Limit holdem not limited enough

It took precisely three sessions of limit Texas holdem last week to remind me why I gave it up for sit and go poker and why 'limit' may be one of the game's biggest misnomers.

A reluctance to be beaten by anything meant that I spent this year's enforced annual break from the game in Lent to read the thoughts of Phil Hellmuth (left) on the limit variant, along with Bobby Bowden's chapter on limit in Super System. Last week, I couldn't help but dip my toe back in the water at a 25-50c table.

One 90 minute session of break-even followed by another that left me two dollars up, picked at some old sores and reminded me why limit holdem poker so often feels like banging your head against a brick wall. A third stint that left me 23 bucks down really was the trip down Bad Memory Lane however.

If I thought that the scale of my loss was the main grievance, I'd be writing about something else this evening, rather than dumping just another bad beat story on cyberspace, but it goes beyond that. I'm just not temperamentally suited to limit Texas holdem poker cash games. Mainly because they're not limited enough.

They're not limited by time, for starters. When you're out of a sit and go, you're out: game over. You can start another one but you do so with chips and hope reborn. Cash games, on the other hand, quickly take on all the fun of a long-term illness if your self-discipline with time is anything less than unwavering. That third session was going to be two hours but then it became three, then four, as I slipped, if not into 'tilt' mode, then certainly 'loss chasing' mode, which is arguably a milder strain of the same virus. Limit poker and limitless time is not a good mix.

In sit and gos, what's more, I get mad once, if it's a bad beat that takes me out, but then it's onto a new game and new beginnings. Get me away from a poker car crash and I'm not too bad at letting even the big injustices go.

In a limit cash game heading south however, there is no such enforced closure and the bad beats and indignation just keep on comin'. I had genuinely forgotten just how bitter and resentful I could get at a poker table. This may be the biggest reason why cash games and I are once again on a trial separation.

Just as I gave up betting on jump racing because fences seemed just one more thing that could go wrong, I struggle to see why I should persevere with a form of poker that gives me one less weapon than its no-limit brother. This is where the name is all wrong: when it comes to hand-chasing in limit poker, the field is often limitless and without the option of making it cost all their chips to see you, the world and his wife will repeatedly tag along for the ride, catching river cards so miraculous, the whole poker/skill debate begins to look redundant.

I'll carry on reading about limit poker because I'm now genuinely intrigued as to how you make it work and because, just as I sneer at golfers who only play irons because they find wood shots 'too hard', I'm loth to abandon something purely because it seems to have me beaten. Whether it will ever again be a practical, as opposed to a purely academic exercise, though, remains to be seen.

I've had my disappointments with sit and gos, undoubtedly, but last week I was genuinely miserable playing limit cash games. To the point where I might as well have been at work...


[Image via Wikipedia]