The History of No-Limit Hold 'Em

I guess it takes some audacity for me to claim that I can summarize the entire History of No-Limit Hold ‘Em Poker into a single blog entry. But blogging takes some audacity to begin with, so I suppose I’ll plead guilty as charged. Maybe it will help to say that my own evolution as a poker player mirrors the timeline that I’m about to lay out.

STAGE ONE: 1950s-late 1980s

No one really knows when the first hand of Hold ‘Em was played, or even where. The fact that its full name is “Texas Hold ‘Em” would seem to be a clue regarding the latter. It was definitely being played there by 1959, and within ten years it had spread to Las Vegas. Twenty years after that, it was declared a game of skill by the state of California, and poker rooms throughout that state (which had been spreading draw poker for some time) started spreading that game too. Even to this day, the twin epicenters of Hold ‘em poker are Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Although poker was legally – and legitimately – determined to be a game of skill, very few players happened to have any. Roughly 99% of all players at this time just played by feel, not really paying attention to which hands are best to hold pre-flop, or when one should fold post-flop. There are still plenty of players who play this way, and you can still find them in pretty much every game. In fact, nearly every poker beginner starts out at this point, and only a few graduate to the next level of skill.

STAGE TWO: Late 1980s-2003

By the time the 80’s were coming to an end, folks started noticing that some players were consistently winning more often than others; i.e., that it wasn’t all just luck after all. The players who were winning had been studying the game, and had figured out that the way to defeat the amateurs was to play a very tight game – folding the overwhelming percentage of the time preflop, and only going to war with the best hands possible. Then, when they did play a hand, bet aggressively to build big pots that they were more likely to win. The strategy even had a name: Tight-aggressive, or TAG. Players like Tom McEvoy, Chris Ferguson, and Phil Helmuth, Jr. were winning world championships with this strategy. T.J. Cloutier became the most successful tournament player in history by using it.

But the seeds of change were being sown, and the TAGs were about to be left behind by a new generation.

STAGE THREE: 2003-Today

The year 2003 was pivotal in Hold ‘em poker. Several significant events happened during this year:

·       A new TV show hit cable television, called the “World Poker Tour”. The show featured (mostly) well-known players playing for millions of dollars, with hidden cameras showing the audience the players’ hole cards. People were finally starting to see some of the strategy behind how winning players played. And since success breeds imitators, the WPT was just the first of over a dozen poker TV shows to hit the networks over the next few years.

·       An anonymous accountant with the serendipitous name of Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker Main Event – poker’s world championship. This fired the imaginations of would-be rounders all over the poker universe. If an amateur like Moneymaker could win the biggest game in poker, maybe they could too.

·       Internet poker started going mainstream. Someone playing online could play more poker in a minute than a live player could play in an hour. Some folks played more hands in just a few months than Doyle Brunson had played in fifty years at the live table.

As the popularity of poker skyrocketed, the TAGs from earlier days saw an opening and began to publish books evangelizing their TAG doctrine. A flood of material from authors like McEvoy, Cloutier, Sklansky, Gordon, and Ciaffone hit the poker universe. The seminal work was probably Dan Harrington’s series, “Harrington on Hold ‘em”. Harrington was himself a world champ, earning the tongue-in-cheek nickname “Action Dan” for his famously tight play. His disciples came to be known as “Harring-bots”. Sayings such as “tight is right” and “fit or fold” started gaining currency.

But behind the scenes, the oh-so-perfect edifice of TAG was beginning to crumble. The culprit? A new strategy, honed to perfection by hordes of internet players: LAG, or “Loose-aggressive”. TAG remains to this day a very effective strategy for cash games, where one has the luxury of sitting around waiting for the very best hands. But it’s suicide in tournaments. Bottom line, you just can’t wait for premium hands in tournaments; the blinds and antes will decimate your stack and make you a non-factor by the time you decide to play something. Consequently, loosening up your opening standards, which increases variance, is mandatory for tournament success. The “aggressive” component of TAG was still relevant in this new strategy. But tight was no longer right; and fit or fold meant failure.

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And this is the path my own personal game has taken. I started off with an understanding of the rules of Hold ‘Em but no idea of strategy (or even an awareness that “strategy” existed). Then I discovered – and read – pretty much every poker book that had been written by the TAG generation, and my game improved correspondingly. But tournament success continued to elude me. I would sit and watch my stack gradually get whittled away, implementing my TAG strategy to perfection. I came to realize that I needed to loosen my game, but wasn’t sure exactly how to do that. It wasn’t until I hired a coach with tournament success of his own that I started to assemble this final piece in my game. It’s definitely made my overall game much more successful … and more fun, too.