The poker economy across the board has been forcibly shrunk by pandemic restrictions.

My home club, the Oaks Card Club has twenty-one tables available for poker. Right now, they are using only nine of them, unable or unwilling to spread more games. Waits for seats in the evening are terribly long. It is crystal-clear that the Oaks is running at full (permissible) capacity, and that if they could put more tables into play, they would.

There is a lot of pent-up demand for poker, and a lot of players, at least in the USA, are going elsewhere to satisfy it: agented apps like PokerBros, and grey-market sites like Ignition/Bovada and Americas Cardroom.

I have been playing a lot on Ignition lately, and in my opinion the games there currently are the best online games I have ever played since well before Black Friday.

Of course, these games are mostly NLHE and PLO.

I predict a substantial boom in live poker as pandemic fears ease. I am not going to Las Vegas for this year's WSOP -- I would want case counts to be rather lower before I'd go -- but I am expecting players, US players at least, to make a strong showing.

I mean, really. Schneids just came out of the woodwork to tell us that the Canterbury Park 40-80 game is as good as it ever has been.

There is no NL in MN to bust all the fish and kill the action. NL is herpes.

People will eventually come back around to lhe. It's the best poker variant.

In Black Hawk, pre-covid 30/60 LHE ran at least one table a day, usually 2 + most nights. Staring Thursday night it went until Monday morning, 3-4 tables on Friday and 4-5 on Saturday. 50/100 ran most Friday and Saturday nights.

“Post-covid” (such as it is, I guess post widespread vaccination), AND with the introduction of unlimited bet size starting May 1st, there’s now one 30/60 game on Friday and Saturday, not even a list the rest of the week. I see a several of the 30 regs playing 5/10 NL now.

The change is at least in part due to the move from Ameristar to Monarch, the spiffy new casino in town, it finally opened during covid. A lot of the dealers left Astar for Monarch. Monarch now fills all 14 tables on the weekend. Astar had 22 tables, but they converted half the room to slots during, now they run 8 games max, and there’s no list there for 30/60.

LHE is dead

Booo, I never got the opportunity to play in Black Hawk.

It's pretty amazing how the Black Hawk and Bay 101 mid-high games have gone bye-bye, yet there are posters who keep insisting that mid-high LHE is doing fine during the pandemic. Talking Stick and Canterbury are a legislation change away from doom. Vegas has been barely surviving for years. LA still seems fairly healthy, but how many of the LA recs are under 40? Online mid-high LHE is a living hell for anyone who isn't DonJuan. These are not good things.

Believe it or not, Bonition used to be a lot better. Having 3-4 recs with VPIPs as high as 90 was pretty common in 2014 at 2/4-3/6 NL or PLO. They have gone way out of their way to kill the games since early 2016. But ya, the games are still better than Stars in 2010.

Also, rofl... Jungleman just made his first RIO video. He is eating a bowl of food, slamming wine out of the bottle, and dropping f-bombs all over the place throughout the video. And of course he is getting rave reviews despite being so blatantly unprofessional. Well, that made my morning!

I think AZ just had a regulation change that might allow real NL. I am worried.

This is all true

Nobody wants to hear what it's really like. This is the reason I didn't write a book lol...

LA Limit hold 'em seems as strong as it's been in 5 years, also.

God Bless America

So awesome! I hope that he is signed to a contract and his video doesn't turn out to be a once only thing. That they went through the trouble to make a promo video for him definitely gets my hopes up.

How do you know the thoughts of these people and why do you dislike them so much?

Dislike? I find them slightly obnoxious at most. I have spoken to them and have read their forum posts for years. They are consistently condescending and arrogant.

Then they will fit right in to the 2+2 lhe community.

It only going to get worse from here as liquidity dry up for lhe and regs that use to win resort to this sort of behavior. https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/605158960 fyi the table start w head up with the same reg that timing down on the other table because he lost a big pot. O before anyone think it happen only once https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/600409416/d3ce6ee66d . And they not even the same person in this two vid. Just because it anon. doesn't mean I don't know the time of play you are usually on, play style and, emo chat.

Inbefore some other regs trying doing the slow down half hearted timing down to 12 sec everytime they want to fold. I know who you are in here stop f.cking posting advice thinking that you are some nice guy trying to help out others.

Dios Mio!

Even if they switch to no limit I don't think it will doom limit games at Talking stick. They have a large player pool of folks who only play limit. Some might play spread waiting for limit but not as their main game. That being said, new players play NL so in about 10-15 years the limit crowd will have shrunk significantly.

Both of those have some sort of accommodation to approximate NLHE, right? I think in AZ it's a huge spread limit (maybe $500?). In MN it used to be that they had to schedule a "tournament," play for an hour at $1-1, raise the blinds to $1-2, and play another hour before everyone could cash out. Not sure if that's changed now.

Point is, players there can play something sort of like NLHE. For your point to make sense, there would need to be a pool of players currently playing fixed-limit HE because they don't want to play fake NL, but once they can play true NL, they'll switch over.

That seems barely plausible if MN is still doing the "tournaments" and completely implausible where a bet cap is the only issue, like AZ or WA.

I agree, and I played in AZ quite a bit, plus a few times each in MN and WA. In all AZ games except for the highest limit ones, there is almost never someone who would want to and be able to bet over $500 anyway. Never heard anyone complain about the bet caps in the games I played.

The rumors of my death have been highly exaggerated.

What's up my man?

I actually played Botez 3 blitz games on chess.com a few days ago. She won 2-1. I would have challenged her to a chess/poker match, but, as will be a big surprise to anyone that knows me, my chat is banned.

Iggy is sooooo sooooooft. I play all the hold'em games there. 30 LHE, 200 and 500nl, fast or regular, and all the MTTs up to 1k (the highest they run). During NFL season it's even better! Thank God for the sportsbook.

I'm making ... over 3 dollars/hand in a smallish sample (over like 4 months).

I'm coming off a 6 month span during which I won about as much as I ever did in a 6 month span during the glory days. And it's not because I'm some sick genius. These punters just punt that hard.

Few things:

- I have also encountered the guy who is always tanking super hard. He does it a lot when it's 3 handed and the 3rd guy is a fish or semi-fish. I guess the idea is to tilt me into leaving. It usually works, but not until I lose 20 bets trying to own him first.

- There's chat on Ignition? I musta turned off that option and forgotten about it.

- I assume from the very first hand that you are the strong reg who checks back flops pretty regularly, like with a 70%ish cbet. Whoever that is seems like easily the best player on the site. Everybody else, including myself, still plays the almost 100% cbet antiquated style. It's like I took a time warp to 2010. Then I play on ACR and the play is different (and much stronger).

Where can one get such a thing without doing the manual inputting of all the variables and etc. etc. oneself? I bought pio years ago and have never used it. Too user-unfriendly for a lazy guy like me. But I've been able to approximate quite a bit of solver work for preflop play in MTTs by using the site preflop.academy. Such a thing for LHE would be extremely clutch.

Edit: I stopped doing the old "flat 100% as last action" thing preflop. Been using an RNG to give certain hands a 3b frequency. Only in BB v BTN/CO though. And I've been 4b some BTNvblinds. Somebody on Iggy 4bets ultrawide BTN v SB/BB and has been giving me the blues. I hope that what I'm doing is some bastardized approximation of GTO concepts. But it easily could be just another way of flinging poo.