I would say that on average bad players win more pots than good players. Good players win bigger pots and more money but less pots overall. At least TAGs do for sure.

+1

Gnicepost,imoG

Odds of being eaten by a spider or ****-punted by a kangaroo are much higher in Australia. Seriously though, what's the rake structure in your game? Do you get rakeback? Here in Murica we have player rewards cards.

I would, just to hard to trust and track live stakes. And i cant think of a way around it.

Staking anybody for low-stakes is very problematic.

If they're a good player and need a stake, then it's likely because they have life leaks such as poor money management, pit leaks etc -- making it a bad investment

If they're a good player without leaks, they're going to be playing on their own money. The guys who you want to stake are the one's who dont want/need to be staked. They're just giving away free money.

The only situation where it's a slam dunk is somebody who you know is a winning player and either left the game for a while to do X, or maybe spent all their money on a medical emergency or something of the sort.

Point being, it's very difficult to find somebody who's worth staking.

That becomes much different for higher stakes, as there's very legitimate reasons to want to stake a 5/10 crusher into that juicy 25/50/100 game that he just doesn't have the bankroll to support on his own.

Rake structure is 10% capped at $15. Zero rake back. Zero comp of any sort. Was funny, had a Vegas reg play at our casino recently and he was dumbfounded by how much rake they were taking. He said surely the game was unbeatable, but then he saw just how spastic the level of play can be and changed his mind lol.

The question is whether the level of lol spew will last long term. I'm not sure how long the game has been running in your market, but most games eventually calm down considerably, with the spewers/losers eventually going broke and leaving the game or tightening up to where they don't lose as much (at which point your rake will become devastating). There is not an unlimited pipeline of spewers waiting to discover the game; most people who have interest in playing it have already done so.

Genjoyitwhileitlasts,imoG

I don't know about that. I know some spewers that have been punting stacks consistently for *years*.

Of course, there will always be exceptions. But to think that that you are going to have the same overall consistent level of spewyness now that you will in 5 years is pretty optimistic. If for every 10 big spewers, if half quit the game and the half of the remaining half adjust to lose not nearly as much, that will have a pretty devastating affect on our bottom line.

GimoG

I don't know, the overall spewyness of my local games (home + Charity rooms, MI thing) hasn't gone down much in the 4 years that I've been playing them consistently, and while the casino conditions aren't as good as they were in 2008 .... they're pretty close.

Not forgetting most of the profit is fresh meat, not recurrent spewers.

@ Meale, I thought I had it bad with the house taking ~$170/hr off each table. Though that involves free food, player's rewards for convenience junk, and a few places that'll give you cash back ~$250/ month. Kinda wanna crowdfund an Aussie casino right about now.

@ GG, If their economy is good, I'm not surprised there are people actually having fun gambling. I get what you're saying about the progression of the game, but you make it sound like no one will ever pick up poker anymore. I do see the game picking up new players. They usually have a clue to some extent, but the slow nature of live poker & unavailability of online games makes learning much harder.

But isn't that sorta the way it is?

NL poker has been in our market pretty much right after Moneymaker. Everyone who has wanted to try out poker since the poker boom has had a decade+ to give it a try.

I mean, obviously you'll still get some late comers to the party. But it's clearly past midnight.

Gwouldn'tbankonanyhotchicksshowingupanytimesoon,im oG

There are new suckers born every day GG: https://xkcd.com/1053/

GG, you're making me feel good about my life long depression. For one, you have the front page of this forum filled with posts written by people who don't know the game (myself included), and they're the ones actively learning. Have you never seen a person under 30 in your casino? Do you not have people who play poker to gamble in your room? Is everyone in your playerpool a cardrunner that uses PioSolver on every hand they take a note on? It could be that you're so risk averse and woeful in nature that you're blocking yourself from playing better (by having chips to wager on turns and rivers is what I'm gettin at here ole friend who's actually helped me a lot when I first got into live poker with posting SPR hand planning analysis and other sorts of analysis good for winning)

I'm simply saying this: poker is getting harder.

If you don't agree with that, then your experience is much different than mine.

I highly doubt (although I stand to be corrected) that many people who have played the game for more than 5 years would say otherwise.

And I'm also not saying the game is unbeatable. My game is clearly beatable. It's just not as beatable as before (for the same amount of effort). That makes it harder.

If you think the game is getting easier, or it's going to remain at a constant, my guess is you'd be in the minority.

Gthat'sallI'msaying,nothingmore,nothinglessG

I've only been in live poker for about 2 years. I was able to beat online micro full ring before black friday over ~150k hands. I sucked a lot back then & from playing online after BF, I certainly realized those games were much, much tougher. Right now, my perception of live poker is like this: Anything under a 2/5 $1k cap format is really soft. People's pf ranges are bad and post flop mistakes are numerous. The "good" average player still has a weak pf range but is more adpet post, making 1k cap games a bit tougher. I don't play 5/T, but hear those games can have up to half the table be winning regs & the rest are rec players. I think that the game will get tougher, but I think experience is the greatest learning tool and the average rec player who puts in ~200 hrs/ year will never see enough hands in their lifetime to be anywhere close to "solid." Your HH alone prove how bad some players still are.

It really depends on your experience on how you're going to view this.

I've played exactly 0 hands of on-line poker, so I don't have a difficult background to come from and just jumped directly into lol live pokr. So anything that doesn't involve a guy with TP not stacking off when I flop a set (like it was before) is more difficult game conditions for me, whereas it won't be for someone who is coming from on-line.

All's I'm saying is come back in 5 years when you are at your 7 year mark, and ask yourself if the live game you are playing in is the same or more difficult. It still might be far easier than the on-line game you played. But it will most likely have gotten tougher overall (still beatable, but tougher).

I'm really not sure how many hours the average player puts in in my room. I play about ~550 hours a year playing more-or-less once-a-week + a few other sessions. A few years ago, our room ran a promotion where the players who put in the most hours in a month got into a free roll tourney; I just played my normal once-a-week session and was rather surprised that I cracked the top 30 in hours (just barely, if I recall). Nowadays, I don't think I would; I'm guessing most players in my room log more hours than me (I have no way of confirming that, it is just an educated guess), and that experience is showing in their play.

ETA: Hopefully this isn't sidetracking the thread. I don't believe it is since all of this is integral to winrates.

Gjustoneman'sexperienceG

There is no doubt that poker is getting tougher. Its a fact. You cant just wait for an overpair and double up. You have to mix your game up. Use peoples tendencies against them. Exploit their weaknesses. Rep the hand that they are afraid of. Let them value own themselves when you know you are ahead, instead of just making a big raise and watching them stack off lite like used to work.

To win as much as you used to, you have to do all the things that other people aren't doing.

Re: poker getting tougher... I'm wondering how much all of this follows the economy at large. I feel like the game is financed by the biggest whales, which not only feed the best players, but also keep the next tier fish from losing so much that they're forced to stop playing. Remove the whales, the other fish come less often, the game starts to dry up a bit... Also, there's all the kids in college or just graduated; if they're struggling to find a job with any kind of income, they may turn to poker - and anybody trying to play poker as a source of income, even if they're not so great, will dry out the game... I'm guessing if we see a big economic boom that more whales will return to the tables, the other fish will follow in their track, and broke college kids trying to pay rent will find something else to do...

Poker is getting tougher but that's really not a problem as long as you're getting better too. I started playing like 9 years ago and made a liveable but unspectacular hourly back then playing an ultra nit style. The field of players has gotten a lot better, but I've made larger gains than the collective field, so I make a higher hourly now. They're gonna keep getting better but I see no reason why I can't keep gaining on the field.

IMO, the profit comes in the difference in skill level. The bigger the gap in skill level, the bigger the profit. But most games also have a ceiling in skill level, either due to the structure of the game (ex. tic-tac-toe) or due to most of us are just mere humans (ex. I've definitely getting worse in hockey, partly as a result of age, and I will definitely not be getting any better even with my wealth of experience). It's pretty easy to move from a whale to a fish, and from a fish to a ~breakevenish player in poker, and that obliterates a lot of the profit right there. I'm not necessarily going to argue a hard strategy ceiling (like in tic-tac-toe), but it's going to take a heckuva lotta work (for some of us, maybe most of us, work that we are incapable of accomplishing) for us mere mortals to crush at the same rates as conditions move in that direction.

It sounds like you are an exception to this. I'd be curious as to your sample size hours over the 9 years that illustrate this?

GcluelessNLnoobG

I can think of a few reasons:

1. Your ability to remain above the field might be capped by the fact there's a learning ceiling in the game. That ceiling is represented by GTO and as we know if eveyrone played that way, you might as well be playing tic tac toe. Obviously, we are ways off having live poker pools play a GTO style, but as I see the evolution of the game so far, I can think of the ways it will evolve in the future and in my mind it's one step closer to it.

2. The casino raising rake means raising prices which cuts to bottom line.

3. We have taken as a given that the main games for live poker are going to remain the same; but as we see from online poker, online operators keep introducing game variants which even if beatable, luck plays a big role. To an extent that's happening with some people moving to PLO right now, but can you imagine a format like spin and go taking hold in a live casino environment?

The short version is nothing's given. I feel pretty good about my skill level right now, but I am also pretty insecure about my future ability to make money off the game. Either way, it's going to require a ton of adjustment and work to keep up.

great input, i'd load up on the PLO stock if i could, it really is a game that is very attractive to losing players; more fun, more action, more variance. the big issue with it is that it plays big, much bigger than nl for the same big blind. in my opinion its inevitable that the biggest whales will eventually move to plo if it's available to them which can easily ''kill'' a given NL market if it's not that big player pool wise.

my 700k population city could not substain a PLO game without drying up the NL in just a matter of weeks, its quite insane to see

I'm seeing that same movement toward PLO in my local pool. All the big time whales love it. When that game starts the NL tables dry up visibly in the smaller rooms as the money moves there. All the home games are going that way too.

One of the things I've seen mentioned about the two games is that calling too often is a bigger leak than folding too often inmost NLHE games, while the reverse is true of a PLO game. Which plays into fishy tendencies of wanting to play every single hand.