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A quick look at the main betting
structures for poker. Betting
is as important to poker as water is to a fish. Without betting, it's,
well, it just isn't poker. But how is betting organized?
Well, the main ways of organizing a betting round are Limit, Spread
Limit, Pot Limit, or No Limit.
Limit poker, like the name suggests, the bets are set at a certain
limit. Typically the Big Bet is twice the Small Bet and there are an
even number of betting rounds at each limit. For example, 1/2 limit
Holdem is Holdem played with bet sizes of 1 and 2 - the lower limit is
for the first two betting rounds and the higher limit is played for the
last two.
Spread limit is typically played in home games, although a few card
rooms still spread some spread limit games. I have not found a spread
limit game on the Internet. In spread limit, you can choose how much you
want to bet, up to a certain cap. For example, a in 1-5 spread limit
game you can bet between 1 and 5 chips.
Pot Limit is somewhere between Limit and No Limit poker. Basically, you
are allowed to bet up to whatever is in the pot. This includes money you
put in to call any previous bets. For example, if the pot is 100 after
the flop, and my opponent makes a pot sized bet of 100, I can call his
100 (taking the pot to 300) and then raise 300 more. It's still
announced as a raise - don't try any of that "call... and raise"
rubbish. Manipulating the pot size is a real skill in deep stack (where
you have lots of chips compared to the blinds) Pot Limit, and is why
some people think the WSOP main event should be PL not NL.
No Limit. This is what you were waiting for right? The Cadillac of
poker. No Limit poker is perhaps more accurately described as "table
limit", since you are "limited" to betting what you had on the table at
the start of the hand. At any point you can go all-in and push all your
chips into the middle. This is what makes No Limit exciting, and
difficult. Online sites tend to offer capped buy-in NL (and PL) games
these are usually referred to by the size of the buy-in usually - 25NL
is a no limit game with a maximum buy-in of 25, 100PL is a pot limit
game where you can't buy (or top up to) more than 100.
So that's how betting limits work.
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