It personally took me countless readings of Doyle’s no limit section and a whole load of further studying to boot to finally comprehend what he was really saying. Up until then, I had merely thought that I understood and it was only when I went back and read my earlier notes that I realised just how far my understanding of what he had written in that poker book had really come.

So for anyone who has yet to read this absolute classic of a poker book and does not know what I am referring to then I recommend that you read on. Doyle teaches a strategy for cash game poker in Supersystem and specifically no-limit poker. His style of play in that book can only be termed as loose aggressive. He is forever putting pressure on his opponents with bets and raises and most of the time it is with insufficient values.

He constantly strives to place his opponents into situations where they have to make very tough decisions and most of the time this is with marginal hands. So Doyle Brunson achieved an awful lot of fold equity with his action. Because he would bet and raise on a very wide range of holdings, players found it very difficult to actually put him on a hand and this made many of them extremely fearful which only served to help his game even more.

But perhaps one of the really thought provoking pieces of material in that section is where Doyle talks about how when big poker pots arise that he nearly always has the worse hand.

This statement takes some explaining but not when you understand it. You see, Doyle liked to be the aggressor and the one doing the bullying and shoving. His style of play was effective and he tried at all costs to impose that style of play onto his poker opponents.

As he states in that book, he does not want anyone to defeat that style of play by becoming more aggressive than him so he will gladly push back harder and even get all in with a drawing hand just so his opponent cannot shove him around.

This type of play with a draw creates an awful lot of fold equity when either fearful opponents or opponents without sufficient strength to call fold their hands. But if he gets called, he still has a large amount of equity in the hand because of his outs to complete his draw so he is never really out on a limb. He says in that book that his constant aggressive play creates an image in the minds of his opponents and the constant procession of small pots that he wins pay for the times when he gets all in with the worse hand.

Everything changes with time and it is now almost thirty years since Supersystem first went on sale. While the section on no limit play is still a damn good read, the advice in that section is not as powerful as it was then for Doyle and for reasons that I am about to now go into in part four.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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