Texas Holdem requires iron discipline

For me, no-limit Texas Hold em is perhaps the toughest of all poker forms to master and it requires not just knowledge of the game but also knowledge of yourself to be able to do so. Limit holdem requires that you see a lot of flops and this in itself brings with it its own unique brand of complexity. Post flop poker is always more complex than pre-flop poker and in no-limit play then you have far more potential to be outplayed from the flop onwards.

You simply have to maintain discipline at all times when you play no-limit holdem because any indiscretion is punished more severely simply because pots escalate and become very big. If you fire a multi barrel bluff on the flop, turn and river at limit and that was the wrong thing to do then you have only lost 2.5 big bets. You may have sat down with 50 big bets and so you have only lost 5% of your buy in. In no-limit play then that sequence of bets could see you moving all in on the river and that means a full buy-in is lost.

Let us look at an extreme but highly pertinent example to show what I mean here. Let us say that you played 100 hands of poker and you won 99 out of those 100 hands and each time you won the blinds each time. If those stakes were at the $100 level then you would have made $148.50 over those ninety nine pots. But let us say that on the 100th hand that you made a crazy bluff with no equity whatsoever and lost $170. Despite winning 99/100 pots, you are losing $21.50 over that sequence of hands.

This is a rather silly example but it highlights the point that it isnt pots won that often decides how you do in no-limit holdem but the huge mistakes that you dont make. It is either a combination of a lack of skill or a lack of discipline that costs players when they play no-limit. Put simply then many players are not cut out to play this form of poker at all. You can become very knowledgeable at no-limit holdem but yet your own discipline levels could let you down. Often online no-limit games are nothing more than waiting games where decent regulars inhabit tables and are simply trying to out wait each other.

As a rule it is the players who lack patience who are the ones who crack first. If you are not at ease with long periods of simply nothing happening in full-ring no-limit games then you will never truly master the game. You must be at ease with this part of the game and if you are prone to becoming impatient or you thrill seek within a poker environment then no-limit holdem will find you out more than any other form of poker. You simply will not be able to get away with indiscipline in this game.