LOL No!!! The 6/12 at Bay is ooohy gooooey soft! I play it all the time and the games are typically better than the 8 games in many ways (and worse in others obv).

I easily have more hours in the Bay 6 game than anyone else posting in this forum (probably more than everyone else combined).

it's a 6/12 and a 8/16 with a half kill. There are usually 2-3 6/12s running and 4-5 8/16s. All of which are glorious.

There are a few reasons why I prefer the Bay 6 over the 8, but play the 8 quite often as well. I played a great 8 game last night that was off the charts. Over the 6 hours I played, I would guess that the avg pot size was probably around 15-18 BBs. I cashed out a bit over 8 racks... down a bit from my nearly 10 rack peak. lolz

If you've got 6-8 games going, you can probably just get away with whatever. Still, the effective size of a 8/16 half kill is like 9/18 or 10/20. Maybe you're doing old school Mirage steps with an apparently smaller gap from the 6?

It is amazing to see the Bay with more games in the feeder stakes that Vegas currently lacks than Vegas has games. You have that with nearly twice the rake. Do you think it is because most junior engineers think that having a math based degree guarantees poker glory, or is it just a big population with a gambling culture? Looking around here, I wonder where people get up the courage to grab 20 fun tickets and hit the old 30/60 game. They didn't make the $ playing 2/5/100. With that spread of 6 and 8 games, I'd feel good about the future.

1. California has a history with LHE. NL is still not very popular.

2. I think the big games have a stabilizing effect on the small games and vice versa. Playing with a small player pool, $5 rake 3/6 game with no way to get out is just depressing. You basically watch your opponents die from old age over the years. But if you have the fantasy that one day you're going to move up to 80/160 and be baller (even if the set of people who have actually done it is probably the set of people named thesilverbail on 2+2), you could spend your life chasing that dream. I believe BBJs work the same way. There's a fair number of people who shuttle money back and forth between different game levels.

Certainly, people like Jesse have had an impact on my view of the game - "He used to play 6/12 ... now he's playing 40/80 ... I'm playing 6/12 ... maybe someday I can play 40/80 too."

3. Also, gambol.

mostly gambol.

For a number of reasons (mostly because of the shady reputation poker has in 'respectable' circles), very few Silicon valley engineers actually show up to play at Bay 101 or M8trix. It's a good thing too, cause while not all of them would end up being matt hawrilenko, many of them would have natural analytic abilities and basic tilt control to the point that playing against a table full of them would not be a great use of time.

Or they'd program androids to play for them.

Has anyone tried playing poker while wearing Google Glass at Bay?

Yeah, but you run like The Almighty himself.

Bravos1, how is that even remotely possible? I have played the 6/12 for maybe 80 or so hours at Bay and its very routinely not that great a game. Maybe I need to table select better or something, I dunno. The 8/16 is absolutely better that is for certain. (more money, same-ish player pool)

Either way, I am still a LHE noob but hope to play 20/40 profitably one day

Engineers/scientists are much more tilt monkeys than most people think. Confirmation bias runs rampant in those circles, even in professional settings. I was always bamboozled by the "successful day traders" I worked with, until it became clear they were explaining away losses and were mostly losers at it, especially compared to beating the markets. Maybe they aren't fish enough to fund you vs. the rake, but I'm not sure the population would be that far above average. Maybe playing a few tech-heavy home games has skewed my view, where the % of people who think they're expert while being terrible is high.

If thesilverbail or Bravos1 sit in a small stakes game, it is possible that every one seems amazing. If you beat 40/80, you giggle in most 10/20 games. It could also be that the mistakes made in a 6/12 game are different and not favorable for your current skills. A higher stakes player wanders in and just enjoys any/all mistakes, so he's just happy. The fact that a guy who wins 4 levels higher thinks a game is good is somewhat meaningless. He's wrong because he didn't just get past beating one level down.
Keep at it. Many of us started lower than 8/16. Keep at it and you'll get there.

Thanks DougL I know. I am kind of afraid of the variance in LHE because I have heard it to be monstruous and logically it makes sense at lower stakes since your WR is so miniscule; but the mistakes I have seen people at 6/12 all over are just brutal.

I see people flatting opens with like any two suited, I see open limping with all kinds of trash, I see people flatting bets and never capping it themselves, I see routine A high folds to a cbet, I see people bluffing in big big pots; with all of this your variance is still high? I might be in for a rude awakening.

Yeah this is definitely true. Engineer types are more prone to entitlement tilt and that can be almost as bad as pure gambol 1-time-baby tilt.

I play 8/16 and 6/12 occasionally. I think 8/16 is definitely the better game on average most of the time, but it has higher variance too and you should be looking to game select between the two stakes a lot since sometimes a 6/12 table will be better. The jump from the 8 to 20 is both quantitatively and psychologically quite a leap (you have to cross the brush to the other side of the room where the big boys play).

When I was struggling through 3/6, players were worse and it was a 4$ drop. I think most 3/6 tables are unplayable now. I got stuck at 6/12 for a long time, partly because I moved up to it having acquired the complete suite of TAGFish tools, so I would do dumb things like x/r 2nd pair vs EP raisers. 8/16 and 20 went a lot smoother. In retrospect I think I could have started taking shots at the 20 earlier, but at the time it was just hard to know that. The move to 40 went well for me, but it was the first time I started regularly encountering tables with more good players than bad. And I'm still a net loser at the 80 with less than 150 hours logged so there's still work to be done.....

In the math usage, variance will be slightly higher due to pot sizes being large. Still, you're playing relatively few hands so that compensates. I'm guessing your hourly standard deviation will be on the order of 11BB/HR. However, I don't think that's what you mean. You're talking about "biggest downswing I'll see". Indeed, if the rake is high and your WR is small, you'll see soul-crushing downers. The reason people think LHE variance is huge and NL variance isn't, is due to the huge WR that NL crushers have -- bankroll requirements are driven by WR/VAR. There's a name for the term that escapes me.
You're really not trying to beat those people. Your stiffest competition is the $6-$7/hand going down the drain, and that drop box is solid. You need the bad players to break even against the drop, and you need them to be actively terrible to come out even better. Move over to the 20/40 and the rake goes from 18BB/HR to 5.25BB/HR. In your share, it goes from 2BB/HR to 0.6BB/HR. So if your 20/40 competition is only 1BB/HR tougher than your 6/12 villains, your WR would be higher there. It won't be, because you're probably not ready for the 20 competition or the absolute $ swings.

Don't ever forget that in high rake games, winning is a real achievement. I started playing 6/12 at Mirage, with a $3 rake @ 5% or something. If you're paying 10% to $7, you're doing another .75BB/HR worse in drop. So if one of us claims we were beating the Mirage game for 1/HR, you're lucky to win in the same conditions due to just the drop.

Variance can also help you. You can use a stretch of running hot to hit the 8/16 or even the 20/40. Very few people every moved up limits without a little help from rungood.

what you're saying is exactly what I was thinking. The whole moving up limits thing is a tough road sometimes. Hopefully you don't have too many former online Mid/High crushers clogging up the tables. Even so, I predict it will work out for you in the end.

Epic white elephant win.

[X] Bring alcohol
[X] Draw the ace of spades
[X] Get your brought gift stolen the max number of times
[X] Leave with non-alcohol

I brought scratchers.
Stole Glen Livet.
Stole a bottle of Cab.
Left with Tetris Jenga.

Canterbury has had 6/12 and 8/16 for as long as I've been playing there, and this never really seemed odd. The different character of the games -- 6 is a limpfest and 8 has gambool -- made the 8 seem like a bigger step up than it really is.

Now it seems they are transitioning the 8/16 to a half-kill

One of the truly distinctive things about online poker was Table Ratings. Tons of people lie about winrates. Tons more have no idea that they are losing or breaking even. And tons more have no idea their winrate isn't statistically significant.

Basically I don't believe any live player's statement about their winrate. I can observe some players and have some idea based on personal observation, but there's just nothing like Table Ratings.

Very few people win at poker. Or the stock market. Or sports betting. Or horse racing. But tons of people will tell you they do.

Early on in my poker playing, I played early on in a home game where the host sold a fixed amount of chips, did a walk of shame style rebuy thing where he made it painful to go to the box to sell you more, and he kept + publicised session and yearly results. Basically, he did the maximum to keep accurate records and show everyone who won/lost the most. It was the entire reason I bought poker books and learned to play better -- the shaming of losing was much worse than the $10-$50 I dropped in our monthly sessions. Compared to sushi, poker was cheap. Having everyone know you lost really sucked.

When I hosted a home game, I'd "buy" a ton of chips for myself and sell quick refills out of my own stack as people needed to re-load. I always helped the losers lie about how much they lost in a session. People minded losing much less because it wasn't public. It also helped hide how much I won, because my own stack was invariably smaller than it started as I sold chips and pocketed cash.

How many "profitable slot players" do you know? Same thing.

This was the worst idea of all time, and its impact changed online poker. Sure, we could know that BigBadBabar and others truly crushed all poker. The shaming aspect on the losing players was terrible. A better version would only report winners.

Pokerstars at one point started chatbanning people for mocking opponents' PTR ratings, which was A++++++.

But even only reporting winners stigmatizes anyone not reported. The best system is just not reporting, but if you're gonna report, set it to a fixed number like Top 100 and hope there are more than 100 big winners in the player pool (or else rank 100 shows a small or negative winrate and again anyone who doesn't make the list gets stigmatized).

And to be clear, since I've admitted I was a frequent chatbannee, I was never chatbanned for tapping the tank.

I understand your point, but I am glad it existed. It helped educate me on some realities about poker and other aspects of life as well.

Yup. So tilting when a slightly losing TAGFish berates a fish using PTR. No, people don't have to know said fish lost $100k over two years playing exclusively $2/$4 and $3/$6 OL

Doug, is there usually still decent coverage on the slopes close to Denver in early March?
Was thinking of coming out for the Penguins v Avs.
Also, could you please tell me the name of the nearest resort?

I liked PTR because it showed me that I was misplaying AJ terribly. I disliked it because I preferred that my opponents thought I was a 44/33 donk that lost massive amounts of money playing online poker instead of the truth.

When I pretended I had lost money and idiots posted my (winning) PTR stats, I would always tell them they were looking up the wrong player and claim I had a blank space after my name.

I think that March is still prime time at the resorts. Spring snow should be great. Even the early-closing resorts are open until mid-April.

Eldora is the closest ski slope to me, it is in Boulder County. It is small and may not always have great snow. Can't beat the drive if the conditions are good. It is very close to Blackhawk if you want to check out the 30/60 game at Ameristar (which has a hotel) and ski, it is your best bet if the snow is good.

Loveland and A-basin are before the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70. You get to them in that order. All my memories of them (been years since I skied either) are they are very high and cold. Good choices in a year with bad snow. A-basin is sometimes open in June or July.

Winter park/Mary Jane is a huge ski mountain, going over Berthoud Pass (avoiding Eisenhower Tunnel, again). Winter park is 65 miles from Pepsi Center. Depending on weather/traffic, you're looking at an hour and a quarter or hour and a half on a good day. Longer with weather or bad traffic. Personally, I like the choice of terrain and distance.

Next, out you go through the tunnel and get to Keystone, Copper Maintain, and then Vail. The first two are 70 miles and an hour and a quarter, while Vail is just under 100 miles and maybe 1.5+ hours?

Hope that helps. The reason that I mention the tunnel so often is the brutal traffic on weekends. If you're day tripping from Denver on a weekend during bad driving time, the wait can be a couple hours of additional driving. On a random Wednesday, it is not a factor (though Denver has a big weekday rush hour).