Ameristar/BH was forced to close all table games a couple of weeks ago. But the 30/60 LHE game has only run a handful of times during the time when the poker room reopened. The 1/3 and 2/5 games had been pretty steady though (at least according to Bravo, I’ve not been since March).

So not much has been lost here even with the recent closure. Hopefully some of the bigger fish will save up enough money during this hiatus to continue their donations...

I'm working really hard at the day job for you!

I’m looking forward to spending your Xmas bonus on hookers and blow

who is MountainsPLZ? The Oregonian?

30/60 still running occasionally at Ameristar / BH sounds great unless it was only during reopen.

I'm optimistic the California LHE games return to safe indoor by LAPC / MLk 2021 at Commerce.

I've never played at Bike or Ameristar but hopefully I'll get a chance in 2021 now that vaccine being released soon

I'm pretty sure you're on the right track

if i add a space to my guess am i closer?

It would be difficult to be any closer

You guys think the 30-50 game will survive the unlimited wagering at ameristar?

this was discussed already in this thread if you look back a bit, but i think the best you can hope for is to have it run on weekends, tho it might take some time to die off

I think the worst thing to ever happen to poker is Rounders, followed by Moneymaker. It made all the new players think that NL was the only form of poker worth playing. ****ing "Cadillac of poker" my ass.

It just has so many issues. It kills the fish way to fast. It's boring to play well in super loose games because you get rewarded too much by nitting it up. And it's rep as an "action game" is totally oversold. You have to play so carefully with value hands. Raising marginally for value is suicide. It's basically either you grind out small pots with pressure and bluffs, or you cooler someone for a big pot. Feast or famine. Rarely do you see two top-ish pairs battle it out with thin value raises like in LHE.

And the average pot sizes are a pittance. Most hands end preflop or on the flop. You spend most of the time watching the dealer shuffle cards. Very few showdowns. People take way to long to make decisions, slowing the action down. Pointy elbows, would not bang.

Old man yelling at cloud rant over.

(I still love rounders as a film)

I agree as well. Luckily the LHE action (and mixed limit) has never died at CAZ.

NLHE sucks but this isn't true. In a loose game you get rewarded for playing a lot of hands. The problem is you also get rewarded for playing aggressively preflop, which eventually makes loose games not loose games unless all the pros in the game implicitly collude and keep the preflop action passive. It's just a really really stupid game where bad rec players can never ever win. And in many cases it just turns them off poker which means they'll never discover the greatest game ever played, yes limit texas hold'em. It's no coincidence that the healthiest poker economies are in areas where NL isn't legal.

By one metric (number of entries in the WSOP main event) the poker economy grew 24-fold between 1998 (the release of rounders) and 2019 (the last pre-covid live ME).

And by that same metric, I shouldn't blame Rounders; the WSOP ME was growing steadily from year to year both before and after the film's release. It was after Moneymaker's win that WSOP attendance blew up.

As for the game itself, yes, NLHE sucks. The two-blind structure calls for tight play; the game needs at least a third blind or an ante, preferably both, to open up correct playing ranges. Without these, the cost of not playing is too low.

Games with buy-in caps slow the rate at which the bad players go broke, and games with buy-in caps are the standard.

As for pot size, think of this: the best players can hope for 2 to 3 big bets/100 hands as a win rate. Good NLHE players can pull more than 10 big blinds per hundred. If we renormalize to big blinds, the LHE WR is 4 to 6 bb/100 compared to NLHE's 10bb/100. But of course 50NL is a much bigger game than $0.50-$1 LHE. The smallest stakes of LHE online are rake traps. The smallest stakes of NLHE are not.

Fold equity in LHE is a joke, and so bluffing becomes difficult or impossible. When your river bet is ten percent of the pot, the villain is spewing money if they do not call with 90% of their range; they only need 9% equity to profitably call. In NLHE, river bets are comparable in size to the pot, and so bluffing and bluff-catching becomes much more important -- which, IMO, makes for a more interesting game.

The bulk of the profit in NLHE comes from getting fold preflop or on the flop and by getting calls on the river. The bulk of the profit in LHE comes from extracting an extra bet from second-best hand on the turn or river.


You've never been to Los Angeles, I take it?

True, what I was alluding to is a game style like my live 1/3 club games, where there's usually 4-5 to every flop, even in 3-bet pots. You can enter a lot of pots getting a great price but then you just pray you bingo the flop and get all the money. You can't profitably draw in these pots because most people know how to bet in relation to pot size. So you just pray you flop big made hands. Everything else gets mucked on the flop.

It reminds me of fishing. Hours of waiting around, standing in a puddle, with a few minutes of excitement when something nibbles on your hook. I hate fishing.

In LHE you can play semi-loose pre, make moves post, draw getting correct odds and just make a bunch of decisions on flops, turns and rivers. Just a much better game.

I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or not. Just to be clear, I'm not saying LHE is the better game to play in 2020 if you want to make a living. Yes, winrates are higher in NL. That's why it's a bad game. Fish get wiped out faster in high winrate games. Remeber what happened with HU tables on Stars and FTP back in the early 2010s? Sure, it's great for pros, but bad for the rest of the player population, operators, and in the end the poker economy.

As for pot sizes, I'm talking about the average. 90% of pots in NL are tiny. The only reason winrates are high is because those few times the pots get big, they get exponentially huge and there is where the recs make the big mistakes.

I'm not a pro. I just want a nice gambling game where I can drink, have fun, make lots of decisions and maybe squeeze out an edge. I hate sitting in a drunk NL game, where I crave to join the action but the opportunities to do it without lighting money on fire are so few and far between.

An example of a great gambling game imo is backgammon. You are constantly making decisions, sometimes they're obvious, sometimes they're hard. It has a nice blend of variance and skill. And you can handicap it to offer the weaker player a chance to gamble.

edit:
And the reason LHE is a rake trap is not an inherent flaw with the game itself, but with the rake system, but that's another discussion.

LA is special, but imagine what it would be without NL.

The reason I brought winrates in is to illustrate how things change when we scale by blind size than by buy-in size.

The average pot size in NL is affected heavily by the large outlier pots where a player can win or lose something on the order of a hundred big blinds in one hand. In LHE, sometimes I have seen pots get as big as 40 big blinds, but it isn't common.

One could argue that the median pot size in LHE is larger than that in NLHE, but if we are normalizing to big blind size I would expect that even this is not true. A blind steal results in a 1.5bb win in either game. If someone opens and the big blind calls, the pot is at least 5.5bb and possibly as high as 10bb or more in NL, but is fixed at 4.5bb in LHE. Pots grow exponentially in NL, and linearly in LHE.

The reason the pots seem bigger in LHE is that players buy in for much smaller amounts compared to NL. Buy in for a rack of redbirds to play 20-40, and you are starting with only 25bb. That stack is big enough in LHE to take a player to the river when betting is capped on every street. In NL, a 25bb stack is going all in preflop if the player is contesting a 3-bet pot.

Hold'em (both limit and no-limit) became legal in California in 1987. NLHE games started catching fire in Northern California in early 2004. NLHE has been widely played for sixteen years, compared to the seventeen years in which LHE was dominant. NLHE is here to stay, assuming that live poker is at all feasible in the post-covid landscape, because the current format of the game has proven to be sustainable.

NLHE is bad for the LHE economy, without a doubt. (It has been far worse for the seven-card stud economy, to my lasting regret.) But the poker economy has grown as a whole, and the bulk of that growth has been NLHE.

You can't compare lhe and nl by big blinds. They're not the same scales. Like you said, people buy in for around 20-25 big bets which is 40-50 big blinds. A large swing in a single live session for LHE is ~100BB which would be roughly 4 buyins.

In my experience LHE plays about 4x bigger than NL when you compare bankroll reqs. So your average 1/2 NL game is equivalent in size to 4/8-5/T LHE.

In the end it's a matter of taste. I like LHE better, you don't. That's fine. I admit that all the poker economy talk is motivated reasoning by me, but there are worrying signs that people have mentioned. California is an insane economy, so it might be an outlier, or it might not.

*I said lhe plays bigger in terms of bb, but should have said smaller. You play higher blinds for your money. Which also means that a 40bb pot in lhe is more like a 160-200bb pot in NL.

*edit-edit: arg, i messed up big blinds and big bets. (4/8 lhe has a $4 big blind, not $8)

Just think in terms of buyins. NL100 has a $100 buyin. 2/4 LHE ($2 big blind, $4 Big Bet) has a $80-$100 buyin depending on who you ask. A common single live session swing for both games is about $200 to $400.

and since I'm on a rant roll here ...
Valuebetting in NL is a joke. You often see people open ATo, get one call. Flop comes T76 rainbow, they bet and get called by QT. Then they just happily check it down on a J, 2 runout. That would be insanely passive in LHE. People go to war with top pair and valuebet with as thin as bottom pair regularly. This to me makes LHE a more fun game. Interesting... is debatable. I kinda agree that NL is more deep and more interesting, but it's not as much fun.

And when you do pull of a good bluff in LHE it's insanely satisfying. It's a myth that they don't exist. You just can't mindlessly bet-bet-jam and hope your opponent is too scared to call off TPTK.

Word on that.

Live 1/2NL is a different beast. It can play basically as small as 2/4 LHE (eg. smaller vegas casino with some kind of promo paying nitty regs to play long hours) or as big as 20/40 depending on the buyin size, preflop raise sizes and looseness.

true dat. We usually only have 1/2NL in my clubs running but it's unlimited buyin and on the weekends it gets ****ing crazy. You will see 10x open raises, people buyin in for 2-5k etc.

Biggest pot I've played was in a 1/2 that upgraded to a 2/5 game that got crazy, and I ended heads up against a local "importer" all in on the turn for 16k. I had tptk, he had a flushdraw. We ran it once and I held . He gave me a fist bump after the pot as a sign of respect. Not sure which was better, the 16k pot or the fist bump.

I was in for $500

I'd imagine it'd be better for a limit/pro play..it might actually be worse for the rooms. Less games!?!?!

I think unlimited wagering for Blackhawk will be bad for the poker economy up there. People being able to spew downstairs will hurt poker. Will they be bringing bacc and some of the asian games as well ?

NL is a all about game selection and the time you play. A typical 1/3 game on a Friday night is going to be miles better than a 1/3 game on a Tuesday afternoon. I still think that LHE is a more action driven game but given u can survive at NL with a 50 buyin bankroll with little to no risk of going broke is a lot easier grinding out 30 an hour than needing a 1000BB bankroll for 20/40 with roughly the same winrate. And as mentioned before you can have huge scores in NL without risking almost anything.