However cash games are more of a sit and wait type of environment and especially no limit games. Let us look at a situation from a poker tournament to show what I mean. The blinds are 200-400 and you have 5200 in chips which is 13 big blinds. You open for 1200 with AK and the big blind calls you which puts 2600 in the pot and you only have 4000 left. The flop comes 9d-4s-2c and your opponent checks. Here the desire to accumulate chips is paramount and you may still have the best hand or draw to it. You could even make your opponent fold the best hand if you make a sizeable bet.

A bet or an all in that doesn’t get called increases your stack to 6600 which is a huge increase from the 5200 that you originally had. With the blinds at 200-400 and the next level being 300-600 then you could become short very quickly and so you need to do something. However deep stacked cash games are more of a waiting game and there simply isn’t the same need to continuation bet.

I think there needs to be a little more intelligence applied to continuation betting than merely blindly betting, especially in cash games. At least consider your opponents range and how it hits the flop and have a plan for how to play future streets it he calls you. At the end of the day, as a skilful player then one of your goals is to outplay your opponents after the flop. You want to play post flop poker as much as possible but merely betting your opponents out of the pot is not only taking short odds but it is also not overly sophisticated and easier to combat. So remember that c-betting is more important in tournaments than ring games where the deep stacks dictate that skilled players can maybe get a bigger advantage going deeper into the hand.

However I often tell people that this experience is a little bit like boxing. You would never make it as a boxer if the shock of being hit sent you back into your shell or you capitulated with the first punch that landed on you. It is inconceivable and even impossible for boxers at any level to escape taking punches and this applies irrespective of how successful they are. Even when you win a fight then you have still taken many punches and some huge punches that may have stunned you. But all boxers accept that getting hit is part and parcel of the game.

But many people are not used to getting hit and this can cause such a shock to the system that it can lead to a type of paralysis with some people. This is an excellent analogy with poker because in poker then you will get hit and hit and punched very hard. This will not happen in a physical sense of course just in a financial one. If you have suffered a huge outdraw against you and you are feeling slightly stunned and a little confused then the chances are that you are not experienced in this part of the game.

Financial losses can hurt and stun you just as much as physical punches can in a real fight and it is only when you have experienced this that you will know what I am talking about. If you are playing stakes that are simply so low that whatever happens to you that you will not feel the effect of it then you may not understand what I am trying to say here. Also limit players may not understand either but in no-limit then you can lose a lot of big blinds in the blink of an eye.

Only yesterday I got all in for 200 big blinds with AA vs AK and my opponent hit a king on the flop and one of his two remaining kings on the river. These are bad events when they happen and they come out of nowhere which makes it worse for many people. There is no warning and so you simply cannot prepare. It is a simple case of you seeing the cards pre-flop and in this case AA vs AK and it is like…..BANG…BANG….BANG and the flop has arrived and in one second flat the turn and river card have been dealt and you have lost a pot in which you were already counting the money.

I could play very well on six tables but my level of concentration was causing problems when I increased that number to ten or twelve. Playing numerous tables is fine as long as you can effectively play them well. I am a good solid deep stacked player but the problem was that I was making mistakes when several big pots were converging together at the same time. So a solid deep stacked player was then becoming a bad deep stacked player and all because I was piling extra tables onto myself.

So what this boiled down to was me being naïve about how I could play when I had ten or more tables in front of me. So this then brings up the point of the article in that deep stacked poker can be difficult to master and previously winning players can become break even players or worse simply by slightly changing the conditions. But this highlights one very important part of no limit hold’em and gambling in general. This is that strategies that win small amounts of money for lengthy periods of time but which also have the capacity to lose large amounts can be dangerous strategies to employ.

It takes a very disciplined style to perfect this process and do it well but if you have any flaws in your character or if your concentration levels are not what they should be then you are going to have problems multi-tabling a lot of tables in no-limit hold’em. I perhaps committed one of the cardinal sins of multi-tabling and that was to add tables too fast. The fact is that when you are playing six tables and finding that you have loads of downtime then it may not be a good move to jump straight to playing ten or twelve.

When all you have to do is fold for long periods then playing twelve tables feels easy. This is until you are called to play several converging pots and those pots start to become big pots. Then this just knocks on into bad play which then becomes bad bankroll management and then bad poker. I think that it is frighteningly easy for good winning players to become losing players temporarily. It is the easiest thing in the world to become blasé about your winnings and success and then to believe that you can basically do anything you want and that will continue…..but this is not the case at all and I for one have realised this recently.

In cash games however we are presented with somewhat of a different picture as online players and especially those who multi-table can find out in the space of a week or two if they are really cutting it in cash games. There are numerous differences between the two that are obvious and a few that are not so obvious.

The early stages of poker tournaments resemble cash games in that the blind to stack ratio is similar. This situation though doesn’t last long as just a couple of levels in and the average stack can be something like 50 big blinds. A combination of having no cards and tight play can soon render a player with a short stack in tournament poker and looking for their first available opportunity to get their stack in the middle.

To highlight a classic difference between tournament poker and cash games, take a look at the following situation. It is in the middle stages of a poker tournament and our hero holds A-K. The average stack on his table is around 25 big blinds and the blinds are 50-100. It is raised to 300 from an early position player and called by two other players. Our hero has a stack of 2500 and decides to shove all-in.

This play is basically automatic because with 25 big blinds then there really isn’t anything to think about. Now look at this situation is a deep stacked NL200 ring game where the raiser and the two callers all have at least 100 big blinds in their respective stacks. You also have $200+ in your stack, now in this situation, a re-raise doesn’t look anywhere near as appealing as the other players will not be coming in with the same types of hands that they would be in a tournament due to not being under the same amount of time pressure.

So AK in this situation doesn’t rate to be the boss hand anywhere near as often simply because in a full-ring game it will be up against hands of a similar strength or better too often.

Let us look at an example to show what I mean and this is where pot control comes to the fore when the stacks are very deep. Let us say that you raised with A-K in a no-limit Texas hold’em tournament and you only started with 20 big blinds and the blinds were 200-400 and so your stack was 8000 before the hand started. You raised to 1200 and an opponent min-raised to 2400. Because you only started with 20 big blinds before the hand then you cannot make a deep stacked mistake.

The bigger the pot becomes then the greater the potential mistake. If you make a mistake for 100 big blinds then that is a bigger and more costly mistake than a mistake for 20 big blinds. But when you look at the A-K situation again in a cash game with 100 big blinds then your opponent re-opening the betting by min raising is a warning sign for your hand when you have 100 big blinds. The re-raiser has still only put six big blinds into the pot and so you have the chance here to control the pot size by calling.

Your opponent has position on you so that is another problem. So if you re-raise here then you are dangerously escalating the pot with a hand that isn’t even a made hand. Although you are less likely to be up against AA or KK because your AK reduces the number of combinations, you must still be alert to the possibility of these hands in no-limit Texas hold’em. Another re-raise by you with AK is basically putting your opponent into a situation where they cannot make a mistake.

You have basically declared that you have a very powerful hand by putting in the third raise pre-flop and you opponent can get away from the situation very cheaply by only losing six big blinds. This is precisely why the concept of pot control is a very important one in poker and especially no-limit Texas hold’em cash games where the stacks can start off very deep and stay that way. Players in cash games have the option to top up their stack and also to buy back in should they lose their stack. This means that they have constantly got a big stack in front of them and are always at risk of making a mistake in a deep stack situation.