At very low stakes, it may be possible to play mechanical, disciplined, and predictable poker and still get the money, but the moment you start moving up in class, you start recognizing that for just about every important rule there are important exceptions.
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE KINGS-FULL FIVE TIMES IN A ROW?
As an overly simple example, suppose I told you that for your first five hands of a Pot-Limit Omaha session, you were going to make kings-full each hand. You'd probably love to know this, and indeed you would certainly be a huge favorite to make lots of money. But all it would take to turn gold into garbage would be the not impossible result of getting virtually no action on four of the hands, but losing a huge pot to someone who made quads or a straight flush. You'd be buried.
Once one or two opponents have already moved all-in in a No-Limit Hold'em event, do you always move in with pocket aces? You sure don't if it's a supersatellite in which tournament officials are giving away five seats to the main event, you're the chip leader, there are six players left, and the two all-in players have relatively close stacks.
Not only would moving in with your aces not be a good play here, it would be a horribly, horribly bad play. Mucking your aces, you have a good chance to get one of the five seats if the bigger stack busts the smaller one, and if the smaller stuck puts a serious hurt on the bigger one, the formerly big stack has a LONG way to go to climb back into seat contention.
Sitting down in a game with barely more than the minimum required buy-in is generally considered a poor idea. Does that mean you never do it? Of course not. If you want to take a shot in a high stakes game, where your downside risk is quite limited, but your upside potential isn't, it can be a viable strategy, even if it does increase the risk that you will bust out quickly on many occasions.
OWNING THE BIGGEST STACK IS USUALLY AN ADVANTAGE, BUT…
Having the most chips on the table is usually considered a serious advantage when playing cash no-limit, and almost as serious an advantage when playing cash pot-limit. But if you know yourself to be one of the weaker players in the game, that nominal advantage could expose you to far more monetary danger than you should be exposing yourself to.
The question of why you would sit down in a game where you knew yourself to be one of the weaker players is another story, but even that's not an absolute. Suppose you knew yourself to be slightly, but only slightly, weaker than six of the seated players, but that there were two absolute stone cold fish in the game, each unknowingly sitting down with the meteorological equivalent of a snowball's chance in the netherworld, you'd sit down in that game in a heartbeat, even though your ranking was only seven of nine in the game.
A lot of players will tell you that in a no-limit tournament, you take extreme risk by limping in with aces from early position, because one limper tends to encourage more limpers, and unless someone helps you out with a raise he thinks will blow out all the drawing hands, you could suddenly be looking at a six-handed flop, with absolutely no idea what kind of shape your aces leave you in (some one who limped with a small pocket pair might flop a set, for example, or an open-ended straight flush draw).
LIMPING WITH ACES CAN CAUSE REDDENED FACES
Generally, that advice is solid: limping with aces from early position can lead to lots of trouble. If you never do it, though, your later-positioned opponents will know that your limping money is always free for the taking, because you're not going to call a big raise with 8-9 suited. Do it once, and either win the pot or take the opportunity to show your cards in disgust when you bet the flop and someone makes a huge raise you can't call, and now your early position limps with 8-9 suited will stand a considerably better chance of seeing some cheap flops.
Two kings are a darned good starting hand in no-limit, but if someone opened before me for a standard raise (call it 3x the big blind), I re-raised a significant amount, someone behind me moved all-in, and the original raiser then moved his stack all-in, I would fold those two kings like they were on fire. The original raiser almost HAS to have aces, and there's a darned good chance that the other two kings are in the hand of the player who moved in on you, meaning you'd be drawing virtually dead (the exception being a weird straight).
YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE DAVID CHIU TO MUCK TWO KINGS BEFORE THE FLOP
If that scenario sounds unlikely, it happened almost exactly that way at the 2000 WSOP when we were down to seven players. Chris "Jesus" Ferguson opened for an innocent-looking raise, T.J. Cloutier re-raised (not with kings, but with jacks), Jeff Shulman moved a big stack all-in, Ferguson then moved his huge stack all-in, and Cloutier, gazing at the deck as if it were colder than the aforementioned snowball, mucked his jacks instantly, and I know for a fact I’d have mucked kings there instantly. Shulman did indeed have kings, and Ferguson had the only hand he could possibly hold when moving-in against two players who had shown such strength: two aces.
It was a horrible beat for Shulman, who had played his hand perfectly, gotten lucky in getting a re-raise from Cloutier, and then gotten horribly unlucky in running into two aces. Two kings are a great hand, but context is everything. I've yet to muck two kings pre-flop in any hold’em tournament, but I've mucked two queens on numerous occasions, and been quite happy that I did in each of them.
It's generally considered good poker to be the aggressive raiser, rather than a calling station. In fact, there's an old saw that says "if you can’t beat a calling station, you can't beat anyone." Nonetheless, were I seated in a game full of maniacs who were raising and re-raising with all kinds of junk, I'd be quite content to conceal my hand's strength and just look like a helpless calling station, at least until we got to the river and the pot was now so large that my maniac opponents would be forced to call me for the size of the pot.
Even THEN I might not put a raise in: someone else could easily do it for me, and by not raising I'd be demonstrating that I had no idea of what my hand was worth, inviting the maniacs to pick on me…although for this to work truly well, I'd probably have to show down some piece of complete trash at least once, preferably early, and my opponents would forever be convinced I was easy money.
MY MOST IMPORTANT GUIDELINE: GUIDELINES ARE SUPERIOR TO RULES
Poker has so many generally solid strategies and tactics that I could go on for another 40 pages listing them and then listing the exceptions, but I think the point is made. In poker, important concepts should be GUIDELINES, and not RULES.
Even if your "rule" is always (gasp) correct against a certain class of players, it may not be against a player who has demonstrated certain weaknesses or strengths. When you learn to properly balance uncertainty with justifiable self-confidence, I'll almost certainly head to another table if I see you sitting down.
I'm confident enough that this is correct that I invite readers to send in any poker concept they consider a legitimate "always" or "never." I'll review the responses, finding the exceptions where I see them, and acknowledging correct responses should any arrive. I can actually think of one off the top of my head: if you're heads-up, you own the stone-cold nuts, your opponent has put so much of his stack into the pot that he's pot-committed, it's always OK to make the final raise to put him all-in. I'm pretty sure there are others, and yet even more sure that most of the concepts that will be suggested as proper absolutes won’t be.
Remember, though, that this article was entitled "Context Almost Always Remains King." I didn't even want to use the word "Always" about a principle I consider the single most important concept in poker. "Rigid thinking" is almost a poker oxymoron. Yes, it's easier, it's more comfortable, and for beginners it may be the correct approach while they are learning poker's most elementary principles…but that's not enough.
If you think you're advanced, though, I'm almost certain that if you approach poker concepts as rules rather than guidelines, you're not as good as you think you are. I welcome the chance to be proven wrong. After all, I don't want to think that my own poker "golden guideline" is actually a golden rule.
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Treat every round of betting as if it were the first. Forget the previous betting rounds and the money you have contributed to the pot.
