I'm still trying to figure out what the best option is for me. I play 1/2 NL and I win at both casinos and underground games. Is it worth it to take a 2 hour bus ride(costs $15 round trip) to the casino to play NL with a max $5 rake or drive 30 minutes to an underground spot with a max $15 rake but the games are wild and loose and still quite profitable despite the high rake. Great thing about the underground game is that I can go home a lot faster if I happen to bust early but I feel that this high rake is really cutting into my winrate. What do you think? Thanks.

First of all, you don't "bust" in a cash game. You can always reload.

That said, winning 10bb/hr is "crushing" the game, I don't know how you can overcome the extra rake playing in the local game. If you can drive 30 minutes, you should be able to drive the longer distance. No need to take the bus.

I should have been more specific. I only bring 2 full buyins with me. So if I lose both buyins, I "busted". I prefer taking the bus to the casino because I hate driving long distances, wasting gas and paying tolls and I can sleep on the bus.
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Go to the casino. An additional $10/hand in max rake is going to eat up way more than $15 roundtrip bus fare, never mind the probability of the game getting raided, times what you'd lose if that were to happen.

From the details, I'm guessing you're in NYC. In that case, there are underground games that offer much better than 10% to $15. I won't advertise here (nor do I care to anyway, because they're not my games), but seek and you shall find.

Could be in Texas. The land where "Texas" Holdem is still illegal.

OP has to consider what his time is worth. If he has a full time job a 4 hour round trip might be difficult. If he is unemployed it's a different story. Try move up stakes if you are going to play local. The 2/5 and 5/5 games around here have a 10% rake up to $15 and I can attest they are beatable primarily due to the many bad players in the games.

What's the percentage they're taking at the underground game? If it's 10%, max $15, then it's horrible, because you're getting the max rake taken out on even a $150 pot. I mean, a typical 1/2 NL pot raised to $12 with 4 callers means you're at $6 minimum getting raked before you even see a flop.

Go to the casino unless it's really a strain to travel two hours.

NYC or Northern NJ is a reasonable guess as to where this guy is from.

Yes, your range is correct. I'm from NYC. The underground game rakes 10% up to $15. I do have a full time job so my only chance to play in the casinos is during the weekends. Obviously it is more equitable to play in the casinos but sometimes it can be a strain travelling 2 hours each way . But I do get free $45 slot play for riding the buses which I use to play video poker(Jacks or better)

I'd suggest taking the bus to AC and see if you can get a comped/discounted/shared hotel room so you can play 2 days for one day of PITA bus riding. That's what I used to do when living in DC. Eventually I could easily get 2 free hotel nights, even on the weekends if I booked early enough, although you are less likely to get that playing 1/2.

What's the safety like at these underground games?

Do they ever get robbed?

I would go to the casino given your proximity. Closest Casino to me is almost 5 hours for any good poker. Thankfully there is a large selection of underground games here. Most are pretty solid and some are just rediculous spewfests. It's amazing what some of these cats will vomit their chips up with.

But again, I would go to the casino as a place to see some new faces, more consistent action and a lower rake.

As to armed robbers and that kind of thing, the risk is surprisingly low. In my experience, they're more likely to get raided by the cops (which is the same thing, effectively; they come in with guns, pocket everyone's money, and cut the hosts loose without charges on the implied condition that they don't try to claim the seized property).

That said, getting raided by Vice is a relatively low risk. Once every two or three years, they seem to make a concerted effort to raid a bunch of games, and then you don't hear from them for a while. My best guess is that they're letting the games recover from the previous raids so that there will be more money to steal. I'm not kidding. That's how it works. It's not like they don't know who is organizing the games, and I'm sure OP can attest to how easy it is to get into one. They're not enforcing the law; they're shaking the games down, mostly at the expense of the players.

But even if the police are a small risk, these games do get robbed all night by the dealers. Seriously, OP, next time you're at one of these underground games, watch the dealer carefully. Any game that is overtly taking 10% to $15 obviously doesn't care much about its players or the longevity of the game. On top of the egregious rake, you may find that the dealer is scooping chips hand over fist, and that it's coming out to more than 10% and/or more than $15 per pot. This is especially risky if they're taking the rake unprofessionally (e.g., putting it in a rack or dropping as they go, rather than stacking it openly and dropping/racking it at the end of a hand, or surreptitiously "making change" and grabbing rake in one motion).

On top of that, there's no licensing process for dealers (obviously) and some of them earn tips only with no base wage, so you're taking a much greater risk of getting a dealer who's crooked in some way or another than you would be at a "square joint."

There are honest games out there, for sure. Bounce around to different spots, and you will probably find one, and then your only risk will be the small chance of a robbery/raid. But in such a game, the organizers tend to be conscientious enough that they wouldn't be taking 10% to $15 from a $1/$2 game.

I mean this in the nicest way, but is there a topic in which you do not blame the government for being a bunch of crooks, or do you just make the most of every opportunity you find on these boards?

Last month you were posting in SSLHE about whether 2/4 LHE was beatable. Forgive me for assuming that whatever underground games you have been playing are well below the radar of both cops and robbers.

I'm not talking about the government in general. I'm talking about the NYPD, and more specifically about their Vice Squad.

I play $4/$4 limit sometimes right now (that's what the previous thread was about) because that's what's available where I live. The nearest legal game bigger than that is over 2 hours away. The games I was playing in NYC were mostly $0.50/$1 through $1/$3 NLHE, and I was friends with several of the hosts—still am, with some of them. I was also a semi-house player (staked 50% by the house) and a dealer for a short time. These guys hosted some regular $2/$5 and $5/$5 games throughout NYC, as well as occasional bigger games than that ($10/$25 was the biggest game I'd heard of in the city).

The stories about the Vice raids? That was directly from my friend, one of the organizers, who was present and got arrested when they raided one of their Friday night games, where there was at least $15K or $20K on the tables. They cut all of the hosts loose, despite having busted them red-handed on what would have been felony promoting gambling charges, if they'd bothered to charge anyone. But they didn't. They took the cash, chips, and cards, and left the organizers their tables. No one was charged. Everything was business as usual by midweek.

They just sent the guys home and kept everything, letting them go back to running their games. My friend told me that this was how it usually went down when they got busted, which has happened to him a few times. They spend the night or the weekend in a holding cell but otherwise face no punishment, and the players' money all gets seized and spent on fancy new **** for the police department. No one has tested these waters yet, but smart money is on the state reserving the right to press charges if they try to come claim their seized property.

So yeah, a bunch of crooks is about right. The games may as well have been robbed by a street gang.

I didn't know you lived in NYC. Apologies. I thought you were talking about sub-dollar underground games in NH.

I have zero experience in underground games aside from reading about how Doyle Brunson used to get robbed all the time.

No worries. I know I talk a lot and can come off a certain way. But yeah, I played and otherwise participated in underground NYC poker for a couple years.

Actually, I've been to a $1/$2 NLHE underground game in NH as well. It totally rubbed me the wrong way (stupid mandatory Mississippi straddle, and too many people playing "on the finger"), so I've never returned, but it's still being hosted regularly as far as I know. There are underground games here, just nowhere near as many as in NYC, and I haven't heard of anything bigger than $2/$5.

I live in NYC and participated in underground poker for a lot more than a couple of years. The NYPD aren't crooks nor are they robbing anyone when they raid these games. They're doing their jobs, and they're not pocketing the money. Most raids result in arrests and charges.

Many raids occur on Friday nights, but not all. Friday happens to be the obvious day when the crowd will be the largest and there might conceivably be the most workers/owners present to charge. While it is a nice side benefit to raid on a Friday night because the money in the room might be deeper, this is pretty irrelevant, since netting $15k once every couple of months is not a windfall for the world's most powerful police department that has 35,000 members.

It's not a windfall, no, but it is low-hanging fruit. When else are they going to be able to shake $15K out of a bunch of nobodies with too little security for the amounts of money they're dealing with? And at the end of the day, whose money is that? It's the players' money, and they're not committing any crimes. Gambling may be "unlawful" in NYC, but there's no specific crime/punishment statute that criminalizes participating in gambling, just profiting from it.

Anyway, all I've shared is my experience. Obviously, I can't speak for every underground game in the city (probably no one can), so I wouldn't be surprised if you heard one thing and I heard another. What I do know is that most of the guys I knew who got swept up in raids went right ahead and kept organizing games as if nothing had happened.

You are correct that the money from the players is collected despite their doing nothing criminal. This is a good point.

Every experience is different. I do not doubt your friend is being accurate, and this is not the first time I have heard of a raid scenario playing out that way.

Smaller clubs usually immediately shut down shop, or move locations. Bigger places with owners that don't give a **** definitely do re-open ASAP, though.

The guys I knew ran a lot of their games out of apartments, usually for anywhere from a month to several months at a time. Then they'd move on to the next spot. After a while they also had arrangements to run games in local bars and other locations of that nature, often on a seldom-used second or third floor. (I don't think that lasted long, as the bars' demands—e.g., $900 in sales over the night or the organizers make up the difference—were just too much to produce.)

So, when these guys got busted, they'd just relocate their somewhat roving game to a new location.

Always pick the casino. It's the safest environment.

No idiots? How are you supposed to make any kind of money in a raked underground $10/$20 game with no idiots in it?

Plenty of hoodies and headphones down here in our games. Bunch of flush drawing spewtards. Sitting in a spewfest of a game last night when the game girl calls it. "Wow. It's like internet poker in here. Everyone's just shoving all in."