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The size of the ante in a particular
game determines how you play. The larger the ante in comparison
to later bets, the more hands you should play. Since there's more
money in the pot, you're obviously getting better odds, but there
are other reasons for playing more loosely. Should you wait to get
an extremely good hand in a high ante game, you'll have lost more
than the size of the pot in antes by the time you win a pot. Furthermore,
the pots you do win will be comparatively small because the other
players, if they are decent players, will notice you are playing
very tight and won't give you much action when you do play a hand.
In fact, when you do get action, you're very likely to be beat.
As the antes go up, your opponents reduce their playing requirements,
and unless you want to be eaten up by the antes, you too must reduce
your playing requirements. These lower requirements continue to
the next round of betting and progress right on to the end of the
hand. In a large-ante game you might bet for value marginal hands
you would throw away in a small-ante game. The principle holds true
especially in head-up situations. In a large-ante seven stud game
you might see two good players betting and calling right up to the
last card, and then at the end one of them bets a pair of 7s for
value and gets called by his opponent with a pair of Ss. As it happens,
though, larger antes tend to make multi-way pots more numerous since
more players are getting good pot odds to draw to a big hand. With
many players in the pot, drawing hands (like four-flushes and open-end
straights) go up in value, while mediocre pairs like those 7s and
5s go down in value.
Another reason for loosening up when the ante is comparatively high
is that if you are playing too tight, it becomes correct for other
players to try to steal the ante from you without any kind of a
hand. I've been in games where some players played too tight for
the ante. When they were the only players in the pot, I knew I could
try to steal the antes, no matter what I had. Let's say it costs
me $7 to raise the pot in order to try to steal $10 in antes. That
is, I put in $7, hoping the remaining players will fold. I figure
I will get away with the play approximately 60 percent of the time.
Since I need to be successful only about 41 percent of the time
to show a profit, I can try to steal with anything. The point is
you cannot play too tightly for the antes unless you want to give
up this edge to your opponents. To the contrary, as the ante increases,
you yourself should try to steal more antes, especially if you are
up against tight players.
If it makes sense to try to win antes right away when they are large,
it makes abundant sense not to slow play a good hand.' The reason
is that if you don't raise with a good hand on the first round,
you are giving an opponent with a mediocre hand the chance to come
in cheaply and possibly draw out on you. With a large ante, he is
not making a mistake on the basis of the Fundamental Theorem of
Poker because he is getting good odds. In other words, if a player
is getting 8-to-1 odds or 10-to-1 odds on that first round, it is
worth it for him to come in and hope to catch a perfect card on
the next round - even when he is pretty sure you are slow playing
a big hand. However, when you raise, you wreck the odds he is getting,
and he has to throw away his mediocre hand. With almost any good
hand, it is not worth letting opponents in cheaply when the ante
gets up there. You are satisfied with winning only the antes. On
the other hand, when the ante is low, it becomes more reasonable
to slow play big hands in order to suck worse hands in; you want
to get more value for your big hands.
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