Slidebar Poker

Early in 2004 I began writing my new book on poker, which will be published in 2005. A few months later I began concentrating on writing the chapter on Omaha/8. Although I am personally not a great fan of high low split games, nevertheless these games are important and no poker book would be complete without discussing them. As I was thinking about the various ways that you can play Omaha/8, it occurred to me that one of the concepts that would make for an interesting investigation was the idea of pure, naked aggression. Eventually, as you will discover when you read my book, I reached the conclusion that pure and naked aggression on its own, as a long-lasting and viable strategy, is not advisable without first being tempered by knowledge, observation, game analysis, as well as all of the other suggestions and recommendations that I mention in those particular chapters about this game, and other high low split games. This is probably not a great revelation, because it has long been known that playing poker purely and only with blustering and naked aggression may be successful in the short-term, but in the long-term will result in protracted losses. Particularly if you are playing in a poker circle where several of your opponents are regular players who will quickly come to know you as such an overly aggressive player, and therefore thereafter play you accordingly.

Nevertheless, I wanted to see just how far pure and and naked aggression can take a player in an Omaha/8 pot limit tournament. The reason why I chose the pot limit tournament, and in particular an online pot limit tournament, was because under such circumstances pure and naked aggression probably had the biggest chance of success, while limiting ones exposure to financial losses, as well as any kind of "reputation" that could be noted by other online players next to your screen name as they are taking notes about your play. I also chose an Omaha/8 pot limit tournament on this particular web site, and very late at night my time, because I wanted to be exposed to European poker players who are far more familiar with pot limit Omaha than players in the United States. That was also part of the chapter that I was writing at the time, and I wanted to combine the experiences that I could gain from this tournament in order to try to illustrate some of the points that I was about to discuss. In this article I want to focus on something that I did not mention in my book, and that is the slidebar poker trick as such may apply to these particular situations in online poker tournaments.

My approach to playing this tournament had only one purpose, and that was to see how far I could get with pure, naked, blustering aggression with complete disregard to whatever it is that I chose to play. Naturally, I did not play every hand. However, when I did select the hand to play it was my intent not to play it softly, cagily, or in any way other than by pure and naked aggression. I call this style of play, as it applies particular to online poker, "Slidebar Poker". The reason why I gave it this particular nickname is because whenever you are playing in online poker tournaments, or a ring games, that are either no limit or pot limit, all Internet poker sites allow you the use of what is called a “slidebar”, on which you can click with your mouse and then drag the icon to any point along the slidebar to determine the amount of your bet, including all the way to the maximum allowable bet for that particular round of betting. In no limit games, you can slide this slidebar all the way to the maximum and for all of your chips at any time. However, in pot limit games, you can use this slide bar at any point and slide it all the way to its maximum reach to bet, or raise, whatever the size of the pot may be at that time. That was my goal, and my purpose, in this particular tournament.

We started with 135 players, and I began to use my intent to practice aggression from the very first hand, which just happened to be Ace-King-2-3 double suited. Although I did not flop the double nuts, I nevertheless flopped what turned out to be the winning hand, and one of the better hands in this particular game. To make a long story short and keep it within the confines of this article, my strategy from this moment on -- as indeed it had been from the time I joined this tournament for the purposes as I have already explained -- was to simply wait until someone bets and then use the slide bar to raise the pot each time, whatever the amount happened to be. If I was reraised, I would against slide the slidebar all the way and reraise the pot until such time as either I or my opponents were all in. I won the first hand, and although I was not always blessed with very good starting hands, I continued to use this principle of slidebar poker each time I played a hand, no matter what it was. My approach was always the same, and that was to check and wait for someone to bet, and then use the slidebar to raise the pot, and then to continue to reraise if I was raised again until either I or my opponents were all in. Although this is not a strategy that I would recommend as a means of playing successful poker, I wish to remind all of my readers that this was an experiment and that I wanted to see exactly how far something like this could take me.

As it turned out most of my opponents actually folded either on the raise or the reraise. Naturally, there were several showdowns, but I was lucky enough to either scoop the pot, or at least win either the high or the low, depending on the various hands and flops and turns and river as they turned out. In the end, I wound up finishing fourth. This was a very good result considering the reckless strategy that I was employing. It proved two points:

First, naked and blustering aggression can succeed periodically, and work to your advantage at least in the short-term, such as was the case in this particular experiment in this particular online Omaha/8 poker tournament.

Second, when we got down to the nitty-gritty with the final four players, it became painfully obvious, as well as plainly obvious, that such aggression alone -- especially when facing three other players who were obviously very skilled in this particular form of poker -- would not, and could not alone succeed.

Ultimately this served to prove my point, and that was that playing poker aggressively is not within itself a means to continued and lasting success. Tapering such aggression with knowledge, experience, ability to analyze the game and the players, as well as the continuing and unwavering focus on exactly who your opponents are and how they are playing, as well as exploiting these situations and circumstances, and position, are in reality the best mix for any poker player thinking about employing a viable and lasting strategy for winning poker.