I used to play @ Artichoke Joe's and Lucky Chances all the time during the day. Wife had a baby and I went to playing online. I recently headed back to AJ's and played 6/12 hold'em. My game is 20X better after hanging out here and playing online for 3 years. Play there is terrible, I mean just awfull. People call raises with 85 or Q2. If there was a table VPIP stat for the tables it would be like 99% or 98%. Sounds great. But when I have 7 or 8 garbage hands chasing me down and everyone calls down someone hits their trash cards. Is this game even beatable? Or is it just a slot machine game where everyone just calls down and see who wins, so the house ends up with all the cash? Is there a game around where people actually play poker? I guess I could try and find a table with only 1/2 the players calling down. And the 15/30 is overrun with Chinese guys who refuse to speak english.

This answer is short, but it is amazingly good: read SSHE by Ed Miller et al. Nothing you can do about the crazy variance, but you will learn to love it as you learn to crush games like that.

This forum is for NL strategy, so I'm going to lock this thread. Shoot me a PM if you want it moved or something.