It’s a numbers game. The more players you meet, the more likely you will meet “good” players.
On average, you can play 4 online games per hour, on a 10 seat table, that’s 40 players.
Live, you will only meet 10 players per hour on the same table.
Therefore, you will definitely meet more good players online than live, simply because you’re meeting more players.
Live play is sloooooow. You’re lucky to get 30 hands an hour.
Online, you’re getting anywhere from 80-120 hands an hour per table. In other words - the bad players go broke a lot faster online.
Plus, there’s the whole ‘drive to the casino’ etc time and effort it takes to play live - a lot of players don’t want to spend 40 minutes getting to the card room only to fold 85% of their hands for the next four hours. It’s why so many live tables end up being huge limp-fests, with half the table seeing every flop. You can see a lot of flops cheap, 3-betting is extremely rare, the table will give you lots of free cards, and live players are showdown monkeys that call waaaay too often even when they know they are beat.
Online, you don’t get to see cheap flops, play is way more aggressive, regs have tracking software and will exploit you to death, they see way more hands than live players so they get better faster, etc etc.
If you’re a break-even online player at 10-25NL, you will crush live 1/2. Seriously.
I’m kind of surprised that no one’s (I think) mentioned rake yet. Rake is by far less online than it is for live games, particularly live games like 1/2 and 2/5. Here’s Poker Stars’ rake schedule. Compare it to the drop at your local venue, and also consider that online, you don’t have to tip the dealer. Further, most online sites will refund a portion of your fees with enough play (“rakeback”), or put those fees towards points entitling you a variety of site benefits (reduced/free entry into tournaments, etc…). I never played enough to get those, so I don’t know the specifics. Suffice to say that the rake a regular player pays is often less than that I cited for PS.
In fact, the “best player” at the table, looking at it from an hourly win perspective, is quite often the rake, especially at low limits and brick and mortar rooms. Mark Blade has a lucid explanation of this phenomenon in his book, Professional Poker: The Essential Guide to Playing for a Living. I knew rake could be brutal, but I didn’t realize it fully until I did what he did, and went through the math for a typical hour at a full ring table. Another good example (because I don’t link to them enough…) is the beginning of this thread at 2+2 concerning casual players, and why they should at least be cognizant of rake. From this post within that thread:
3 bb/hour is quite large BTW, even for NL, and is often the difference between how much a good player makes at the game, vs a mediocre/losing player. In Limit, improving your winrate 3bb/hr would be gigantic. Consequently, better players are going to gravitate to games where they have less of an uphill battle to fight to be profitable, and that will be online. Of course, if online is full of people with HUDs and SharkScope and all of the rest, and live is filled with drunks and tourists, you might not care as much about the rake.
I was about to post about the rake and how the high rakes at live games can pretty much negate any advantage you gain from the easiness of the game, but Gray Ghost has it covered.
Thanks. SenorBeef had a great rant in this sub-forum about online rake, and the absolutely hideous amounts he was paying when he played a lot of online pre Black Friday. I also found interesting the interplay between VarlosZ and Beef about rake, and online play in general, in this thread (Page 2, towards the bottom.)
I’m not suggesting bricks and mortar casino poker games are an investment, don’t get me wrong. Within ten minutes of sitting down I turned to the guy next to me and said “Jesus, the rake is ferocious.” He didn’t understand. The Casino Niagara rake is 10% after the flop, maxed out at $6. My best guess in terms of the total take is about $80 an hour - we sure as hell were not averaging 30 hands per hour, I’d guess 20, and a lot of hands don’t hit the full rake so I’d estimate 20x4=$80. That’s a charge of nine bucks a position (it’s 9-handed tables) or 4-5 BBs. That’s huge, far more profitable than any player, and a tremendous drain on the players; the rake is cleaning out a player every 2-3 hours. **There’s a reason they give me player points for playing poker. ** (I have heard the other casino in the falls, Fallsview, has table fee games.)
Between that, the cost of driving there, and my weakness for the buffets, I can’t really make money even if the play is as bad as I’ve seen. Well, maybe I could make $4 an hour or something, which isn’t worth my time. It’s fun, but it can’t be a profit center. I don’t blame the casino for the rake - the guy dealing the cards isn’t working for free, the land we’re sitting on isn’t free, the electricity that powers the lights and stuff isn’t free, the insurance on the place isn’t free. They have to make money.
My observation is simply that the calibre of play is appalling. I was really surprised. Perhaps the 2/4 and 3/6 games are better, but 1/2 was populated by a lot of bozos.
That is outrageous. On a 1/2 NL table, I usually see 10% rakes up to $4. Sometimes there is also a $10 min pot for a rake and sometimes a no-flop, no-drop policy.
At the Harrah’s in New Orleans, it was a seat charge of $6 per half-hour of play per player, on the half-hours. For a full table, that’s $120 an hour, which isn’t bad for the card room and probably worse than a straight rake. Of course, I would expect the tables aren’t always full during off hours.
Even at that, you’re playing against the rake/seat charge, not other players. That’s always been the truth at low limit tables.
I was in Vegas a couple times in the last couple years for conventions and such. The weekends were good for loose tourist play but mid-week was horrible as the density of good players got too high.
Even with good play, it’s a long, tough grind when too many of the other players are sufficiently good and variance comes into play more heavily. If you’re only playing 4 or 5 hours, odds are bad you’ll see a reasonable number of good hands. And if you hit a bad statistical patch, you may only see a couple playable hands an hour. Switching tables isn’t usually an option as there may not be that many tables spread if things aren’t busy.
I guarantee the low stakes limit games aren’t much better for quality play. If anything, play can often be looser, with multiple people willing to 3 bet or cap raises just because it’s a limited loss on any given hand/round, rather than the potential for losing your entire stake. You really have to have the absolute best hand nearly every time.
It’s easier to fold a bad hand online because you can always do something else for a minute or two while it gets played out, i.e. since you’re at your computer anyway, you can watch a YouTube video, read some e-mail, play some Plants vs. Zombies… Sitting there for real in the casino, you’re relatively trapped - it’s not like you can pull a rolled-up Time magazine out of your pocket at start reading. Perhaps out of the forced idleness, you get another drink from the waitress, and that starts affecting the quality of your future decisions.
Just a theory, of course.
No doubt at all this is true. There’s TVs to watch, but it’s duller than being able to hit the SDMB or play on an iPad.
However, the advantage to live games, as I learned very quickly, is you see who the fish are. On Pokerstars, the fish in position 4 is “gvx177c” and there’s no way you can remember what he’s doing unless you’re Rain Man. You can take notes but he’s gone in 18 minutes and it’s a one in a hundred shot you’ll ever see him again. For that matter, since you’re playing with quarters, maybe that one time he just acted stupid over $2.50 in an effort to really, really screw you later. But at the casino, when some guy’s ordering his third beer, got REALLY angry that his pair of sixes didn’t hold up against a board that had 7-8-9-10 on it and (surprise!) yielded a straight, and then starts calling every hand, he might as well be wearing a sign that says “Please Take My Money.” It’s just so much easier to figure out in person.
I’m also a little surprised there isn’t a flood of people in there, given how popular poker has become. The poker rooms seem busy but not TOO busy.
Well, if he’s THAT surprised, no wonder he’s a fish.
That really happened.
He didn’t notice that he had a straight, too? I gather he was annoyed someone else at the table had a jack, but holding 66 and seeing a 7-8-9 flop might encourage me to stay in, too.
Since I see a few online poker enthusiasts in one place here, question: is there any prospect of US players being able to play any time soon? Like the next few years? Any bills in Congress or some states contemplating something?
There is a lot going on – no telling how long it is going to take, though.
Poker Players Alliance
As for playing the low end of a straight, be aware that pro players often call it “the ignorant end”.
He didn’t have a straight; he must have had fours or fives. It was a pair below the straight, that I recall for sure. Sorry, it’s been a long week, I messed that up.
Why? Because of the collaboration possibilities?
Yes. Collusion is devastating since you’re often playing to win only half the pot. It’s also more difficult to prove collusion in a split-pot game.
Took down $540 profit today at 1/2 NL starting with a $200 stake. So that was nice. No, I do NOT expect to win like that regularly, it was a total fluke. Nobody could do that.
The first hour was uneventful; I was being dealt nothing useful, or if anything came up the flop was a bust, but I bided my time. Made a value bet of about $15 and didn’t nail it but I didn’t mind. It was the right bet, statistically speaking; I was getting 8-1 odds on a flush draw, and I was happy I had made the proper bet and did not at all mind that it didn’t turn out. Then I won a decent pot, about $80, with a flush card that came up on the turn that I’d made another proper value bet on.
Then I was dealt two tens in late position (button had just passed.) The flop came
10 10 K
Well, holy shit, quads. A raise and a call to me, too, $30 to go, there was action! I acted like I had to make a decision and merely called. Here comes the turn.
10 10 K K
Protip: at the Casino Niagara this is a no-lose situation. If by some miracle an opponent has four kings, by losing with quads I’d win the famed but rare Bad Beat Jackpot, which is awarded to any player playing NL who manages the unlikely feat of being defeated despite holding a straight flush or quads where both your hole cards are part of the hand. The jackpot today was up to $800 so I actually would have been better off if someone had HAD four kings. Anyway, the first guy checks. The second guy bets $50. I call. The first guy, who I have seen before and can play poker, bails. The river:
10 10 K K 3
Buddy goes all in for $202. I call and flip over my tens. He had A-K. Bummer for him. So that hand was the better part of my winnings. That’s just luck.
Question; did buddy make a mistake here? I mulled this over in my head on the drive home; what exactly was he thinking I had? 10-something, I’d assume. If I had king-anything the pot would split, since the kicker would not have been part of the hand. Should it have been possible for him to guess I’d flopped that monster?
Not putting you on quads wasn’t a mistake. But not putting somebody on trip 10s on the flop was a potential mistake. It depends a bit on the pre-flop action. If everybody just called pre-flop, he should have been somewhat careful on the flop.
There’s a range of hands, including 10-J, 10-Q, 10-K, 10-A, or even 9-10 suited that are more than playable in late position pre-flop. If he had raised pre-flop, that narrows down the range of potential hands somewhat.
From your description, it doesn’t appear there was a raise on the flop. There was a $30 bet, a call, and you also called? If so, his mistake was simply calling with 2 pair. With little pre-flop action, I’d rather see a raise, just to see who might also have a K or even a 10. Cold-calling a scary board is asking for trouble, unless you have a really good handle on your opponents.
If he thought anybody had a single 10, waiting around for another K or running Aces was definitely a mistake, even if it did hit in this case.
Of course, after the K hit on the turn, he got priced in and it really was unlikely you had pocket 10s. But I’d say it was a mistake slow playing the flop as he did in any case. You play decisions, not results.
Yes. Whenever you are playing, you want to bet enough to eliminate hands the other person has.
After the flop, buddy opened with $15, and 2nd guy called, making it 30 to you. I’d guess he was roughly betting the pot at that point, so there was no useful information he could get from that bet. In the 2nd round, the 2nd guy bets about half the pot, a good move. He’s probing for information. With two calls, he (2nd guy) knows he’s probably already losing. What Buddy should have done was a check raise, especially since there was only half the pot to call. A check raise is saying, I’ve got something pretty strong, who thinks they can beat me? A check raise probably would have forced #2 to fold, and a mere call from you would be highly suspicious. Probably, if he was a good player, he should just give up the hand at that point. Also, if he was a good player, your only hope of getting more money would be to re-raise his check raise, as calling only would nearly guarantee he was beat.
That third king though probably nailed it. The way the betting was going, I’m thinking Buddy thought he would end up with a split pot. Without making those probing bets, he could only think that you had the 4th king. But, the way it went, I think #2 had it. But, #2 figured it out and bailed.
So overall, yes. When playing out of early position, you have to use your bets to get information from the other players.
A 2nd mistake he made was going all in on the river. That makes no sense at all. If he has the best hand, he’s assuming you’re too stupid to fold your hand and will just hand over more money. Let’s say you had tens over kings. I’d probably have bailed that hand after the turn. His best bet, if you actually did have only one ten, was to put up a value bet and make you pay a little bit of tax to see his cards.
So yes, I’d have to say Buddy made three mistakes. The first mistake was by not using his bets to figure out what you had. The second mistake was just sheer stupidity on the final bet: if you’ve got the nuts, you’ll always make more on the last bet by betting less and getting called, not betting more and increasing the chance of a fold. The third mistake was falling in love with what was eventually a losing hand. It’s a tough one to get away from, to be sure.