You won't really find "2/4" live, depending where you live but you may find 2/5. Live stakes tend to be weird compared to online because they have fixed denominations of chips to deal with, 2/4 would involve you having huge stacks of chips all the time, or having to make change a lot.

Anyway, 2/5 is not a tough game in most places I've played (which is Oklahoma, Vegas, California a little bit (CA is weird though, most places have low buyins for NL games)

Go to a casino, try 1/2, see what I mean. Try to remember that you'll have to play a different game live, you should be value betting and folding a lot, and bluffing not so much. There are spots to bluff, of course, and you'll find them but there are basically not too many nits or weak/tight players.

Even now I play waaaay over my weight class live. Games at every level during the WSOP are full of fish, all the way up to 75/150.

the only casino here is offerning 2/5 games and i was afraid of going because i had in my mind that i need to be playing 2/4 online in order to try 2/5 live.
but after these posts ill give it some thought

If you're beating .5/1 then 2/5 will not be a problem. The main thing to be aware of, imo, is how slow the games go. It will make it feel like you're running bad, because you'll play and win so many less hands/hour. It makes a lot of online players kind of tilty. The *main* skill an online player needs playing live is patience.

Looking back on the first time I played 5/10 limit, I was sooooo scared. I mean, sometimes you'd have to call $20 on the river, which was like, twice what I'd normally buy in for in my regular online game.

do you think its profitable? i was thinking that if u have the same winrate 2/5 is like 40 h /hour or less but with x5 the money. online i play 250h/hour so it sounds like the same thing... i find live games more fun though its all the casino atmosphere

You should expect a higher win rate per 100 hands than online. However, I know people who make more playing .5/1 online than 2/5 live, because they play a dozen or more tables, and crush pretty good. Online there's also rakeback, bonuses, etc. Not saying 2/5NL is your doorway to riches, just saying a competent NL100 can crush NL500 live.

There is very little about the 1-2 tables I've sat at that suggest the rake is unbeatable. There are just so many calling stations/pushers that just about every pot is ginormous and there is a rake maximum. Most rakes are $5 max when you account for BBJ. Just about every other pot at every 1-2 game I've played has been huge in relation to the blinds. I've only put in about 25 hours at 1-2 but it strikes me as very beatable especially considering the prevalence of WSOPME "experts"

Whether the rake is beatable depends on your opponents.

If you played against 9 copies of yourself, you would all be break-even (assuming no rake), but then the house takes some rake, so you all eventually go busto, even if the rake is tiny

If you played 9 ppl who all-in-mucked every hand, you could pay a huge amount of rake and still be highly profitable.

Obviously, there are lots of shades of gray in between these two extremes.

Anyhow, if you are confident that you have >10% edge, you can beat the games with rake of 10% (especially if there's a cap on the rake, so in big hands it's less that 10%).

A lot of live 1/2 players are bad enough that it is not that hard to have >10% edge.

Best of luck!

What game and where you have that game where they take rake without a flop? If that's the case then don't steal the goddamned 1/2 blinds. Stay tight and focus on playing big pots with big flopped hands. In general if the blinds are small and the stacks are deep you play super tight and mostly play situational based on what's developing in that specific hand. Play starting hands with high implied odds on the flop based on the effective stacks and forget about stealing blinds. Use AA/KK/QQ and AK to pretend stealing and hopping they will put you on a mediocre stealing hand. I guess this is I'm gonna do if I were you.


Che,

Online games are not just more fun. Online games are a totally different game. You will have to deal with tells, to hide your own tells, to learn to identify the fish, who's on tilt, who is just called due to boredom, etc. Online game require more skill but can be much much much more profitable. An average ROI of 10-12 BB/hour after the rake and tips is a feasible goal.

rusty I have a couple questions. is live 1-2-3NL W/ $5 rake beatable? if everyone is a regular and tight? max buy in is $300, however, usually people have average of $120's and they play the game like 2-3-5NL. sometimes it gets deep! average chip count is $300 I figured that's when it's beatable. and also I have played on cake micro limit HU I paid so much into rake w/ villain in a couple of hours we lost around a couple dollars....I'm guessing with %5 micro isn't beatale? thanks alot

I honestly don't know.

Micros online are beatable with obscene rake and very tough conditions.

1/2 NL live is certainly better than the micros online.

I played a lot of hours in tons of "reg" filled games and thought the games were pretty good overall. Plenty of money, no one is solid.