Still remember running it up when I was clueless, and thinking I should play 5/10 since I was so good, and losing my entire winnings of $1500 in about an hour.

My first experiences online were 800 person freeroll tourneys in Limit Holdem, that you had to sign up at like 6am, and start playing at 8am.

Hope all is well with you! I'll probably be out in Vegas this summer for the first time in 13 years.

I’m more than a bit late on this thread but this looks like a cool book and I’d like to check it out at some point

I did want to say that i disagreed with the take regarding dealers’ talking. I was a hardcore player during the poker boom, but now am the type that will head to a casino occasionally on a weekend and drink a bit or more and play some cards (low and occasionally mid-limit games). I’ll try to win and still think I’m a winning player, but I’m more concerned with having fun than trying to play 100% optimal poker.

I absolutely prefer talkative lively games and a good dealer who is engaged with the players can make a big difference in that regard. I’m not saying it’s required from a dealer, but IMO, it’s a welcome trait for a dealer to have.

I know that my friends who I go to the casino with feel the same way and we’ll often talk about our favorite dealers and it’s the ones who interacted with the players (while dealing fast and controlling the game) that we liked the most. I’m also likely to give higher tips to good dealers who interact with the players because I feel a stronger connection there.

Just my two cents and understand if others don’t feel the same way.

You mean a range of games like Five card stud, Seven card Stud, Omaha, Follow Queens, Anaconda (aka Pass the Trash or F**k Your Neighbor), Chicago, Cincinnati, Souther Cross, or even, "Indian Poker" which is as politically incorrect as it sounds ?

One game that my company developed, by mistake, was High-Low Limit Holdem.

One thing that upsets me is when a player leaves chips on the table for 45 min to 75 min to eat. Sometimes 2 players will get up and eat together. Some rooms allow players to pick up to eat and will put them 1st on the list. I think this is a good idea. Nothing worse than a player gone 45 minutes then comes back and decides they wanted to quit anyway and then just leaves. Flop cash games used to be 10 handed, now most are 9, but with the pandemic, Wynn is taking down dividers and keeping it at 8. This is a mistake. Often there is an average of 1-2 players walking at any time, so 9 handed is really 8 or 7 handed, and now 8 handed becomes 6 or 7 handed. Cash games 10 handed would be nice while tournament 9 handed is fine since all players need to be seated at a tournament or be blinded off.
Also, years ago, you used to be able to play over a walking person's stack with a clear box. But now they don't seem to allow that anymore. That would be nice too.

^ Nit spotted

What we have here is an assertion contrary to fact. Poker may or may not be dying - my vote is 'no' - but it's irrelevant. It's clear that the least dead portion is NLH. That's not debatable. There are at leaqst 5 NLH games for every one non-NLH game. If all these other games are so great and dynamic and interesting, that would be reversed.

Any theory of the goings on in a card room must conform to the observation that NLH is what's succeeding.

How do you account for the fact that you could have used the same argument AGAINST NLH thirty years ago.

I account for it by noting that the thing that has made NLH successful is a virtuous cycle of promotion, and that cycle took place in those 30 years. My argument is that within reason any other game *could* be the next NLH, but in order for that to happen, an analogous amount of promotion would have to be done, and that would take a decade or more. PLH or LH might be easier since they're closely related. Since no one is putting in any real effort to promote any other game, NLH will remain the top of the heap for the foreseeable future. This is not something an individual cardroom can control, unless they're willing to go to WSOP ME type lengths to promote something else, which seems unlikely.

In fact as people with experience with older games age out of the player pool, NLH may become even more dominant. At 39 years old I essentially never encounter a casual player younger than me who knows anything about any game other than NLH. Tho other games might as well not exist. These are the people who move up from the dining room table to 1/2.

To be clear, I'm making no argument about the mathematical properties of the various games. I'm merely pointing out that the success or failure of a game has little if anything to do with those properties and everything to do with what is being promoted to the fish, and those promotions are very close to 100% NLH.

fyp, not very many purely "poker-only" operations marketed I can think of off-hand. I expect there are some,in live poker jurisdictions where poker-only stand-alone rooms may thrive.I plead ignorance.

Within the marketing spend specifically allocated to poker gaming, I'd think it is like 98% NLHE and 2% PLO if there are specific breakdowns within the poker category.

Hi Gzesh:

I'm not completely sure, but I think that in Europe the PLO percentage is a little higher. However, no-limit hold 'em is certainly the dominate game. Also, in the book there is a mention as to why the growth potential of PLO is not that high.

Best wishes,
Mason

There may not be much poker-only marketing (there is some in Colorado FWIW - it's really tacky) but there is the "natural" promotions that come from home games, TV broadcasts, watercooler talk etc. which is basically all NLH. The day I hear anyone talking about PLO outside a cardroom will be the first. Normal people think PLO is a bunch of guys in the middle east that blow **** up

So you are not saying that NLH was destined to become the most popular game based on its rules. But rather because of similar reasons as to why Microsoft dominated in spite of products which would have beaten them out under different circumstances.

Got my copy in the mail today. Opened real quick but not read anything.

Hi Everyone:

I'm hopeful that since some of you have the book we can get some discussion going relative to some of the ideas in the book. And I'll start.

One of the important chapters is titled "A Proper Balance of Luck and Skill." This idea has already been addressed in this thread but I want to give an example which all of us should be familiar with. It was the recent heads-up match between Negreanu and Doug Polk.

What was interesting about this was that at the half way point the loser (at that point in time) had the option to keep playing, and if my memory is right Negreanu was down over $700,000 at the half way point but continued to keep playing. Now, even though he was losing that much he did have a number of winning sessions. But suppose he was down by the exact same amount but never had a winning session. The question then is "Would Negreanu had opted to continue playing?"

Of course, we don't know the answer. But my contention is that he would have been much less likely to continue on. Yet a "proper balance of luck and skill" may have allowed Doug to win an additional $400,000 plus.

Notice that according to my book, Cardrooms: Everything Bad and How to Make Them Better; An Analysis of Those Areas Where Poker Rooms Need Improvement this is exactly the way poker is supposed to work in a well functioning poker room.

Best wishes,
Mason

Yes. As long as a product is "good enough" in some sense, it can be marketed effectively. I think that goes for card games too.

I do think NLH has rules that fit the marketing well though. Being big-bet with lots of betting rounds, medium information and a low draw-out rate, it was easy to cast it as a game for manly men who wore boots and Stetsons at the table. A Texan could opine it was a game where you put a man to a decision for all his chips, and there's enough betting rounds he could mean it.

This may also be why NLH has very few women at the table.

A game like NL lowball with fewer betting rounds and weak information would have been a somewhat harder sell, although I think it could have been done with enough effort.

NLH promotion was also helped by the simplicity of the the starting hands. That had a huge impact on getting people into the game.

If you’re just looking at change in popularity rather than absolute popularity, I don’t think that’s true. Over the past 10 years, NLHE has certainly decreased in popularity. Most of the HORSE games have also declined, perhaps faster than NLHE. But there are games that have increased in popularity: possibly PLO High and certainly PLO8, and also definitely more exotic mixed limit games like Badacey and Razzdugi (which didn’t really exist in casino mixes at all 10 years ago AFAIK).

This bothers me a lot as well, but not because I dislike playing shorthanded. It’s because it often leaves people on the waitlist for hours while there are actually unused seats at the table. (This isn’t really nearly as much of an issue when there are many tables of a game being spread, but is you’re waiting for a game with only one or two tables, this can make a huge difference in wait times.)

Hi Nick:

This is addressed in the book and something called the “Short Walking Rule” is proposed which should solve this problem.

Best wishes,
Mason