Casino All In Hold´em : Allgemeines

[the mind Profil]

My New Game

A discussion of the new WPT All In Hold 'em table game
By David Sklansky

World Poker Tour All-In Hold 'em has now been approved by the Nevada Gaming Commission. That means that any casino in Nevada can offer it to its customers. It is presently in the Bellagio, Mirage, Sam's Town, and Treasure Island. It will soon be at many others.

This article points out some important gambling concepts that All in Hold 'em, a game I invented and patented, can teach you. But first, here are the rules.

You are playing hold 'em against the casino dealer. So are the other players at the table. You are not playing against them. Everyone is playing heads-up against the dealer.

Before getting your cards, you bet an initial "ante" of your choice, say $5. After the players have anted, the dealer deals each of them two downcards. He also deals himself two downcards. These are hold 'em starting hands.

After looking at your cards, your choices are to fold and give up your ante, bet an additional five times your ante ($25 in this example), or bet an additional ten times your ante ($50). If you bet, the dealer will either "fold" and pay you an amount equal to your ante only or "call" and run the five board cards. If you win, the dealer pays both your ante and your bet (that is, $30 or $55 in this example). If you lose, you naturally lose both your ante and bet.

The dealer determines whether he will call the players' bets by the following rules:

If he has a pair or two cards that total 17 or more, he will call all bets. (Points count as in blackjack, so 98, Q7, and A6 would all be 17-point hands.)
If he has a pair or two cards that total 13 through 16, he will call the five times bets, but fold to the ten times ones.
With 12 points or less and no pair, he will fold to either size bet.
There are many interesting facets to this game, some of which I went into in a previous article. Most stem from the choice to bet five times or ten times along with the related "qualifying" hands for the dealer. For instance, the right play for a pair of aces is far from obvious, because a five times bet gets called much more often than a ten times bet. The dealer will call a five times bet about 72 percent of the time, but call a ten times bet only about 39 percent of the time. A pair of aces winds up doing a tad better in the long run by betting ten, but it's close. Most pairs make more if they bet five. Deuces, though, are another pair that should bet ten. See why?

To get this game approved, a detailed mathematical analysis of the game had to be commissioned and provided to the Gaming Commission. Because of that, I know not only the correct play for every two-card hand, but also the Expected Value of each play, along with its alternatives. (Folding, of course, always has an EV of exactly minus one ante.)

The first lesson to be learned is that betting is almost always better than folding. I am not going to reveal the complete strategy, but I will say that you should fold fewer than 20 percent of your starting hands. Thus is true, in spite of the fact that your bet is a lot larger than your ante and that, if called, you will often be the underdog.

One particular category of hand that does quite well is an unsuited ace or king with a "rag." For instance, king-seven offsuit has an EV of about 0.4 antes if it bets five. What we can learn from this is that when playing no limit, there is much to be said for moving in moderate stacks with such holdings. The semibluff is a strong play. (The key is that the hand do well in an all-in situation, but not otherwise.)

Meanwhile, even hands a lot worse than king-seven are wrong to fold in All In Hold 'em. For instance, it is also right to bet five with jack-four offsuit, but not because you win money with the hand. You just lose less by betting. A fold costs you one ante. A five times bet has an expectation of about -0.5 antes. (A ten times bet has an expectation of about -0.7 antes.)

This idea of betting a lot to cut a little off your losses is a key gambling concept. One obvious example is the play of splitting eights against a ten in blackjack. But the situation arises much more often in poker. And those who do not recognize these situations and act on them are doomed.

Sometimes in order to maximize the amount of losses you can cut, you must risk a lot. There are many examples in All In Hold 'em. For instance, five-trey suited loses an average of about seven-eights of an ante if you bet five with it, but only three-fifths of an ante if you bet ten. The bigger bet saves about a quarter of an ante. (But you risk an extra twenty times your savings.) Situations like this abound in the game. Betting ten with weak hands is frequently the mathematically right play.

Playing All In Hold 'em perfectly gives you a disadvantage of much less than one percent. The same is true of our main competitor's game. But there is a much bigger chance that their game will face a lot more near perfect play than ours will. There are two reasons why the average player will not play All In Hold 'em optimally. Both involve the necessity to bet ten times the ante with some of the weaker holdings.

First is the mathematically-related reason that the correctness of the bets is not intuitively obvious. You really have to do the math. But the second reason is purely psychological. How many average players, upon being shown the exact percentages, would have the gumption to bet ten times their ante with, let's say 6 4, to save 47 cents, if it will cost them a likely loss of $50 if the dealer calls them?

World Poker Tour All In Hold 'em will always do a lot better for the house than the theoretical house edge versus optimum play would predict. It can count on the mathematical and psychological imperfections in 99 percent of the human race. Not in you, though, I hope.


© 2006 by David Sklansky, All Rights Reserved.