No limit and pot limit

In a no-limit game the only ceiling is the table stake, meaning the chips a player has on the table when the hand begins. Money elsewhere in the account does not count, so a player with €80 in front of them can never be made to put in more than €80 on that hand.

Pot limit keeps the same floor but adds a moving ceiling. When nobody has bet yet, the largest bet allowed simply equals what is already in the middle.

Both structures share one rule about the minimum. A raise must be at least as large as the previous bet or raise on that betting round, so if one player bets €10 and another raises to €25, the next full raise must go to at least €40, because the €15 increment sets the new minimum step.

A short all-in is the exception.

A player may go all-in for less than a full raise, but under standard cardroom rules that smaller amount does not reopen the betting for anyone who has already acted. Those players may call or fold, nothing more. House rules on this point can differ slightly between operators and between private games, so the posted rules for a given table are the ones that count.

The part that catches newcomers is that a pot-sized raise is measured after the raiser’s own call. The player first notionally calls the bet in front of them, then totals the pot including that call, and that total is the largest amount they may add on top.

A worked example

Say there is €100 in the pot and an opponent bets €50. Calling would add another €50, which makes the pot €200, so the maximum raise is €200 on top of the call, for a total of €250 put in on that action.

The shortcut is to triple the bet being faced and add everything that was in the pot before it, along with any calls behind it. In the example, three times €50 is €150, and adding the original €100 gives the same €250. Dealers often teach it that way because it can be done in the head while the action is moving.

Online, the arithmetic is usually handled by a pot button that fills in the maximum, and in a live room the dealer will announce it on request. Tournaments may also use a slightly different preflop convention for counting the blinds, so a figure that looks wrong on screen is worth checking against that room’s own rules before arguing with it.

The most common slip is reading “pot limit” as a cap on the whole hand. It is not: there is no limit on the number of raises in either structure, so a pot-limit hand can still escalate quickly, because each pot-sized raise roughly triples the pot.

The second mix-up is with fixed limit, a separate structure where every bet and raise comes in a set size and raises are usually capped per round. No limit and pot limit are both sometimes called big-bet poker to set them apart from it.

Neither structure changes the cards or the odds of any hand.

What changes is how much a single decision can cost. In no limit one call can risk a full stack, while in pot limit the stack usually goes in over two or three raises instead. That is why Omaha, where hands run closer together in equity, is far more often dealt as pot limit than as no limit, although some operators do offer no-limit Omaha tables too.