Obviously, I have a somewhat different take on things. You don't want to encourage the gamblers, you want to encourage me. I'm retired, with more money than sense and finding a fun way to pass the time would lure me to the game.

I last played in the fifties, but when I lost eight dollars, I never played again. (Although I cried so much that the adults gave me my money back, angle shooting at its best...) I'm not really comfortable walking into a casino, I feel a little out of place. Design an easy way to get my money and I into what feels like friendly, happy atmosphere and you will have that grey tsunami of cash that everybody wants to see.

Do you mean the girls get a bracelet or the boys get a bracelet?

You played in the 1950s or when you were in your 50s? BOTH were quite some time ago, weren't they.

I haven't played since the 1950's and I was the only person at the table in that poor part of West Texas that wasn't wearing a real gun. (Even my grandmother carried, lol.) Seems like a million years ago...

buy a dog and a boat. go to a river and set up a trot line. fry up some catfish the next day. die happy in the wild.

i prefer the company of gamblers.

Were any of them wearing onions?

My twist on NLH to bring players back to poker and entice new ones to play:

Add more gambool to the game by creating larger starting sized pots.

Make players that go all-in before the river with the best hand put 5xbb in the next starting pot if their hand holds.

This gives other players an incentive to gamble it up and chase their draws knowing there is a rebate in the next pot if they miss.

Likewise, any player that goes allin before the river without the best hand and makes the best hand at showdown receive 5xbb from the casino jackpot fund and another 5xbb added to the next pot via the jackpot fund.

Set a minimum pot size to qualify for jackpot promo.

With the higher starting pot sizes, recreational players will have more incentive to play less than optimal hands and trash hands making the game looser.

Whether doing it this way or another, I find the key to reinventing NLH has to come primarily preflop by creating more action.

Maybe just ban HUDs?

just start a committee (it took me a few tries to spell that one) to address the issue. cause yapin on your dork site aint gonna make it happen son.

That sounds almost exactly like limit O8 at Red Rock and The Orleans.

This. And sex education. You would eliminate all sorts of badness and weiredness in society. But certain groups would never stand for it.

2 Issues. First is multitabling. Second is the preflop game.

Playing against a multitabler is essentially the same as playing vs a bot. At least at the low-mid stakes and thats where every non-rich person will start playing poker. There really isnt much fun when playing at a table where 6/9 players play all the same basic strategie and never say a word.

Ive said this 7 years ago already. Poker players are first and foremost entertainers, thats why I often reply when people start chatting, eventho I play 20 tables. Its hard and Ill time-out every now and then, but the guy who just had a fun conversation with me while losing to me HU is waaay more likely to play another game, than the guy who just lost to someone who he believes is a bot.

Basically no suggestions here, just complaints.^^

Oh and spin-and-gos seems to cut it. Super fun format for them gamblors. And regs hate it.

What game and stakes have you played the most hours at the last 5 years?

I'm gonna guess 20/40 Limit Hold'em

If that was directed at me its 150-300 mixed games.

The final table at the WSOP made it clear to me that the best tournament players have skills different from cash game players. There really are some big differences when the game is NLH. Namely:

Antes

Amateurs

Shortstacks

Survival

Prize Structure

Do you see why?

Do we see why you say this? Because a tournament specialist won?

A resurgence? Is that really an issue? Every casino in Vegas has a poker room. Every new casino that opens puts in a poker room. Every foreign Casino now has a poker room. What is missing from the poker community that needs a resurgence? Get that idiot Adelman (spelling) to stop blocking online poker and you'll see an online resurgence in the U.S.

David, you lost interest in poker because you don't need the fortune or fame.The money you play for has no meaning. You once personally told me and everyone else on this forum at the time that the only reason to play poker was to make money. You were a bit premature then because now besides money one can get very famous from successful poker playing. But that aside for most of us the only reason to play was to make money. And because poker is a game of logic it is actually boring when played correctly. I know I play Sklansky/Malmuth poker and it is boring but effective poker. Anyway I started a blog here also before I saw yours. If you are going to post I might just abandon mine and stick with you. Listening to you always did me fine in the past. I'll be in Vegas over Christmas and New Years. Hope to see you.

Vince Lepore, I used Marston because when I started posting again Matt was not to keen about my returning to 2 + 2.

A variation of Holdem with very deep stacks, and a huge ante. Also another street would be interesting (6 cards on the board), because it would tend to improve drawing hands, and make bluffing more profitable.

My ideas to spice up poker to make it more fun for amateurs has always left out the variation that has always been the most popular in home games, at least up to recently. Hi Lo Split with a Declare. There are many variations and two different ways to declare. But I never mentioned them because they all have one drawback. Its very easy to collude. Always declare the opposite way as your partner.

But perhaps I was wrong to think this way, at least as far as internet poker is concerned. If the site has good collusion detection, including a human expert, the danger might not be as high as I feared. Some of you may resist this idea because you have to learn a new game. But if it catches on and you do learn it, you will all come to love me for thinking of it.

I started playing in 2007 and at my worst, pertaining to skill level, I loved Stud 8ob. I felt more at easy with the limited betting and intrigued by some cards actually being face up and known to all. Throw in that players will drag halves and quarters of the pot, and it was awesome.

To this day I still don't enjoy NLHE, but often it's all I can find in Vegas with a recreational bankroll.

I also think to fix poker outside of legislation, we need to invest more into the player pool. We, as a "regular" community are not putting anything in, so we are getting nothing out. People play 10+ tables online (if we capped table max to 4, they would be forced to play NL100+ instead of clogging up NL25-NL50) or in a live setting we have headphones large enough to mute a jetliner and talk ENTIRELY too much advanced strategy at the table.

We need to have conversation related to anything other than GTO at the table. Also casinos need to bite the bullet and offer times to learn other games (like they do with pit games). Maybe from 11:30-12:30 or 5:00-6:00 they will have a table where they will deal and teach the rules of a different mixed game. This allowing them to actually run 5/10 and 10/20 HORSE.

Much less often players are complete novice to NLHE. Why wouldn't we want to bring back mixed games where the edge returns, even against current "regs"?

This all coming from someone who payed for (community) college playing Stud 8 on PokerStars before the Chinese players showed up in colluded droves and the US government dropped the hammer.

If your goal was to make poker more fun you should not have written any books. Once you and your partner started producing poker books and others followed, poker for fun was doomed. Poker is now becoming more and more like chess in that the general population will find it less and less fun to play. No limit holdem sucks to play when you have to play correctly.. Does the word "grind" help to understand what I am getting on about. Moneymaker's win at the WSOP handed the poker world a devastating blow by popularizing no limit. The general public treated poker as a gambling game before that. Gambling is fun. Once you wised them up and showed the world that poker is a game of logic you ****ed it up.