-6-7-8 straight, but if your opponent shows four to the same suit, do you really think your straight is good? Probably not. Learning to fold hands that are normally strong but weak to your opponent is extremely critical to success in seven-card stud.
As always, there is overlay in all of the games. Relative hand strength is a big factor in pot-limit Omaha, and understanding the psychology of your opponents is critical in any game. But by playing many different games, your skills become more fine-tuned as a result of each different game and you become a better overall poker player as a result.
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