Can I assume that his 1/2 pot bet was all-in? I mean, it should be assumed, but...

Larry, you are correct.
i'm not sure why i wrote "bets" instead of "shoves".

quick question guys -

how standard is 10% rake capped @ $10 in a "non-standard" 1/2 home game?

Depends where.

Where I live a "standard" cap in those types of home games is ~ $50 (which is just another reason why I wouldn't play in any).

10% capped at $5 is common. $10 is too much for 1/2, in my opinion. Very tough to beat a 10% vig on pots up to $100.

Also, no flop, no drop makes it more palatable, but that is not always the case.

You mean the rake is capped at $50? That is insane.

"Criminal" is the word you wanted, I believe.

Wow, 5 BB as a cap? that's pretty bad. I don't think the "no flop" rule would make it better.

5% w/ $5 cap is more standard in casinos, right?

Nope- 10% up to $4-$6 are the common rakes in the PA/NJ/DE market right now- some of that may be, or may not be, a BBJ drop. Not too many that I've heard of have a "no flop, no drop" rule either.

I'm not familiar enough with the time charge games to say for sure, but I believe it might be around $5-6 per half hour.

10% with $5 cap plus jackpot drop is standard in Florida cardroom 1/2NL. No flop no drop is room-dependent.

Doesn't Florida have some strange rule about a cap on pot-size (capping pots to something absurdly small), or am I completely off-base?

They used to, but they got rid of those. A long time ago, the $0.25/$0.50 limit games at the dogtracks (or was it $0.50/$1?) had a $10 pot max.

yeah I remember reading something ridiculous about how the 5/10 games down there were capped @ $100/pot

Back in the Stone Age, I believe there was a $10 cap on pot size, but this was way before I ever entered a Florida card room.

Then we entered the Bronze Age: $100 maximum buy-in for any game. 1/2 NL became fairly playable. Rooms also ran 2/5 and 5/10 (snicker), and those games tended to be fold-or-shove preflop and be prepared to rebuy several times.

July 1st started the Golden Age of Poker in Florida. Florida law no longer has any restriction on buy-ins or pot size for parimutuel poker. Each room sets its own limits, which so far seem to be pretty much in line with LV limits (typically 40-50BB min, 100-150BB max).

Alas, Florida law regarding home games is still back in the Stone Age. Down here, we are allowed to play what they call a "penny-ante" game:

• No pots larger than $10.
• No admission fee or rake is permitted.
• Games must be conducted in a private residence.
• Games may not be advertised in advance.
• No players under 18.
• Debts incurred in a penny-ante game are not legally enforceable.

I don't have a problem with most of these rules. The two big sticklers for me are the $10 pot limit and the vague restriction on advertising in advance. The pot limit is ridiculous for even the smallest stakes, and because of the vague wording of the law, an email to my buddies saying "poker at my place tomorrow" could be considered advance advertisement.

Of course, the reality is that there are home games all over the state that violate the letter of the law and never have a problem. Busting small stakes home games is simply not a priority for most local police down here. Still, it would be nice to update the law and make these social home games legal.

FMP

I'm not going to have many opportunities to play live poker in the next 2-3 weeks due to personal circumstances. After basically decimating my roll on Stars, I decided to take a step back, change things around, and start rebuilding my confidence in my online game.

I put some money on FTP and played my first session of 5NL Rush Poker tonight. I've played several hours of play money Rush Poker and done well, but play money poker is like kissing your sister. I wanted to try it for real.

At the end of my 939 hand session, I had crushed it for a whopping 32.5bb/100. (Inb4 "sample size.") This includes losing a couple of large pots when I was way ahead and got rivered, and a long (~200 hand) super-dead streak where I couldn't catch a hand or win a pot to save my life. FWIW, in 3.5 hours I played the equivalent of about 30 hours of live poker - holy crapadewski!

Fun and profitable! I think I know what I'll be doing between now and my next live home game.

I haven't tried Rush yet. Besides the number of hands you can play, how does it influence your game? Do you tend to play tighter? Does everyone else?

In general, people at 5NL Rush seemed to play a little tighter than regular FR 5NL. That said, there are still idiots (like the 70-100bb preflop shoves and the guy who called off his stack with two overs and a backdoor FD against my TPTK. He got there on the river, of course.)

LP aggression in unopened pots is very profitable. I stole a ton of blinds, and 3betting from the blinds is good too. When someone plays back, give up and fold unless you have a hand. Basically ABC poker with a little more LP aggression, and be prepared for some variance when you run into the guys who will shove ATs/77+ pre.

Rush poker no so good to Schmendy tonight. Over about 1400 hands, I basically gave back everything I won in my previous session and then some.

FWIW, I ran horribly. All in with an underset 3 times, I had QQ a ridiculous number of times and either got the blinds or lost a race with AK. I suffered several ridiculous coolers for big pots like KQ vs Q4 on a QQxx4 board, and also FPS'ed myself into losing a number of pots that got much larger than they should have.

Whine-cry-bad-beat-story etc., you know the drill. As I said in my original post, there are a lot of really bad players at this level so I expect a ton of variance.

The good thing about this session is that I intentionally played way too long to work on my "tired tilt" problem. Several times I caught myself getting stupid, playing dumb hands, and suffering from FPS ("why won't these idiots fold middle pair when my bets are telling them they're beaten?!?"). Each time I noticed it, I stopped, took a breather, and put myself back on the TAG wagon. By the end of the session, I'm exhausted but my play was fairly decent for the last hour or so.

It's a small investment of time & money to fix one of my biggest live-game leaks.

It is tough to maintain discipline when you are playing in a virtual vacuum. Playing live there is more to do than online, so easier to focus on something other than what a donkey you are. It seems to me this is one reason the asperger types tend to do so well online. They can have an unrelenting focus.

IANAP(sychiatrist)

ummmmm... can we vote on that?

this does not seem to match this:

either people are generally too positionally aggro (reraise the bastards) or not enough (steal blinds, because people will have to give you credit).

I've never tried Rush, but I thought the idea was that you never play more than a hand or two against the same people, so you're not getting reads on individual players. Therefore tailoring your 3b to the blind theives isn't going to happen.

I would think most people would have more trouble concentrating live, because it takes so stupid long to play a hand, you can only do one at a time (if you're not kurt), and there's so much else to do.

Online, you can add tables until you are playing poker with ~100% of your attention. I don't know about you, but that makes it MUCH easier for me to focus on the actual poker action.

Live, I'll take naps during hands, or get into intense debates about the diversity of arsenate-tolerant microbes in mono lake...

I can understand your position if you are mainly focused on the cards, stacks, betting action, etc, which are the elements of online play.

But in live play there is so much else to watch. Mannerisms, facial expressions, anything spoken, what people do when they are not in a hand.

Or, if there is not anything going on, just have a conversation with someone at the table. At least it can help take you off tilt if you just made a really bad play.

No doubt different players need and value different things.

Most players seem to be too aggro in position, so 3betting from the blinds works a lot. However, many players (often the same ones) are also very passive from the blinds, so IP aggression also works. I think it's part of the whole Rush Poker dynamic, where it's easier to just move on to the next hand when somebody says, "I have something" and you don't.

However, even at 5NL, there are players who 3bet light and squeeze. Don't get me wrong - they're not all complete idiots.

True to some extent, but during a long session you see the same players returning to your table time and again. After a couple hundred hands, I get simple reads like "evgeniy6969 raises an unopened pot every time and always c-bets." It might only be a read from seeing him do this 3-4 times over 150 hands, but it's not quite a vacuum.

And I don't use a HUD, so those players probably have even better info than I do.