Quote:
Originally Posted by DalTXColtsFan
Nick, I'm also curious as to why you'd prefer NOT to play with a kill.
Because the way the kill is structured is essentially a penalty on people who play well; i.e. playing hands that are likely to scoop. Whenever you scoop, you are forced to put much of what you won back into the pot. Actually winning money often then depends on being about to win the pots where you post a kill with a random hand.
Additionally, making more people put money in the pot preflop increases the variance in the game for everyone, especially since hands run so close in equity that multiple people are often forced (correctly) put a lot of money into the pot preflop. The preflop pots become very large relative to the post-flop betting, which I believe reduces the skill in the game overall (especially because the large preflop pot itself was essentially forced by pot odds, not by good or bad plays).
There is one case in which having a kill can make the game more profitable, and that is if people play too tight preflop, and are incorrectly folding their kill to a raise (or incorrectly folding their BB in kill pots). If you can consistently isolate field opponents with a lot of dead money in the pot, you can make a decent profit without waiting for premium hands.
Finally, having a kill creates a lot of incentive for angle shooting. Every live O8 game I play in at some point involves an argument over people forgetting to post the kill, moving out of the blinds in kill pots, leaving the game when they win a kill pot to dodge the kill, etc. O8 players are already miserable enough that you don't need to give them additional things bicker over.