I would like to see a $20 bomb pot every hand. A timed rake would get rid of the omc's but they are donors so we don't actually want that. If I owned a poker club I'd kick out all the winners; you know, like pokerstars.

PokerStars kicks out winners?

And what live club does this?

Underground

What's the legal status of these games? Are they safe and legit?

Or are they like the home games here in Vancouver?

Are the 2/5 and 5/T games at the Villa or 2/5 at Parq nothing like Brad Owen's and Andrew Neeme's vlogs look like?

I've been watching a bunch of poker vlogs on YouTube. Check them out for yourself.

Does the action not seem drastically looser? Do you see action like that in Vancouver, even at 1/3?

I haven't seen action like that in Vancouver in at least 4 years, especially at 2/5 and up. One possible reason for this: Vancouver's action players don't want to wait 2+ hours for a seat at the table, so they do all the poker in home games, which don't strike me as trustworthy.

I don't see that much action at 1/3, I assumed it was due to the amount of old nits who play poker at 1/3.

I've never played 2/5 or above and I see less old nits so I thought there'd be more action players, espicially ones with money to burn lol

Vancouver, I think, is not an action city for casino poker. Lots of causes:

• OMCs
• TAG grinders who aren't welcome in home games
• Action players only going to home games
• Recreational players being repulsed by multi-hour wait times
• The closure of many poker rooms, increasing average commute times, meaning only the more serious players make the drive.

Good points, the OMC part is extremely annoying. Espicially at villa where it's filled with old men and having their Ipads out and stuff.

Honestly I don't see many good TAGs at 1/3. Usually they're weak passives or nits.

The biggest thing that is killing live poker is rake. The rake is wayy too high compared to other cities and if they increase it again post pandemic I might as well just play online PLO and live poker in other cities.

I'm not sure that the rake scares the recreational players away. I bet most of them don't even know what the rake % or structure even is. But they sure as hell know that they don't want to wait 3 hours for a seat.

oh, it freakin sucks worse in saskatoon! it's always the preppy douche crowd. You know the doug polk all-stars. You know they have an idea how to get it in good, and are awesome to slowroll.

A timed rake would force omc's to play different or lose more but you know the casino's would take the change as an opportunity to raise rake higher. Real poker shouldn't be under the auspices of the BCLC and casino's shouldn't be allowed to offer it. Private clubs should open; even restaurants should be able to put a couple tables in their private dining rooms for instance.

This seems unlikely as the poker room has expanded 3 or 4 times in the 2.5 years that Parq was open. Hopefully they're done with raising the rake for awhile, it basically tripled in the last 5 years for Omaha, and nearly doubled for Hold'em.

What killed poker in Van more than anything else by far was the lack of tables and long wait lists. This keeps most fish out of the games.

If Parq opened with 20 tables, games wouldve been lit. And yes I know all the reasons it didn't.

Opening with only 6 tables, they should've just opened as a higher stakes only room. 5/5 with a 300 min buy in would make 6 tables acceptable. When the table games all around mostly have 25$ min bets, offering 1/3 games seems absurd. A game where you can sit at a table folding for $4 a round is something that should've been left behind a long time ago in a city like Vancouver.

If I'm understanding correctly, your idea to improve the poker conditions is to eliminate the low stake game? All that will do is price out a huge percentage of the typical player pool / make them go broke faster, no?

Lack of tables is definitely an issue.

GcluelesspokerconditionsnoobG

If the tables are so limited, then yes. There's more than enough players willing to play a bit higher to make it work. Those players who sit with $100 while watching movies on their iPads and playing like nits are a cancer to the games in so many ways.

Those players would gladly play .5/1 if it was offered. They'll play whatever the smallest game available is. Some would play a bit of 5/5 if it was smallest game offered. But their presence filling up the tables and wait lists and creating a miserable atmosphere is a big reason we don't have better and bigger games.

The rake went up a bunch of times. The stakes should've gone up also.

Those reasons, such as the higher profitability of other casino games, guarantee the continued decline of poker in Vancouver. The only way to reverse the decline is, I think, to have government change laws & regulations so that a private business can open up a poker room... and the pandemic has to end.

Such a change would create a profitable business or several, make the poker community deliriously happy, cut down on sketchy home games, and free up space and staff in casinos.

Combine all those benefits and we have the government's ~5396th highest priority right now. This means we can count on going to the grand opening of the Vancouver Poker Room by the 25th century.

But which players would be priced out? Which players would go broke faster?

Probably the players who:

• buy in for 35BBs then
• fold 92% of hands pre-flop
• while binge watching 2 seasons of Game of Thrones during a 15-hour "poker" session
• while frequently failing to realize it's their turn and slowing down the game.

Given these players' impact on the table atmosphere, waiting lists, hands/hour, and the Vancouver poker scene generally, I want them priced out. If they do play, I want higher stakes to make them go broke faster. The seat should go to someone who values it more and contributes more to the poker scene.

Given the waiting lists vs tables in this city, the number of games running would not be greatly affected by a decrease in demand, i.e. "a huge percentage of the typical player pool" not playing any more.

And, perhaps this is motivated reasoning masquerading as benevolence, but I think such players would likely find more happiness doing something else. They obviously can't be that fascinated by the game of poker. The multi-tasking means they can't really enjoy their shows. So, if they don't play poker, aren't the chances high they'll find something better to do?

Make it a more gambly game by taking preflop out of it; make every table have a $20 bomb pot every hand. Everyone gets to see the flop and the pot is always a minimum $180 or so; fun, fun, fun. Get rid of the $600 max bet too. This will make the rake way more affordable and draw in gamblers because the games will get huge.

Check this out. Really, watch the whole thing if you have time. If you don't, start at 12:04, then watch the next two hands.

How often has anything anything like this happened in Vancouver?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAYt_Z9eYpE

I mean, I get what you're saying, but for the most part I've made all my money off of people who play a $200 stack really poorly (and I basically do this by outnitting the nits); very little (if any) of my money comes from deepstack action games. Eliminating those people from the pool eliminates a huge percentage of the profit, imo. But that's my viewpoint based on where I think my profit comes from.

And yeah, having a bunch of people at the table buried in their iPads ain't the greatest environment, but it is what it is, and I don't think eliminating the low stakes changes that. FWIW, I'm always the biggest nit at the table, but I've never had an earbud in / play on my phone; as long as you're social / not a complete *******, I think the lowstakes environments can be ok. If anything, I'd lobby to ban devices from tables before I'd eliminate lowstakes altogether.

I know the last time our rake went up (from $7 to $8), at least they increased the maximum BI (from $300 to $400), although even that doesn't make a big difference (as most still prefer to BI for far less). The real culprit is lack of tables, which limits stakes / games / tourneys / etc. and just really handcuffs fostering a great poker environment.

GimoG

Are Vancouver home games not safe & legit any more?

We must have radically different predictions as to what kind of players would replace the 30BB Netflix-watching short stackers as well as a completely different style of play in deepstack action games.


Why do you treat the movie-based poker tables as something totally unchangeable?

Are you saying that a $500+ minimum buy-in would have no impact on either the styles of play or the player pools?


Whoops, so you do think higher minimum stakes would change the scene?


Yup. But since we're unlikely to get more tables any time soon, the best to save Vancouver's poker scene is to raise the stakes.

Alls I'm saying is that (imo) the vast majority of the $$$ in poker is provided by the huge percentage of players who are fine playing at a small stakes table and dribbling off their poker recreational money over long periods of time (willing to lose it thanks to getting decent entertainment bang for their buck). Most of these players would not be cool playing a much higher game where their recreational money they are cool losing to poker could be gone over 2 bad sessions.

Gnothatin',justsayin'G

No, IMO those players are keeping the real money out of the games, in a city where fish see a wait list 30 people long by 6pm and 100 people long on weekends and thus don't bother playing poker.

They don't offer $3 blackjack or $2 roulette either. 1/3 nl is too small of a game. Tight players can occupy a seat barely putting $10/hour into the pot sometimes. 2/5 with a 200 min should have replaced it by now at least.