Let's Play Higher Limits in Poker!

Won't Necessarily Cost You More Money

Most home gamers play with stakes that are literally pocket change. People who see poker solely as a party game can gamble with quarters much more liberally than they can with $20 bills, and your average group of players will choose the former. The biggest hang-up many casual players have with real poker is the prospect of risking amounts of money that they care about losing. The anxiety that these players may experience at the thought of betting dollars instead of dimes is perfectly natural, since bigger bets appear to equate to more financial risk. But a more careful consideration of the factors that contribute to risk will reveal that, that assumption is not completely valid, particularly with respect to the transition between penny poker and real poker. How can this be so? Because the risk to which a player is exposed in any game depends not only on the size of his bets but also on the frequency and the wisdom of those bets.

Let's imagine a typical home poker game where the maximum bet is a nice, comfortable, harmless, I-didn't-lose-too-much-honey 25 cents. You are playing various kiddie games, which are really fun for your buddy Brett because he is in almost every hand until the showdown. The reason he's in all the time is because he really doesn't care about winning or losing quarters, for Brett, 25 cent bets are below his threshold of value. Suppose you are averaging twenty hands per hour, and each game averages five bets per hand. That means Brett is throwing about $25 into the pot every sixty minutes. Brett does value $25, but since that amount is spread out over quarter-size bets, he doesn't think of his $25 as ever really being in play. And since he almost never folds, he is betting that $25 on a collection of hands that are almost completely random. The games are so crazy that the portion of Brett's $25 he gets back from won pots every hour may as well be decided by spinning a bottle.

Now, suppose you finally snap. You literally force your friends to play $1 fixed-limit straight-up Seven-Card Stud.

Dollar bets aren't too scary, but they are big enough to prevent Brett from throwing them away just for the fun of hearing the chips rattle. In other words, Brett will now have to think before he makes and calls bets. At that instant, even without any formal education on poker, his play will miraculously begin to resemble that of a sensible player. He will be much more careful about calling the whole way to the end of each hand, and in fact, he'll drop the majority of his hands without having to see the last card and it is even possible that on average, the frequency of his contributions to the pot in the $1 game will be about one fourth what they were in the 25 cent game.