Page 20 - March 2003 • Southern California Gaming Guide

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
Poker Begins as a Battle for Antes by Andrew N.S. Glazer
Poker comes in many variations. You might play at home or in casinos, play stud or a op game like hold ’em or Omaha, play against good or bad players, play tournaments or money games, and do any of these at different stake levels, and that
short list doesn’t even begin to cover the many different situations a poker player can face.
ante game, folding this hand would be a mistake. This is why memorizing a list of playable seven-card stud starting hands isn’t helpful: the list would only help if designed for a speci c ante level.
When all else fails, consider how much dead money you are aiming at when you consider a bet, call, raise, or fold. Most experienced players understand this in mid-hand: They evaluate the risk- reward ratio of pot odds, a concept that can even make it correct to draw to an inside straight, if there is enough money in the pot. Many of these same players don’t make the same evaluation at the start, staring only at their cards and not considering how much dead money is in the pot.
If the antes are small, there is little to be won: You’ll do well to toss your medium-strength hands into the muck. They’ll be dealing another hand in just a minute, and the money you fail to lose plays a much bigger role in your session result than most
players realize.
Andrew N.S. (“Andy”) Glazer is a columnist and Poker Tournament Editor for Card Player Magazine, and is widely considered to be the world’s foremost poker tournament reporter. He is also the online guide for the free poker information site, www.poker.casino.com Newsweek called him “a poker scholar” in a 1999 article, and he was one of the broadcasters for ESPN at the 2002 World Series of Poker. Mr. Glazer writes a general gambling column for the Detroit Free Press, has written for virtually every gaming publication of note, and is the author of Casino Gambling the Smart Way, which can be found in bookstores or at his own website, www.casinoselfdefense.com.
Given these variations, it’s hard to nd many statements about poker that apply to all forms of the game. Plays and techniques that work well in one situation often don’t in another. That’s one of the many reasons why I abhor use of the words “always” and
“never” in poker, an extraordinarily situational game in which absolute concepts rarely serve you well.
Nonetheless, poker players often seek the comfort of an absolute truth, a port in the storm of complex uncer- tainty, and I have a good one for you: Poker begins as a battle for the antes (or in op games, the blinds).
Antes and blinds are “dead money” (chips that players must place in the pot before a hand begins).
Without that dead money, there would be little nancial reason to be the rst person to enter a hand unless you possessed the best possible starting hand, because you’d be putting money into a pot where there was nothing available to win. All your initial bet could be is a target.
How does focusing on the battle for the antes help you improve your poker results? Recognizing the
amount of dead money at which you are shooting should change the strength and number of starting hands you should be willing to play.
The easiest example of this comes in seven-card stud, because the amount each player must ante at certain stake levels isn’t standardized. Playing $5–$10 stud (where all bets and raises are in $5 increments in the early betting rounds and $10 increments in the later betting rounds), I’ve seen antes as small as 25¢, and as large as $5. If you are playing eight-handed, that means you could be staring at a $2 pot or a $40 pot before the bring-in bet ever gets made.
If the ante is that huge $5 (and that is unusual: a fty cent or dollar ante would be much more common), it becomes correct to play many more starting hands (and hence weaker hands) than in the quarter ante game. You are paying so much for the privilege of seeing each hand that you must play more hands out, or you will get anted to death.
In a small ante game, a starting hand like (5-6) 7 isn’t playable, despite its straight potential. In a big
Page 20 March 2003
Column: The Poker Pundit