The really simple advice is to stop playing the 1/2 game at all.

In addition to the rake and BI cap, you risk developing bad habits which will be very difficult to break should you move up.

Now you become the professor. (LOL) You got alot of acid in your gut and lots of pain in your heart,.. man...,

2+2 used to be years ago a very good forum filled with helpful advice, and you were able to exchange posts and comment hands with the great pros of all times like Izmet Fekali and Abdul Jalib and get their advice. But now they are gone underground from the poker forums and only focus on their play. I know them all because they live here in Vegas and one of them is my neighbor. The old content on 2+2 was and probably still is the best. I even wonder if you or some of other 2+2ers dudes even play poker for cold cash.

More's the pity, dude ... wtf?

Why not? And why is everyone saying it's "unbeatable"? Sure if you win a 100bb pot you only get 90 back but thats still something

Jesus hell find a $300 max buy in for 1/2.... or play 1/3

Yikes $100 cap 1/2... FML if i had to play that... Flop TPTK+ and jam for that game lol

Imagine you were stranded on a deserted island. With a big coral reef nearby. Unfortunately, the only food on the island was arsenic. And you thus reasoned, as it was food, and you had to eat food, that even though it smelled like garlic (arsenic oxidizes to arsenic trioxide) and was an insanely bad idea, you would eat the arsenic.

Do you see how this is not a product of rational thought?

Okay.

My 1-2 games have a rake of 5%, capped at $5, with a table max of $400. The dealers have told me they take in $120/hr in rake. On average, then, they collect $12 per person per table hour. That means playing at that table costs the average player $12/hr.

Your 1-2 games have a rake of 10%, capped at $20. Twice the rake, 4x the cap, and 1/4 the buy in. Now, I don't know what the exact amount your table is collecting each hour. However, I think it would be safe to assume it is somewhere between 2x and 4x the $120/hr my casino is taking in. So, lets say it's 3x.

$360/hr

Each player at a full table, on average, is paying $36/hr in rake. That's the amount you have to make in your game just to break even. Or to put it another way, the casino is taking nearly four max buy-ins per hour off the table.

***

I short stack my games. Have done so for years and thousands of hours. I pay $12/hr in rake, and I make about $24/hr. We can say I make $36/hr with 1/3 of that going to rake.

If my casino raked as yours did, I would make no money.

However, you do not have access to my games. Your games have 1/4 the max buy in of mine, twice the rake and 4x the cap. You will NEVER make $36/hr at your games to cover the rake. The Titanic is sinking and all you are doing is bailing water with a 16 ounce Slurpee cup from 7-11.

Got some high end GTO play? Okay, now you are bailing water with a Venti Latte cup from Starbucks? 20 ounces.

It doesn't matter. This ship is going down.

***

The rake is not just a nuisance that some solid play can overcome. After the casino takes its cut there is no money left to win. And what does change hands is an illusion, like on a roulette table. Over time, there are no winners.

The house edge is immutable.

You will not beat this game.
You will never beat this game.
You will not build your bankroll off this game.
The best poker player in the world couldn't beat this game.
Some games are simply unplayable.

And friends don't let friends eat arsenic.

All the best,
Flux

Holy **** I had no idea it was that bad. Thanks.

Is the 1/3 game 100bb max buy-in 10% capped at 15 beatable in your opinion or not even enough to worth trying

I think the math above is all pretty dubious (one of the biggest problems being the assumption that everyone at the table pays rake equally, we play many less pots than other players, therefore we pay a lesser share of the rake). I agree with the conclusion though, the game probably cannot be beaten.

The 1/3 game will be beatable assuming the players are bad enough. In a lineup of people off this forum, everyone would lose. In the 1/2 150BB max buyin 10% $15 cap game I play sometimes, there are times when I've stopped playing because the lineup is simply not weak enough for me to be able to win (and I've been playing for nearly 20 years and was a full time online pro for 6 years). You want there to be at least 1 or 2 clueless players at the table.

$300, 10% and $15 capped.

Man, you have some tough conditions in your casino.

I can only compare it to what I have, and maybe we can make some approximations.

Out of the gate, you are still twice the rake and 3x the cap. So if 5% and a $5 cap equals $120, with your 10% and $15, we are at least $240. So each hour costs you $24 to sit at the table, on average. Of course, if you play tighter, involve yourself in less hands, but with stronger edges, the rake won't bite you as hard.

But is the game beatable?

Well, to be honest, it doesn't sound good. Generally speaking, I have heard that ~10bbs an hour is a good return in a live game. And that's typically based off a 5%/$5 rake. So someone making $30/hr in a 1-3 game is actually making about $42/hr before rake.

But in your 10%/$15 rake, we double that rake. So, that same player now is only making ... $42-$24 = $18/hr.

The best players of the game might average about 6 bb/hr. That rake is literally biting into 40% of their potential profits. This is all predicated on your rake being twice what a typical rake is. Now, if it's closer to 3x as much, then we are now down to $6/hr, or about 2bb/hr.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about your games, but it's really tough. I am speaking in some broad generalizations, perhaps others with experience in high rake games can comment. Obviously, the action is a crucial component. In addition to your play style, as Chris mentions.

EDIT: I just noticed that ChrisV has 34K posts, played for over 20 years, professionally, lives in Australia, and plays the same hideous game. He is your man to consult with.

In games where players think about $ amount rather than pot odds (feel like I'm the only one on this board to ever mention this phenomenon) I go ahead and price in flush draws sometimes and just get outta there when it hits because sometimes they fold even when priced in LOL particularly on the turn. You can also bluff river for insanely cheap sometimes, see these pots all the time where someone 3 barrels for $20 every street and the guy who was calling folds getting 7:1 otr.

Screw that rake tho, play online if it's an option. You'd have to crush that game to even break even.

It's not fair to accuse a guy of plagiarism with no proof. I just googled a sentence from this post and the only other time it comes up is in another recent post from outdonked. There are also grammar errors in it (use of "less" rather than "fewer" and "gonna" in the first sentence) that suggests it's not professionally written.

I generally don't read outdonked's posts, as they're too long. But it's BS to complain about him generally and then also express disbelief when he writes something that you think adds value to the forum.

You can beat games with surprisingly high rakes by being a huge nit, sitting there folding almost every hand and then bombing it when a premium hand comes along. When you eventually wake up with a hand, often like 5 people will be in the pot before you put in your raise or reraise. The looseness of the games makes the blinds a near irrelevancy, especially when compared to the rake. Playing few hands minimizes your rake, also if there's no flop there's no rake, so if you're playing a preflop-oriented strategy you can dodge quite a bit of rake. Your strategy in such games should be oriented towards taking the pot down, as an example let's say you bet $10 postflop and your opponent calls, the rake on that $20 is going to be $2 which is effectively robbing you of like 1/5th of your opponent's call, so it has to be a pretty thick value bet before it's even worth it. So like MAYBE the Crown 1/2 can be beaten, but even with all that I think it would be a huge struggle, also I'd rather die than sit there and play that kind of game.

The 1/3 should be ok, but I wouldn't be looking to pay your house off. Gun to my head if I had to make wild guesses, an expert could win maybe $20/hr, with $10/hr being more realistic for a decent player. But as I said it depends heavily on how bad the opponents are.

Edit: Should probably mention the issue with short buyin games, which is that the other way to profit in high-rake games is to take advantage of really crushing hands, like flopping a set. If you have to buy in for $100 and then someone raises to $10, you cannot flat that with any hand at all, so setmining is out. So pretty much all you can do facing raises is fold or jam/reraise a committal amount. Also, to answer the question in the OP, doing stuff like raising to $12 and getting multiple callers is more or less an automatic loser unless you have a big pair, because the advantage any other hand has preflop or postflop is on average typically not enough to overcome the rake, given the small amounts you have to work with postflop. If I were forced the play the 1/2 game my strategy would involve a lot of folding and then sometimes raising an amount basically designed to make everyone fold. Even with that though I would not be at all confident that I could win.

While I'm on a posting roll, I'll point out that the phenomenon of schooling, or Morton's theorem, is hugely exacerbated by high rake.

As an example, suppose I raise a hand and I have a choice between 1) a single player calling and having an expectation of -40% of his call or 2) 9 players all calling and all having an expectation of -10% of their calls. In a zero-rake environment, the game is zero-sum, so if 9 players are losing 10% of their call, that means I'm winning 90% of a single call in scenario 2, whereas I'm only winning 40% of a single call in scenario 1. Thus, I prefer the scenario where 9 players call.

But if there's 10% rake, suddenly scenario 2 is a disaster, because that -10% all just goes to the house, while in scenario 1 I'm still making a solid profit. So there's a paradox where a game becoming more generally loose-passive can actually make things much worse in a high rake environment. That's why you need one or two awful players to hammer on, just a full table of people who are pretty bad but not terrible will not cut it.

play the higher limit game, the 50BB high rake game is a joke.

did they ban your previous acc't? You just joined one month ago. oops the cat is out of the bag

Let me give some more because from early this morning I couldn't fall asleep thinking how you insulted me so many times of being a thief or an idiot imbecile who could not possible have written that poker advice strategy of my own .. etc and etc..

I'll betcha dollars to doughnuts you not gonna find any sentence of my post anywhere in the universe. Ya' dig? Of corse I’m not a pro writer and master of de written art. I was raised around cards games and spend my whole life around clubs in Vegas casino and de only thing I got in life is what I’m goin' after. Yuh with me? But sure is one ting, I always be on de spot when comes to hustlin' NL poker, inside out and upside down which way you want it, .. don’t matter to me.

Right? No matter which way de games goes I find a way to beat it. If some friend or if I read a young player to be smart trying to talk poker with me about what to do here and what should be done there ...., wtf? ..I will always try to help him wit' whole my hart. Yuh with me? - And if you try to sit at my table and I have a read on you of being a donkey of acting smart and I figure you for looking down on me ..., well.. wtf? .. I put an X on your forehead and take you down... man..take you down .., man at cards and money game, - But for an honest smart new young dude, I’m always with whole my heart and try the best to help him if I can..., That's why took me couple good hours since I got home from the tables last night late to put in writing my way of thinking and dealing with stations and fish callers in volume pots. Ya’ dig it? - I'm not even in bed right now cause I cannot sleep trying to fight you despite the fact that I have to go see the games tonight. Are you still with me .., man?

Didn´t wanna insult you, I just said what I felt at that moment.

good luck to you.

Very unlikely its beatable by 95-98% of the player pool in that casino.

If you're in the top 5-10%, give it a go. Otherwise, just play for fun and ignore the $$$.

As long as the rake is capped... e.g. "10% up to $15", then the quoted above is nonsense.

The house is not colluding against you -- since the house's equity in the pot doesn't change regardless as to how many active villains are in the pot.

When playing in a high rake game, you really need to have two things going for you:

1) You need a constant supply of new players, or existing players with super deep pockets. As the rake takes $$$ of the table, it needs to be replaced by someone other then Hero. So high rake games can be beat if, e.g. you have a long (effectively infinite) seat list and the floor is quick to fill empty seats as players bust.

2) If the rake is capped, then you want to do whatever you can to build the biggest pots possible, or if you cannot do that, then take it down preflop. You don't want to play lots of small or medium pots. This also means a few things:

A... not getting involved with other players who are short stacked. Suppose you are OTB with 200bb and UTG is sitting on 70bb and he opens to 5bb, it folds to you and you know the blinds are not getting involved without super premium hands. You should probably fold almost everything except for super premiums which you shove AI hoping V will just fold almost always.

B... not playing speculative hands when you are not >90% certain to get paid off. Playing 87s for the FD in a high rake game is a recipe for losing $$$.

C... preflop 3B relatively light but still with a strong hand. Especially if you think they'll fold pre. But if Hero's hand is stronger then V's range, then you want to bloat up that pot to make it worth playing.

OK, ..man .. all is good. If you are a "player" ... wtf? ..., we are brothers in blood and spirit.

Good Luck and Good Flops to you too!

Hey Lapi and/or Chris, and/or anyone ...

My rake is relatively negligible, but over the years I still haven't come across anyone who has attained my consistent win rate combined with my relatively mild variance.

Buying in short, I play:
88+, AQ+, and suited Broadways.
Shove JJ, AK.

That's about it.

Really, an 8/8/3 style in the VPIP/PFR/3bet lingo of online players.

Last I checked, my stats were about $24/hr over the past 4300 hrs at 1/2.

I have always felt that if I could do that buying for $100, then a truly great, competent player could average $50/hr with a full buy in ($400). But I have never met that person. I occasionally run across someone who touches $35/hr, but it never lasts, and they dip below $30 over time. Or completely off the scene.

Is it possible that even with my 5%/$5 rake, $120/hr casino take, and the $12/hr tax on the average players winnings, that a good portion of my advantage stems from the very real possibility that I am only playing about 1/3 the hands the average player is, and consequently ...

Only paying about $4/hr in rake?

That would amount to about $8 additional profit per hour, I would be at $16/hr otherwise. That $8 is literally a 50% improvement on my win rate. All those other hands would have to increase your win rate by that same amount to justify playing them. When was the last time playing speculative holdings increased anyone's return by 50%?

Ignoring the issue of entertainment, or why we play, in a purely economical sense, is being a hyper nit the most exploitive way to play a live game?

High rake games obviously exacerbate the problem.

Thoughts?

Flux,

It would seem that results speek for themselves.

You may be right. I tried doing some math to prove my point and couldn't. I'm not sure if my fail is at the intuition or the math.

We're off topic I think, but your numbers are interesting..

4300 hrs at 25 hands per hour is 107,500 hands.

At 8/8/3, you only played about 12,000 hands.

Which means you average win per hand played is about $8.

While I'd like to think I'm in the top percent of the player pool, the game is 100% beatable even if you aren't a "crusher". Melbourne has a lot of affluent gamblers/the games are soft as butter, you won't run into a good reg until 2/5.

As Chris has said a tight game is optimal.

Also the games are being raked pre