There's a big a$$ world outside of poker, I sometimes wonder if taking up my first game of cards 11 yrs ago didn't ruin me for life...

Limon, good thread for how long it has run.

In 2006 who was better you or BLDSWTTRS? Who do you guess/speculate is better now?

Do you still think BLD was cheating/dumping/whatever back in the party days?

In ten years if your still beating poker for the same rate now or a little bit less do you keep playing? more or less hours than now?

Favorite type of food? (i.e steaks, seafood, Indian, Thai)

one day i will show up naked at the commerce bar

I guess I was talking about soft collusion then. I could care less if friends want to check down/chop/do whatever once they're the only ones in the hand. But when two youngish guys come sit down together at the highest game running, speak to each other between hands in the same non-English language and play really aggro and 3b a lot yet only 3b each other with KK+, and in general are (possibly unintentionally) best-handing, that's collusion. A lot of the times I don't even think they know they're doing anything wrong, but it's still collusion. Do you disagree that this kind of thing happens a reasonable amount live and do you also agree that no one has ever and likely will ever be punished for doing it?


I'm going to try to put my thoughts in the nicest way possible. You're ******ed.


I'm pretty sure he's 100% serious and mentioned it above and it makes perfect sense. If you're a good high-stakes pro you don't want it to be easy for people to improve to the point where they can sit in your game and be a winner. You want as many of the people who have the money to sit in your game to have made that money through means other than poker. So if they rake games hard enough such that games below 5/10 are literally unbeatable after rake, the 5/10+ games would be much softer in the long run because no one was able to learn/improve/build their bankroll at lower stakes they had to have made their money through other means. Typically the people who make their money through poker are not the ones you want sitting at your table so if you can eliminate as many people that fit that profile as possible it is a good thing for the poker economy and a super good thing if you're one of the people with money and skills to play high-stakes already.

Oh ok I see, thats absolutely ridiculous for obvious reasons but I can now understand at least why he personally would want that now.

At the same time I think he'd be shooting himself in the foot as the HS games basically wouldn't run so it wouldn't make a difference if they were softer.

Meh, I kinda agree with him. It would be stupid and ****ty for people who aren't me, but it would probably be great for me and other established pros with 6figure bankrolls if small stakes didn't exist or was unbeatable. Why do you think otherwise? Why wouldn't high stakes run?

Money flows upwards. With no money flowing up from lower levels the high stake games, long term, would be suffocated. It would start as simply some high stakes pros waiting around for rich fish, how long would that realistically last? The site meanwhile would die as a business as it isn't viable. Nah can't see that happening.

I think you're wrong about how money moves through the poker economy. Its a subzero sum game. Money flows in from losing players and out through rake and winning players who pull money out of the "economy" and spend it. Players who win at small stakes mostly don't lose it all back at high stakes. The games don't run around winning players. It's already high stakes pros waiting for rich fish. Fewer pros wouldn't kill the high stakes games at all.

I do think you're right that the sites stand to make more money if small stakes can support pro players, but I don't think it's absolutely self-evident. The bigger factor may actually be that the sites need the rake to be low enough to allow losing players to win for long enough stretches to make it fun, which it might turn out is also low enough to support pros.

On a very fundamental level, only losing players are necessary. There is no such thing as a poker economy without losers. There could be a poker economy with no winners. Many local small stakes card rooms fit this description. I once visited a card room in Billings Montana where they were playing 2/4 lhe with a $5 rake on any pot over $20. This game had regulars. I don't think there were many winning nights, nevermind careers in the history of that game.

A future in which online poker looks like this is not impossible to imagine.

I think online is pretty different from live in this regard for the most part. With an unbeatable rake in low stakes games, fish will get faceraped so quickly that they will soon stop playing, breakeven and losing regs will obviously not play, there will be no pro grinders, no wannabee's who keep depositing with a dream, it will end up with no one playing at all. I can't imagine high stakes surviving above that. When some high stakes players go on big downswings, how will they return to the games as well? It seems theoretically the money would very quickly just all end up in Ivey's bank account.

low stakes online and live are exactly the same in this regard. losing players are gonna lose. if you make the rake such that a great player can only breakeven in a game he wont play. the fish will keep playing and actually lose slower and have more fun in the horribly raked game with no pros. small stakes games have an unlimited supply of people who just play for fun and every casino/private game on the planet rakes these small stakes games to an unbeatable degree. in the bigger games you need regs so you have to make the games beatable or keep a whole stable of props on hand.

i debated a lot about releasing this info because its pretty harsh, but its true.

man youre way off on this. hs games do not and will never run because of a pathway for hard working players to move up. IN FACT ITS QUITE THE OPPOSITE.

I don't believe this is possible. If the rake was high enough to make the game unbeatable for a pro then it would kill fish, even if they were playing other fish.

now tell me something about myself I don't know.

what would be really ******ed, though, would be playing on the road back in the old days in Texas, and Lousiana and not packing heat.
the gaming commission back then was called a .45 caliber. or a sawed-off shotgun in the trunk. while it wasn't protecting you, it was detering for you.
it woulda been insane not to have protection back then. Players were robbed on a regular basis.
(it would actually be an interesting stat to have if it was possible; was more money robbed in total from players on the road between, say, 1958 and 1971, or on one day back on BF?)
how is this different from playing online and having no authority there to protect the players, except the sites, which is like having the coyote guard the hen house, or trusting Enron to protect you as an employee.
BF pretty much proved that ya'll were working for Enron in a sense.
there's a book called "Conspiracy of Fools" about the Enron scandal.
required reading if you want to understand BF.

...or try watching Mel Brookes' "the Producers".
the idea is to run the company into the ground on purpose, and leave the little guys holding the bag, and you siphon the life force out of everyone while you bounce, unscathed. (or so you think).
of course, when you look at how things turn out historically, even the upper-ish scammer guys end up getting screwed in the long run, or end of facing legal consquences (ie. Jeffrey Skilling). the top top guy gets plastic surgery and stages a funeral with a closed casket. lol. mainly because it's a facile scam that's being run, the mid level scammers ends up scamming themselves. (in life). (thus the title "conspiracy of fools")
;Leo Brink and Max Bialystock paint the picture of the foolish scammers perfectly.


so, please tell me more about myself, being ******ed is just a start. (mentally challenged would have been more PC, bro.) I'm so intrigued.
like, for example, how many months of my life have i spent surfing in mexico, catching my own fish, and drinking margaritas in my hammock in a palapa with no internet?
28 months, 24, 32?? i want to bet the over and under. please set a line.
ya, i'm a real ******o.
bingo...you're good.
actually, why are you even still reading this drivel posted by a live-tard??

Ra nothing against you but I'm assuming you don't play 5/10+? The one major difference is first off the fish that play that high typically have a ton of money and don't care as much about losing. A lot of the 1/2 fish are the ones who read a book or two and think they're going to be the next Phil Ivey (or Hellmuth lol) and that the reason they're losing is because they run bad not because they're limp/calling 73s for half their stack. They also are the ones who probably will scream and bitch at the floor if the table only has 8 people that there are seats open. The ironic thing is a lot of the regs seem to want this as well.

Then look at the 10/20+ games and a lot of the times they run shorthanded. The fish love the action and don't mind it and obviously the regs are super fine playing shorthanded with a fish. I actually played a decent amount of 10/25nl HU this summer and at least one of the guys I played was a pretty big fish. The typical higher-stakes fish (can't really speak for 25/50+ since I've never played that high) are the ones who have made a lot of money from outside of poker and are looking to have fun and gamble. They can do this HU. So as long as there is at least one fish who wants to play and at least one other person (2 fish would actually be ideal for poker room/economy but obviously game would run with a fish and a reg) the game will typically run. And even if the regs are not good, playing HU vs. a fish >>>>>>>>>>>>>> playing 9-handed with a fish and 7 meh regs and it's really not even close. So I think it's pretty obvious that from a purely selfish outlook you should always hope that up to the stakes below the ones you play get raped by rake and are unbeatable.

You said you were done with the thread so I wasn't going to waste my time, but since apparently you're not...

So what you're saying is the only entity possible to protect players is government? Funny you mention Enron because the government did so much to protect their employees...

I've traded/bought/sold probably 200k+ in my online poker career, and although I always made it such that I would at least have a chance to sue if it went badly, realistically it would be a huge pain to have to do this and I didn't really have much protection. Guess how many problems I've had with any of that. That's right it's all gone smoothly without needing any government to help protect me. There are organizations that audit the poker sites for both fairness and how they keep their funds.

Do you understand what happened with Pokerstars? Despite the government freezing a ton of their money and seizing their domain, they returned my money in I think it was ~2 weeks. I'm pretty sure I trust Pokerstars more than the government right now.

That's kinda the point, most people aren't that dumb. Full Tilt made some bad gambles (and who knows if they woulda paid off or not had the government not seized a ton of their money) and now are paying for it. Pokerstars on the other hand did everything on the up and up likely because they realize they are dealing in an industry where they can make a lot of money. They're not foolish at all.

Well you seemed to think you know everything about black friday when:

1. you don't seem to have a clue, especially with regards to Pokerstars which even pre-BF was considered the best site and there are many people who played there exclusively. Were they the life marks you were discussing?

2. even the people who played on FTP (I'm going to ignore Cereus because again even pre-BF everyone knew they were shady as ****) probably almost all made more money than you from FTP including the money they had locked. If someone makes 500k from FTP then has 50k locked are they a life mark because they've made 450k more than you have from FTP?

And although I'm not really a fishing or margaritas in a hammock kinda guy, I'm pretty happy with my life and the heavy majority of my income has come from online poker. I understand online is not the only way, but it's funny you try to ridicule those who made a ton of money just because one company screwed up. Are you going to now laugh at all the life fish who invest in stocks because of what happened to Enron?

i dunno. i play for pocket change during recess out behind the gym at the school for the mentally challenged.

1] you get my respect on this one, especilaly considering the 'too big to fail' bailouts of 2008-10, which makes enron look like chump change. the banks leveraged literally thousands of times the GNP of the entire world into toxic derivatives, which is like a fraudulant house of mirrors for $, and oops, it blows up in thier faces. no prob... the tax payers are there to save the day.

which leads me to 2] it was'nt a gamble. they failed on purpose. you can make more with a flop than with a hit, if you rig it right. George W did it with his company Arbusto oil, and others... i'm serious, it was called Arbusto oil.
the company failed, but he came out smelling like a rose.

sorry to lump stars into this mess; my bad.
I played on stars exclusively, and if i ever was lucky enough to bink a tourney, I cashed it out ASAP, even for low stakes, because im a live player, and being from texas, i was raised to believe that cash is King, and don't trust in credit. I want benjamins, not numbers on a screen.
at this point all world currencies are so rapidly devaluing that even cash is becoming a number on a screen.
two words: gold and silver imo.

just kinda realized something; maybe BF refugees are so grossed out by the idea of grinding live because they are used to poker being their life. It works when youre in your hello kitty PJ's agrinding t home, so it's all good. I can see that.
ya, grinding live around a buncha drunks and degens can get depressing when you can look them in the face, I agree.
but that's why you need balance in your life to equalize it. without the balance it's a suicide mission, psychologically.
take up golf or something. volunteer for some cause; do something rewarding outside of poker, and you will gather the moxy to grind in the hellish casinos and cardrooms. It sure can't hurt.
balance is easy when youre the king of your internet castle. (Seinfeld reference)

leave the flaming to Limon.....we bought the popcorn for abe.

There is plenty of opportunity to start your own well - as far as I can tell.

holy wall of text batman

this just isn't true, man.

in the long run, most rec players and fish are going to lose more money taking -ev propositions (eg, chasing draws w/o propers odds) than they will from the rake. in the cases of super droolers, they're going to light the cash on fire long before the rake can ever add up for them.

simply put, the idea of the rake, more importantly the structure of the rake, means very little to a rec player or fish. they are there to play the game and have fun, hang out with the guys, blow off some steam, etc. for them, rake is just part of the price of the entertainment. if they're concerned with being beaten by anything, it's by you when they're holding 2nd pair and debating whether or not it's good.

ya big fan. try to see the la phil several times each season at the bowl. loves me some ludwig van.

well bld played bigger than me and won a lot more so all evidence is he played better. a lot of times when i moved from 400/600 nl to the biggest games i would see a lot of weird stuff. i mean just like night and day differences from the 600 to the 1000 on party which shouldnt happen if all the games were straight. it was pissing me off and i may have went off half cocked but i saw stuff that if i woulda saw it in a live game i woulda said something right there at the table so...w/e.
the hours get less and less every year. if i really needed to make a lot from poker i'd prob take a prop job again just to force myself to put in the hours.
lol. everything. i just like food that is prepared by someone who obviously cares a lot. most of the time i cook myself, i like to cook and garden.

in the l.a. area for steaks ill give the nod to mastros. seafood prob water grill. indian, al noor (which is actually pakistani but i cant tell the diff). thai, lotus of siam which is in vegas but its the only place i ever eat thai food.

Hi limon, a few questions:

- Do you agree that allowing players to use iPad while playing is bad for the games? I'm encountering this a lot lately at the tables in Vegas where a table has 3-4 guys on their iPads and inevitably the game dies.. these players dont give any action because they are transfixed by the webpages they are browsing.. I think casinos should just ban these things and floormen tell me they would love to but that plenty of players want to be able to use them at the table.. to me iPad is way worse than someone using a smart phone because you arent going to browse the web for hours on a smart phone.

- Which areas near Commerce are good, safeish, with maybe cheapish accommodation and malls etc so someone could say come to LA for a month and play poker at Commerce without worrying about their safety? I dont want to drive all the way from Santa Monica btw. I'm thinking maybe Norwalk, Downey, or say Hacienda Heights etc... am I on the right track? Do you/does anyone know any safe/decent place within 20-30min drive from Commerce that offers monthly rentals?

- If you're in a game where you make a comfortable profit on a regular basis against the same opponents and your image is good, but you are making a lot of reads in a lot of spots where you can take down pots with nothing if you become a lot more aggro when others are putting money in while weak, then would/should you change your style to become drastically more LAG? Or would you say, I dont want to increase the variance and change my image in this game, I'll just let some of these opportunities pass..

- If I were to say that LA has soft games because LA as a city just has more people with huge egos and ******* personalities than any other city in America, would you agree?

Btw I dont agree with your suggestion that online poker 2.0 should be capped to 2 tables. I think allowing somewhere up to say 6-8 tables would be good. I can play up to 6 cash tables without HUD quite comfortably btw so its not like when you play 6 tables that you are being a robot... it's still real poker. At 24 tables, sure, you are just clicking buttons every millisecond. But otherwise if you've got notes on half the players at the table and know how they play then you dont really need tracking software and HUD to be able to play multiple tables against them.

Actually you are ignoring a major component of why fish would have money sitting in front of them -- because they haven't been raked to death. An example would be Crown Casino in Melbourne Australia, which used to be an incredibly soft and juicy place for cash games... but about 6 months ago they increased the rake from 10% up to $6 per pot and $10/hr time charge(which was already ridic high) to 10% up to $10 per pot for the $2/5 plus that $10/hr time charge(which makes it practically unbeatable esp. when max buyin is only 100bbs). What then happened was that since both fish and pros started to get raked more, the stacks started to become less-large by the end of the night, and in turn everyone started to nit it up more because they cant afford to gamble since everyone knew the casino was taking more from everyone every hand. Even the loosest fish started to play tight. At 5/10 the rake is also high, at $25 per hour time charge. But since people are raked to death on the 2/5 and playing careful they also stop taking shots at 5/10 so the 5/10 barely runs there anymore.

So it went from a casino that had tons of players throwing money away, to one where everyone plays careful whether they're regs or fish. At least that's what I encountered in between visits in January and July.

Wow, is the Crown Casino still opened? I mean that's totally sick and an extreme example to say the least.