No-limit holdem is the most popular game played today because of the television coverage and the belief that anyone can win. With the continued coverage on ESPN, The Travel channel and seemingly everywhere else it looks like its popularity will continue to grow. Most of the same concepts discussed here are the same for pot-limit and no-limit is much more popular so we will discuss no-limit. To be profitable playing no-limit, most of the same things that are important to limit play apply. Starting hand selection and position are the two most important. Effective and profitable no-limit play needs to be broken into two parts; tournament and ring game because certain strategies are different between the two forms. First we will discuss some concepts that apply to both and then we will look at the differences.
One of the areas that many newcomers struggle is the "I have to win every pot I am in" mentality. Playing no-limit is about taking your opponents whole stack. To do this, you don't have to win every pot, just one big one. For this reason my starting hand requirements are a little different in no-limit than in limit. If I can enter pots for the correct price I play a lot of small pairs and suited connectors (suited hole cards that can also form a straight. The advantage of small pairs is the times you flop a set, your opponents will have a very hard time figuring out how strong your hand is. Often if you have a set and an Ace is on the board you will have opponents betting into you . For example a player holding AQ with a board of A 7 5 has no reason to not believe they have the best hand. If you have a pair of sevens or fives in the hole, you tend to win a nice size pot. Continuing on with the above example lets say the turn is a 2 and the river is a Q. Your opponent has top two pair and you may be able to win their hole stack with your set. So it boils down to this, when playing no-limit try to put yourself in positions to win big pots.
In tournament no-limit holdem, there are many different styles that can be effective. One thing that is important no matter what style you play is you must amass a large stack of chips to win big tournaments. This means that once you get to the middle and later stages of a tournament you will have to win some big pots when you may only be a slight favorite. In the early rounds of tournaments I try to play very tight and only enter pots with my best hands. My goal is to only play big pots when I am a strong favorite. This can often be used to my advantage in the middle rounds as the other players notice I have only been playing strong hands and this lets me steal some pots later. My goal is to survive the early rounds and start trying to amass chips in the middle rounds. If I am fortunate enough to amass a large stack, I will start pressuring the smaller stacks with raises. Smaller stacks usually won't want to risk busting out of a tournament without a strong holding until they get very short stacked.
When playing ring no-limit, you can buy more chips if you catch a bad break and lose all of your chips on the table. So when I play ring games I will go all-in with only the slightest advantage, even as low as 51% chance to win where I hate to risk my tournament life on such a toss up. When playing ring games, expected value comes into play. In the example above, if I enter 100 pots with a 51% advantage I will win 51 of them to show a positive expected value.