are there any people play poker here?

Just to see what you got, you gotta pay each bet before.

 

What strategy did you use?

I do Texas Hold 'em NL and Blackjack. Online for play money only, I don't trust online gambling, too easy to cheat. Especially in Poker.

I used to count cards too playing Blackjack so I would take trips to Vegas (never liked Atlantic City much...) when I could and hit the local Indian Casinos. Life got too busy and so my nice little hobby got left behind. Was fun for a while though!

 

I play Holdem quite a bit, had connections via friends back home inTexas where you could always find someone hosting a game at their house pretty much.

Cash play limit for fun mainly, 100 bucks min buy in. Mainly an excuse for me to drink whiskey while the " serious" guys drank monsters pretending they Phil Ivey

 

I know a bunch of Phil Ivey wannabes. The same guys that pay me at the end of the night

 

I know a bunch of guys who think that alcohol doesn't impair their decision making.I play a solid game against them and clean up at about 4am when they will call just about anything.......

 

Exactly right. Alcohol makes it difficult to control tells and ability to control raising. I notice hilarious raise patterns the more drunk my friends get. Many that are way out of position

 

I've never played Texas Holdem, but I'd love to learn! Would you like to teach me... for ... say... $500/hand?

 

I seldom leave with less than I put in actually. I bartended through school so I have the alcohol tolerance of a small rhino

Also my house game technique is aggressive early on while people are patient waiting for top 20 hands then I try to get caught bluffing at least once early so everyone thinks I'm loose.... Then I get buzzed mid game and maybe let on I'm a bit more tipsy than I really am drinking Jameson out of the bottle.. Then I go tight aggressive from there on out. They've got me as loose, bluffing, and tipsy and I'm just waiting like a spider.

Haha good times

 

I used to enjoy regular social games...I was the one who made it financially viable for everyone else to attend...

 

Hold 'em.

 

5 card stud or 5 card draw, 7 card stud. The only casino games I play is craps and occasionally I'll play some of the new video slots just to see the graphics, but only in Vegas or Reno, where at some casinos the slots are loose; otherwise they're a joke. Don't see the attraction for Hold'Em, it's not a skill game; the casinos like it because of that, so they promote it no end. I play several times a year, and have filed a W-2G every year for the last 19 years. It's getting tougher to get good games together, as the Asians and South Americans have been moving to Baccarat as the hot game the last few years; fun game but too much risk for those who want to make money consistently at, like craps or Poker is.

Before Poker I played a lot of Bridge, a much more interesting game and a lot more well-heeled players around; you could make a living just being a paid partner to people who wanted to increase their rating levels at one time; the last fee I got for Bridge was in 2009 or so, when Larry King was trying to revive the game back to its original popularity. It never did, of course, and casinos hate the game.

 

How is Hold 'em less skilful than 5 card stud?

 

I don't think he counts or plays off of any specific indices.

 

I'm curious as I would have said the opposite was true.

 

He said Blackjack holds no appeal, yet anyone that understands basic math knows that if you have a 1% edge over the house, that 1% will make you a millionaire if following proper bet deviations and spend the time necessary in the casino to do it. You also need a pretty good sized starting bankroll.

I'm actually writing a book on advanced Blackjack strategies in my spare time.

 

To be fair to him he didn't mention blackjack at all. He only talked about Hold 'Em having no attraction to him.
How it can be called a game of no skill when the top players regularly make good money playing it seems disingenuous. If it were just a game of luck there would be far more random winners.

 

At high levels, Hold'em turns into luck.

Everyone at the super roller table understands every possible hand combo on the board and bets accordingly.

It's one of the big reasons you don't see any of the old WSOP champions doing that well anymore. Back then less people understood the game the way they do now.

In the middle there's a skill gap, at the highest and lowest levels, there is not.

I think I may have misquoted someone then, the person I meant to reply to was saying something about Blackjack.

 

There is a lot more to poker than just pot odds though, recognising betting patterns and other tells for a start not to mention knowing when to bluff and when to call or fold. Once you get to the final stages of a tournament with huge rising blinds it does become a bit pot luck especially when heads up but the skill is involved in reaching that point. Obviously there is luck involved as with any card game but over the course of a long tournament the luck averages out to a certain degree. Helps to be lucky in the final hand but skill can get you to that position.
I think the older WSOP players suffer from not being as ultra aggressive as today's young players. I wouldn't say fewer people understood the game back then it's just that more people stuck to the more rigid playing styles and tactics where as today a larger range of starting cards are used and 3 or 4 betting with weaker hands is more common.

 

I didn't mention Blackjack; I don't play it unless the wife and/or we have guests who want to play. It bores me to tears. And, once the casino spots your system, you're banned, and your pic is in every casino's book within an hour. I'm not interested in getting banned or even playing against the casinos anyway, just other players in games off the floor, in private rooms. The comps alone over time have added up to more than I could make running the latest 'genius' Blackjack 'system'; they're a dime a dozen.

 

Everyone is playing off the same cards, for one, not their own.

 

Did the play money thing at poker stars for a while. There's a reason I don't play for real money. Wehn you are drawing dead with a straight flush after the flop you get the idea the poker gods don't like you.

 

The 'tournaments' are kind of a media scam; they advertise them as 'big games' but in reality they aren't winning the money claimed on the TV shows, which they want to fake the audience into thinking they're playing for millions' by valuing the chips as 'millions'; the prize money is a lot smaller, and not worth the time involved going through the various elimination rounds for real players. A lot of amateurs can win easily, something they almost never do in real life games. Never heard of Phil Ivey. Was he last year's winner of something or other?

 

Yes, that's another problem with Hold Em, the ridiculous hands possible in it. I've seen three flushes in one hand on one of the TV tournaments. I just laughed and quit watching after that. Didn't see any players who impressed me, except one Asian guy whose name I don't remember some years back.

 

Didn't play much after that my play money stash which had been nearly 250k dropped by a little less than half... Never get greedy in Hold'em the nuts aren't always the nuts.

 

The 'top players' look like 'top players' because most have real jobs and real lives and can't hang around for long multi-day tournaments, so those guys merely have to hang on long enough for a lot of players to self-eliminate. They don't look like great players' in the early rounds, more like neurotic sissies.

As for the 'more aggressive' stuff, it's mostly posturing and bombast, playing it up for the TV audiences, and not particularly that 'aggressive' in actual play; they aren't really playing for the actual money they value the chips at, and they're only really out their entrance fees, no matter how long they last; they start over in 'new rounds' frequently; the kind of betting that goes on in Hold 'Em wouldn't last but a couple of hours in real games with the amount in real money. With regular games at that kind of real money levels the single game can go on for many hours at a stretch, sometimes two days and more. Some games are over in an hour; you just never know ahead of time. I certainly would have zero problem 'playing aggressively' if I had little risk of losing real money.