Pot Limit Poker: Advantages and Disadvantages

Pot limit is the ideal limit, for you can bet enough to protect your hand or to bluff effectively. Draws to short pairs, inside straights, and three-card flushes are usually unsound. But in small limit games they are irresistibly alluring. The pot limit bet packs a killing percentage wallop to knock them out of play before the draw. Allowing players to over bet the size of the pot gives the player with a large bankroll an excessive advantage.

Enter The Short Money Game:

Any good Poker player has a natural aversion to the chiseler who takes a diminutive table stake to start play. A good player points out, "Why should I risk fifty dollars against a man who plays five? With luck, he may eventually get my fifty, and all I can win from him is five. If I get a big hand and bet him twenty dollars, I can tap him for five and no more." But the game works both ways, for the little fellow with a big hand cannot hurt anyone much in one deal. However, the percentage favors the little fellow, for he is apt to get several calls for his small table stake and win a good pot, whereas if he is able to and does bet high, all others might fold. This little fellow has a similar advantage in the early betting intervals, for he gets several to one odds for this money, and a bluff in the end cannot run him out, for he has practically nothing more to lose.

Take the case of Captain Able of V Bomber Command Headquarters in Port Moresby, New Guinea, in 1942. Right after supper he walked up to the crap table. As he was bankrupt, he borrowed a shilling ($0.16) from a friend, and in ten minutes he ran it up to two pounds ($6.40). He hopped into a jeep with two other officers to attend some official business at 39th Group Headquarters at Seventeen-mile Drome, after which the party wandered into the Group officers' club from some brew. A sizeable Poker game was in progress, and Captain Able lost no time getting into the fray. Each player had about fifty pounds on the table, but this did not phase the good captain with his miserable two pounds. His good luck - carried over from the crap game no doubt - held, and he quit at three the next morning with 210 pounds, nearly $700! And it all started on a borrowed shilling!

After that experience, the Group officers made a club rule that no one could start play with less than thirty pounds. Every good table stakes game has a minimum takeout, usually about 200 chips.

Often a player gets low in chips and plays the short money game. This is legitimate, for he has contributed a substantial portion of his own money, and he has to win a pot or two before he can bite into any stakes that were not originally his. Pot limit poker allows players to minimize there risk by capping bets as in limit poker, while giving them flexibility to play aggressively to push other players out of hands when needed as with no limit poker. Pot limit poker truly is the best of both poker worlds.