[… encouraging new players to start thinking … ]
I suggest that this is a major flaw in your game. It costs you a lot of money,
When a player makes a costly mistake, if you feel you just have to say something, the correct thing to say is “Good hand.”
Yes, don’t tap on the tank, but I think the idea there was in helping friends and family members learn the game. I’m gonna coach my kids and the friends at work who literally learned the game from me when I’m giving them lessons.
In an actual game where you’re playing against strangers for money, criticizing another player’s strategy isn’t just a costly mistake, it’s incredibly rude.
Berating someone for their play is such a delightful indication though that the bully is about to go on Tilt. Further, I don’t mind discussing strat—away from the table!—with people. It’s how I’ve learned I have a poor memory for how past hands have gone.
Like counting cards in blackjack, most people aren’t going to know how to apply what they’ve learned, but it will keep them coming back, trying to figure it out. A la the old jape of the older gambler sitting at the table, peeling off 300 to his girlfriend, and sending her off to play slots for a few hours. She comes back in an hour, asking for another 300.
“What?! You lost that already?”
“Well yeah, but why are you so mad? How much have you lost?”
“3,000. But I know what I’m doing!!!”
I think it was TV poker that hold’em into the limelight for non-serious games. Hold 'em may have already been dominating professional play, but for little penny-ante or ‘random marker with no cash value’ pickup games it wasn’t until after the poker TV explosion that hold-em was something I’d even see. Before that, it was mostly ‘draw with mild variant rules and wild cards’ (like ‘San Francisco’ where ‘Queens are wild and straights don’t count’) with an occasional other game for variety. Also I don’t think Rounders had anything to do with popularizing poker, the only people I’ve seen talk about that move or bring it out for a movie night are people who were already very into poker.
I also think TV had a lot to do with popularizing no-limit games, though No-Limit or Pot-Limit have a lot more room for dynamic play and psychological games than limit games do. Limit poker has a lot of ‘keep calling bets until you see what happens’, and if you’re making bad choices it takes a long time to catch up with you, while in no/pot limit games there are a lot of bets you shouldn’t take and you can lose a lot if you’re not careful. Bluffing in limit poker is very grindy, while bluffing in NL/PL tends to be one or a few dramatic decisions. OTOH, limit poker for friendly games has the advantage that people don’t tend to get knocked out, since you usually want everyone to stay at the table all night.
My ‘don’t tap the tank story’: When I used to play in NL tournament games, I remember one guy who kept complaining that I’d “suck out” (bet against a better hand, then end up winning from a late draw) who never seemed to get that it always happened when there was a big pot and his little blind-sized bets were 1/10 or 1/20 of it. He didn’t get that there are a lot of hands that are good enough to be worth gambling on for a 20:1 payout that I would fold in a heartbeat to one solid (half-pot or pot-sized) bet, and I didn’t educate him on it.
What I mean to say is the game itself teaches you things about how to get better. The way the community cards work are going to make people naturally think about why they could easily have paired the ace on the board whereas if you try to rep the ace it’s not as credible or vice versa. IMO if you ignore the gambling aspect of it, this is a quality that makes games better. Sure if you already know how everything works, you’ll make more money if the fish can figure out what you’re doing more easily, but by that logic the best gambling game in existence is 3-card monty.
I think most forms of stud/hold’em poker are really strong as far as being easy to learn and hard to master, so texas hold’em giving people new players training wheels as opposed to overwhelming them with different things they can’t process makes the game as a whole better.
In my opinion, low-limit limit poker was killed by the rake. When I started playing, the rake was 5% of the pot, up to $3. Then it went to 10% to a max of $5 when the government casinos opened and shut down the private clubs. The last time I played a limit game (4-8, the biggest available), the rake had risen to $7, with $2 of that being raked from every contested pot for a ‘bad beat’ jackpot.
Consider a 10 handed game plays roughly 50 hands per hour. At a full $7 per pot, the casino is taking $350 per hour off the table, or $35 per player per hour on average. Loose players (the weak ones you want around) are involved in more pots, and pay more per hour. Eventually they all just bust out of the game, or get tired of losing.
People who play small limit games are often retired or low income players. They simply can’t afford the rake. They don’t know that’s why they can’t afford to play, they just know that when they play poker their money drains away steadily, even if they are above average players in the game.
On the flip side, no-limit has a lot of blind stealing (which around here they don’t rake), or the pots get very large. A $7 rake on a $700 pot hurts a lot less than one on a $70 pot.
Of course the same could be said for 15-30 or 20-40 limit games, which have also vanished. My guess is that this is because the players who come into poker now start with $1-2 no-limit, and play a lot of no-limit tournaments, and so never develop the skills or desire to play limit games.
Likewise, I think the rake for cash games has driven a lot of players into tournaments. A flat $5 or $10 fee to enter a $50 tournament in which you might win $2000 and get to play for many hours is a reasonable entertainment expense. $35/hr to play a 4-8 cash game is a whole different thing. And since tournaments are almost always no-limit, that’s what players get used to playing.
As for the superiority of Hold-Em, it’s all about the balance. Pros like it because they get more information before they have to commit serious money to a hand, and amateurs like it because the community cards and suck-out capability means they have a shot to beat even the best players if luck runs their way a bit. Also, the blind structure ensures that there will be action, forcing tight players to loosen up a bit and allow the fish a shot at them.
Low stakes limit poker is still fairly common. There are lots of regular games as low as $2/4 in Vegas. It’s a social game, obviously, everyone is going to be a loser in that game.
Jackpot drops aren’t the same as extra rake, as you get a fraction of that equity back. For regulars, that can approach 100% in expected value. Actual results may vary, obviously.
50 hands per hour is too way high an estimate for the pace of even well dealt, shuffler-assisted live game, 35 is a more reasonable estimate.
Your overall point is correct - the rake is a huge factor that dominates almost all other considerations in terms of winning and losing. It turns big winners into small winners, small winners into small losers, break even players into big losers. Rake in online poker is actually far more egregious - even though it’s half the rate per hand, a live casino has to pay for the space, the power, air conditioning, floor staff, dealers, drinks, waitresses - only poker has to pay for jack shit, their marginal cost of running a table is probably under a penny per hour - and yet they still charge people a few bucks per hand in rake. I paid over $100,000 in rake in my most expensive year playing online, and the crazy thing is that I played a lot less hands than most pros, since I rarely multitabled more than 2 tables.
Some people pay for online services like, say, $10 a month for xbox live or $15 a month to play world of warcraft, where they provide a somewhat similar service, running a virtual game for you using some server resources. I paid $8500 a month to a few online sites just to play an online game that didn’t take a lot more resources than it would cost to run Words With Friends.
Poker was still running in a lot of places prior to COVID-19, but I’d agree that the low limits were harmed by rake.
In Casino Rama’s $1/$2 NL game, the rake was 10% up to TEN BUCKS. It is impossible to win money in the long run at that game.
When the pandemic is over come to Brantford, where 10-20 limit is always spread and 20-40 limit goes most of the time and always on weekends. Excellent games.