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Imaduck
Apr 16, 2007

the magnetorotational instability turns me on

Mortley posted:

How do real poker players feel about video poker?
The great thing about Poker against human opponents is that it's so dynamic. Even if you've played millions of hands, you can still run into new situations you haven't seen before each time you play. The other great thing is that there are situations where there is no clear right or wrong answer. Even top-tier pros will debate about how a hand should have been played. They're consider not only on the math, but make guesses at how other players will react based on what they've seen them do in the past.

Games like Video Poker and Blackjack have the statistical component of Poker, but lack the real dynamics of the game. The rules are fixed, and the reactions are always the same. On top of that, the games are solved; you can look up the solution online, play with a cheat sheet, and know that you're always playing correctly. Even if you're counting cards in Blackjack, you're usually just following the system. These types of games really don't have the same thrill or puzzle solving aspect of real Poker. And you're playing against the House in these games (as opposed to other players) meaning the House is going to make it as hard as possible for you to win.

That doesn't mean Poker players won't play these games. For almost every player, part of the reason you enjoy Poker is you enjoy the gambling aspect of it, at least a little bit. There's no shortage of excellent Poker players who have blown their winnings at Craps or Blackjack or Pai Gao. It's also nice to unwind at these games because you don't have to constantly be thinking about the dynamics of the game; you can just relax, play your system, put some chips out there, and let the cards do whatever they're gonna do.

Personally, I'll play Video Poker, Slots, and Craps from time to time when I'm at a casino to unwind, take a break, or come down from some bad beats so I don't go tilting off more money at the Poker table. However, I play very low stakes when I do this; I'll sit down with $200 at the Poker table, but only like $20 at Video Poker most of the time.

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Mortley
Jan 18, 2005

aux tep unt rep uni ovi
Thanks for your different but equally interesting responses!

Keg
Sep 22, 2014

Keg posted:

Wow, that's a very good strategy.

By the way... I was bluffing :smug:

Jeza
Feb 13, 2011

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

Imaduck posted:

For almost every player, part of the reason you enjoy Poker is you enjoy the gambling aspect of it, at least a little bit.

I remember seeing a short documentary about Phil Ivey and that guy was just really a gambling addict. He bet money on everything, just didn't give a poo poo. It was only exciting for him with money on the line, and he'd bet on anything.

twodot
Aug 7, 2005

You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Jeza posted:

I remember seeing a short documentary about Phil Ivey and that guy was just really a gambling addict. He bet money on everything, just didn't give a poo poo. It was only exciting for him with money on the line, and he'd bet on anything.
Phil Gordon has an observation that being a good poker player means you have to separate the value that the chips represent as money and the value that the chips represent as your ability to win more chips. Assuming you've applied proper bank roll management, you need to be prepared to risk whatever is in front of you, and that seems to produce a lot of great poker players who make terrible financial decisions (see earlier Rounders discussion).

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?


What are the best States aside from Nevada for poker? Second, aside from playing what are the best resources? Books, Videos, Twitch Channels, etc.

faarcyde
Dec 5, 2005
what the hell did you trade Jay Buhner for!?

Murgos posted:

Like many I dabbled in poker 10-12 years ago. I think it was reading 2+2 that put me off it for good though. Reading accounts of people much better than I was at the time talk about their online BB/hour rates while grinding out 6-8 1/2 or 3/6 tables at Party or Stars made me realize that it was way too much like work to be any fun and that the real expected payout for maybe 90% of them wasn't any better than having a only half decent profession.

Lots and lots of people made a lot of money. You could make six figures working 25 hours a week as a slightly above average regular in midstakes games up to about 3-4 years ago.

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless

Tab8715 posted:

What are the best States aside from Nevada for poker? Second, aside from playing what are the best resources? Books, Videos, Twitch Channels, etc.

Florida and California supposedly. By California I pretty much mean LA and the cost of living and rake are high there so you need to be at least mid stakes to have a chance. I've already talked about books and videos in this thread a little.

I talked to a long time live grinder in Vegas for a while when I first got there (Squidface on 2+2 who has been at it for 20+ years and is probably the most regular face in the Venetian -- nice guy, generous with his time) and he said he'd go to Florida right now if playing poker was his only consideration.

It also seems like there are a lot of terrible players from Baltimore but I haven't heard anything about Baltimore specifically.

raton fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Jun 15, 2016

Imaduck
Apr 16, 2007

the magnetorotational instability turns me on

Tab8715 posted:

What are the best States aside from Nevada for poker?
A lot of states have poker in casinos, in card rooms, in private games, and/or online; no matter where you are, you can find games if you look hard enough.

California has quite a few casinos and card rooms, and there are many poker players there, especially in the LA area - the Commerce poker room is legendary. You're also a quick flight or drive to Las Vegas or Reno, depending where you're at. It's also likely that online poker will be legal there soon. One thing to note is that some of their casinos have weird rules about poker and buy-ins and what not, so you should read up a little before playing poker there.

Maryland is quickly becoming a poker hotspot. I was amazed at the size of the poker room in the Horseshoe in Baltimore, and there are many other casinos in driving distance.

New Jersey recently legalized online poker and even has PokerStars (it's for residents only though, so the action is okay but not anywhere near PokerStars international). They also have Atlantic City and other places to play poker.

I've met a few pros from Northern Florida. There are a number of big poker tournaments hosted there.

There are plenty of other Casinos and card rooms throughout the country; these are just the ones I hear about the most.

quote:

Second, aside from playing what are the best resources? Books, Videos, Twitch Channels, etc.
For book recommendations, check out the earlier posts in this thread:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3778125&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1#post460544890
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3778125&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1#post460553500

For free videos, I've been impressed with The Poker Guys videos that someone posted here earlier, especially for live Poker. The PokerStars Youtube channel also has some good content, although it's not as focused on training. I'm sure there are other good ones that folks can recommend.

There are a number of good for pay training websites. I've heard great things about Run it Once and Crush Live Poker. The prices can be steep though.

Twitch has a ton of great Poker streamers. The most prominent one is Goon JCarver's Run it Up. Elky, Vanessa Selbst, Jamie Staples, Randy Lew and many others stream often. Poker Central is a 24/7 poker channel. Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth sometimes stream. Goon Moosepoker also streams sometimes.

Imaduck fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Jun 15, 2016

JIZZ DENOUEMENT
Oct 3, 2012

STRIKE!

Tab8715 posted:

What are the best States aside from Nevada for poker? Second, aside from playing what are the best resources? Books, Videos, Twitch Channels, etc.

I mainly play 3-5 and 5-10 no limit hold 'em. Been to the WSOP twice. My perspective:

*Oregon is terrible. Tiny card rooms, high rakes, nitty environment.

*Washington is not great. Most of the Casino's are about ~1hour from Seattle. High rakes. The 2-5, 3-5 tables are profitable but usually not great. 5-10 is terrible. Usually only 1 table a week if that. And it's generally really, really good players that only show up if one of the two massive fish shows up. Kind of surprised how bad the scene is considering how many rich workers are flowing into Seattle. Also Washington has a rule where the max individual action is 500.

*Los Angeles in California was decent. Big rooms, higher % of the population was slightly worse. L.A. has crazy cost of living though.

*Atlantic City in New Jersey was amazing. Most of the poker rooms at most of the casinos were poo poo. But holy drat Revel and one other were down right amazing. People swearing at each other, going on tilt, acting out of turn. I have not seen that many tables with such consistently lovely players in a loooong time. Unfortunately Atlantic City is about 2.5 hours south of Central and North Jersey, which is where you'd like to live if you want to move to NJ. Also the Mayor of one of the major northern cities recently established an outreach survey to determine community sentiments on allowing Casinos to be built there.

*Florida. Never been, but a handful of years ago basically every poker player I ever met was talking about it like it was a gold rush.

Mind_Taker
May 7, 2007



Central Florida (Tampa, St. Pete, Sarasota) was really juicy a couple years ago but except for the Hard Rock they don't even really have 2/5 games any more, and the 2/5 games at the Hard Rock are full of grinders. I feel like a lot of the whales went broke or decided to just start playing table games at the casino instead of poker.

I would bet South Florida is much better though.

MF_James
May 8, 2008
I CANNOT HANDLE BEING CALLED OUT ON MY DUMBASS OPINIONS ABOUT ANTI-VIRUS AND SECURITY. I REALLY LIKE TO THINK THAT I KNOW THINGS HERE

INSTEAD I AM GOING TO WHINE ABOUT IT IN OTHER THREADS SO MY OPINION CAN FEEL VALIDATED IN AN ECHO CHAMBER I LIKE

Sheep-Goats posted:

And the hysterical amount of two/three seating that must go on there out of the micros.

When I was in college we used to do this, we'd have 3-5 people together all sitting at the same online table, generally multiple tables in fact, this was back in 2004/2005-2007ish, I think they have better ways to combat this now, but before it was pretty much the wild-west, made a lot of money doing it.

Keg
Sep 22, 2014
My unfair edge during the Party Poker days was having a huge pokertracker DB mined from a few weeks when I'd just leave a bunch of tables going while importing hands into pokertracker. I think close to when Neteller shut down, Party stopped generating hand histories on tables where you weren't sitting, but until then it was pretty great being able to load up the game and search through a list of people who were absurdly passive and loose.

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless
My favorite poker youtubers break down probably my favorite poker hand.

Dwan has addressed himself what went down in this hand and said a lot of it came down to personal history between him and Eastgate, but the first time I saw this hand I basically threw my hands up in the air and was stunned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8qFoh6pUEM

Cockmaster
Feb 24, 2002
Does anyone have any experience with bounty tournaments? They seem to be all the rage, and they look like the sort of thing that would appeal to casual players. Has much of anything been written on proper strategy there (in a conventional tournament, it is generally recommended not to place any real emphasis on knocking anyone out).

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless

mostlygray
Nov 1, 2012

BURY ME AS I LIVED, A FREE MAN ON THE CLUTCH
Genuine question:

Why does everyone like Texas Hold'em? When I was young, it was always 5 card draw. When I play with my brothers-in-law, we always call a different game each time. Sometimes it's 5 card draw no wilds, sometimes it's Chicago High, sometimes it's Follow The Bitch, sometimes 7 card stud with 4's and whores wild, etc. The rules are called per hand based on whomever is the dealer with the exception of house rules. Keeps you on your toes and creates big winners and big losers. You have to stay on your game and you fold all the time. It's all about bluffing and playing the person, not the odds.

With the big games on TV and such, it's all Hold'em. I don't understand.

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless

mostlygray posted:

Genuine question:

Why does everyone like Texas Hold'em? When I was young, it was always 5 card draw. When I play with my brothers-in-law, we always call a different game each time. Sometimes it's 5 card draw no wilds, sometimes it's Chicago High, sometimes it's Follow The Bitch, sometimes 7 card stud with 4's and whores wild, etc. The rules are called per hand based on whomever is the dealer with the exception of house rules. Keeps you on your toes and creates big winners and big losers. You have to stay on your game and you fold all the time. It's all about bluffing and playing the person, not the odds.

With the big games on TV and such, it's all Hold'em. I don't understand.

Sid Meyer said what makes a good game is a lot of interesting decisions. Almost unquestionably the three variants of poker that offer the largest volume of of tough decisions are Hold'em, 2-7 Triple draw, and Pot Limit Omaha, in no particular order. Stud is probably close as well.

The main reason for Hold'ems dominance is, however, historical. The first WSOP was held in Binions and was cooked up by the regs and management there basically as a promotional tool to get more people playing poker. Almost everything was cash games then but the more casual players that are in the pool the more easy money there is (there are other effects of poker's explosion such as it becoming a draw for whales which it never was before then, but I don't think any of the grinders cooking up the first WSOP had that much in mind). The choice of games for the first WSOP came down to either 2-7 Triple Draw (seen at the time as the most skill heavy game) or Hold'em. Hold'em was selected because it has many more opportunities to say the words all in, which is undeniably appealing to casual fans, because it's a much simpler game to explain the structure of, and because strategy doesn't involve memorizing discards at all which casual players see as unfun. Part of Hold'ems continued love is still along these lines -- new people can understand it easily and don't run into many situations where they feel cheated or caught out by some obscure rule, or get made fun of because they missed some piece of face-up information, or whatever.

One other huuuuuuuge advantage Hold'em has that was also unforseen is that its immensely well suited for television via hole card cams. The hole card camera was probably the single biggest driving force in poker's boom. Remember the tapes of Chan's WSOP game from Rounders without the hole card cam? Even real poker professionals who were specifically interested in those two players (see them as heroes, play against them regularly, whatever) would have a hard time sitting through more than a few minutes of tape where you have no idea really what each person is holding.

With that said you'll be pleased to know that dealer's choice games (which is the term for what you guys played when you were young) are becoming more and more popular even at lower limits. The poo poo town I'm stuck in now regularly has three games going. The room with the sharks is Hold'em or PLO, dealer's choice, except on Sunday when it's complete dealer's choice (we played one orbit of Stud Hi where the winner of the hand was whoever was second best, which is awfully confusing multiway) including wild cards, games like Badugi which are rarely much more than flipping coins, etc. The smaller casual game regularly starts out as a 4-8 Omaha 8 game and develops later at night into 1/2 Hold'em or 0.50/1 PLO. The irregular game (which becomes the big game on the weekend) is in a bar downtown and plays dealer's choice Hold'em, PLO, or Tahoe (which is Hold'em with three cards and is hella dumb IMO but whatever).

Anyway I think Hold'em is a very good incarnation of poker. It allows for some variation in viable playstyles (tight aggressive is easiest but loose aggressive is possible and sometimes immensely profitable, and within these rubrics there are are wide variation of styles and approaches that tumble into the similar statistical presentations once you zoom out a little, never the less they are interesting choices sometimes), there is a very good balance between the value of your cards vs the value of your position and how you should react vs. different sorts of players to play optimally, aggression is very valuable in Hold'em which makes for more spots where decisions are possible, etc. I personally prefer PLO (in my mind there are many fewer interesting decisions on the river in Hold'em than there are in PLO, to be fair though there are often more decisions to be made on the flop in Hold'em than in PLO, but in balance I think it swings to PLO).

To contrast this I would not be interested in playing Stud Hi with 4s and Qs wild. In a game like this I would not be doing much more than waiting to start with two wild cards in my hand and draw to quads most of the time and would probably only have real decisions to make once in a while when I held, say, a full house and got checkraised on the river in a medium sized pot. There's not much game in that game. It's fun to yell quads but it's more fun to be in interesting spots, put other people into tough spots, and find a way to a solid statistical edge and a game like that doesn't offer much in those departments.

E: One last thing I want to say is that poker is not really a card game. Poker is betting game (I prefer the term "pricing game" but I think that term can be misleading to laypeople). This is why poker with play money is not poker, the meaningful part of the game has been made meaningless, and without real money at stake, even if it's just a tiny bit, there is no game at all left, it's just seeing card combos come out with no meaning attached to them at all. So when you want to know what kind of poker is the best, you need to look not at the cards, but at the betting possibilities that are reasonable and select from those sets the ones that are the most fun. Some varieties of poker offer a lot under this rubic. Some are awfully awfully lean.

raton fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Jul 17, 2016

let it mellow
Jun 1, 2000

Dinosaur Gum
because you can have 10 people at the table and hands happen fast

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless
Never fast enough

twodot
Aug 7, 2005

You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Sheep-Goats posted:

E: One last thing I want to say is that poker is not really a card game. Poker is betting game (I prefer the term "pricing game" but I think that term can be misleading to laypeople). This is why poker with play money is not poker, the meaningful part of the game has been made meaningless, and without real money at stake, even if it's just a tiny bit, there is no game at all left, it's just seeing card combos come out with no meaning attached to them at all.
You can definitely run a free poker tournament, and you're still playing poker and winning it will require much or all of the same skill as a tournament you paid to get into (presuming participants actually want to win, games where the people playing aren't actually trying to win aren't typically fun, but that's not unique to poker).

Imaduck
Apr 16, 2007

the magnetorotational instability turns me on
For whatever reason, tournaments with no stakes and no prizes never seem to work that way. Inevitably, people end up not feeling attached to their chips and not really attached to winning, and just start doing random things and gambling. Free poker websites are terrible for learning how to play poker correctly.

Murgos
Oct 21, 2010

twodot posted:

You can definitely run a free poker tournament, and you're still playing poker and winning it will require much or all of the same skill as a tournament you paid to get into (presuming participants actually want to win, games where the people playing aren't actually trying to win aren't typically fun, but that's not unique to poker).

Lol. No. 90% of the field will immediately go all in on the first hand*. 90% of everyone left after the first hand goes all in on the second hand with the winnings from the first hand. This continues until 2 people are left and they do heads up by going all in until one pushes the other out.

*Note that the people who didn't go all in aren't playing either, they've just left the table after looking at their hole cards.

e: Every now and then there is a nit who thinks they'll just wait out the carnage and jump in with their mad skillz and clean up. No, by the time the field has thinned out they are so far behind on chips they just get put all in every time they bet until the odds take over and they too are cleaned out.

Murgos fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jul 18, 2016

twodot
Aug 7, 2005

You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Murgos posted:

Lol. No. 90% of the field will immediately go all in on the first hand*. 90% of everyone left after the first hand goes all in on the second hand with the winnings from the first hand. This continues until 2 people are left and they do heads up by going all in until one pushes the other out.

*Note that the people who didn't go all in aren't playing either, they've just left the table after looking at their hole cards.

e: Every now and then there is a nit who thinks they'll just wait out the carnage and jump in with their mad skillz and clean up. No, by the time the field has thinned out they are so far behind on chips they just get put all in every time they bet until the odds take over and they too are cleaned out.
I mean, I've played no stakes poker games that didn't play this way. Why would anyone show up to coin flip for no prize? That seems very tedious.

Imaduck posted:

Free poker websites are terrible for learning how to play poker correctly.
This is almost always true.

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless

twodot posted:

You can definitely run a free poker tournament, and you're still playing poker and winning it will require much or all of the same skill as a tournament you paid to get into (presuming participants actually want to win, games where the people playing aren't actually trying to win aren't typically fun, but that's not unique to poker).

In theory yes. In practice I'm not sure -- I would expect things to go down like described above.

Let me put it another way. There's always at least two kinds of expected value in a hand. There's Monetary EV and Fun EV. The structure of most forms of poker is built around allowing for interesting competitive decisions to be made with regard to Monetary EV. If there's no monetary component left then people will seek to maximize Fun EV. Most people maximize this by yelling "all in." Some people prefer "all in bitch!"

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless
The best tournament I ever played in was a ten dollar GSOP rebuy event. Scotsman, who ran/runs the rakeback site a lot of goons used managed to lose the vast majority of his all in shoves and was in for about seven hundred dollars. I think I had about ninety in but had won more often and eventually we had a pot together where we had maybe 2,000 BB effective stacks. We somehow saw a flop and I pushed the remainder of his stack in the middle, minus one penny. He of course called, keeping one cent back in his stack, leaving himself with the obviously massive Fun EV play of folding for a one cent bet on the turn, which he executed flawlessly.

It's not often that you get railbirds on a ten dollar rebuy but we sure had 'em, given that our average pot was much larger than the buyin for the tournament starting maybe two minutes in. We told them we were anime figurine connoisseurs and the winner of the tournament was going to get a particularly coveted nude tween doll.

mostlygray
Nov 1, 2012

BURY ME AS I LIVED, A FREE MAN ON THE CLUTCH

Sheep-Goats posted:

Sid Meyer said what makes a good game is a lot of interesting decisions...

That makes total sense. I finally understand why it's popular. 5 card draw or Omaha would be a terrible spectator sport.

Mind_Taker
May 7, 2007



I really hope poker finds a good way to implement a shot clock in every major televised/streamed tournament because it really becomes a drag watching events live when every mundane decision takes 20-30 seconds.

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless

Mind_Taker posted:

I really hope poker finds a good way to implement a shot clock in every major televised/streamed tournament because it really becomes a drag watching events live when every mundane decision takes 20-30 seconds.

I don't think there's a way to bring decisions under that timeframe that's fair to competitors -- live poker needs editing to be watchable IMO.

Remember that most of those people aren't getting paid to be on TV, not even indirectly. You're asking them to pay large amounts of money in entry fees and good poker players will avoid bad structures and other tournament issues like the plague. Online they implemented time banks to do this as a sort of compromise and it works there. I know some poker shows have tried to use basically the same system. But in the end having to wait for certain players to over examine their players is just a part of live poker that can't (and maybe shouldn't) go away.

raton fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jul 19, 2016

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless

mostlygray posted:

That makes total sense. I finally understand why it's popular. 5 card draw or Omaha would be a terrible spectator sport.

There have been some PLO cash games televised that came out okay. I don't think Limit O8 will ever be a game for TV. It's usually a pretty good game to play for money in lower stakes settings because most casual players are just terrible at it and these days it's not that hard to find a table of it but whatever.

raton fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Jul 19, 2016

Imaduck
Apr 16, 2007

the magnetorotational instability turns me on

Mind_Taker posted:

I really hope poker finds a good way to implement a shot clock in every major televised/streamed tournament because it really becomes a drag watching events live when every mundane decision takes 20-30 seconds.
We've started to see a few events pop up in major tournaments that have shot clocks and time bank chips. I think a lot of folks are leaning this way, but it'll be a long time (never) before we see it in every tournament.

I'm not totally convinced that live streaming live poker events is the way to go. There's just too much time wrapped up in dealing, waiting for each player, collecting cards, and doing all the other clerical business. Edited poker shows keep the action moving. I'm sure they'll find ways to make it work though. Streaming is pretty new, and a lot of effort is being put into getting it right.

bengy81
May 8, 2010
So, like most other US players, I haven't played since the big crackdown thing a few years ago, but thanks to the OP I'm kind of interested in getting back into online play. Do any of the recommended sites have players in other games like stud or Omaha, or are they mostly just NLHE?

3-5 pl stud was my jam on Full Tilt back in the day...

Imaduck
Apr 16, 2007

the magnetorotational instability turns me on
PLO cash runs pretty regularly on Bovada at a variety of stakes. I've heard that there are some other games that run on America's Card Room, but I don't play on there, so maybe someone else can confirm. Unfortunately, I don't think 8 game or stud run regularly on any of the US sites.

yeah I eat ass
Mar 14, 2005

only people who enjoy my posting can replace this avatar
Are you aware of any site that actively tries to prevent/limit multi-tabling? It drives me nuts trying to focus on one game but the other 8 players all wait until the last second possible to make a move because they have like 20 other tables open.

Jeza
Feb 13, 2011

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

twodot posted:

I mean, I've played no stakes poker games that didn't play this way. Why would anyone show up to coin flip for no prize? That seems very tedious.

When I was bored and at uni I used to play a bunch of that play money poker on Pokerstars. I found that on the giant freeroll tournaments lots of did go all in like Murgos said, although it was never really 90%. Usually 2-3 people on the first hand and a few after that.

Overall people were pretty trigger happy on low stakes "play" money, usually because it gets handed out for free. But at the higher stakes that you either paid for or earned up to, people were only a little bit looser than playing with real money. But it was still noticeable.

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless

Murphy Brownback posted:

Are you aware of any site that actively tries to prevent/limit multi-tabling? It drives me nuts trying to focus on one game but the other 8 players all wait until the last second possible to make a move because they have like 20 other tables open.

No live game in your area?

If you're waiting maybe open a second table yourself to stay busy. No site that I've ever seen forbids multi-tabling. Some sites have different limits on tables -- you can only have four open on Bovada for example.

yeah I eat ass
Mar 14, 2005

only people who enjoy my posting can replace this avatar

Sheep-Goats posted:

No live game in your area?

If you're waiting maybe open a second table yourself to stay busy. No site that I've ever seen forbids multi-tabling. Some sites have different limits on tables -- you can only have four open on Bovada for example.

I'm not nearly confident enough in my German to go to a casino here yet. I'd be fine until someone asks me a question and then i'd freeze and look like an idiot. I think four open is manageable and I sometimes did that on fulltilt, but I've seen/known people who do 12+ and it just doesn't seem fun to me. Might as well write a odds-calculating bot that performs your moves at that point because there's no way you're getting reads on any of the other players that way.

Murgos
Oct 21, 2010

Jeza posted:

When I was bored and at uni I used to play a bunch of that play money poker on Pokerstars. I found that on the giant freeroll tournaments lots of did go all in like Murgos said, although it was never really 90%. Usually 2-3 people on the first hand and a few after that.

Yeah, sorry, 90% was me being dramatic. It doesn't matter though if you can count on even 1 person (much less 2 or 3) going all in on any two cards then your only recourse is also to go all in or fold away your stack. So, it becomes a game of going all in on coin flips until you get enough coin flips your way to build a big enough stack to get to heads up. At that point the heads up can be pretty fun, but not really because there is no risk. You just hop into the next free tourney starting in .01 seconds regardless of if you win or lose.

raton
Jul 28, 2003

by FactsAreUseless
The big freerolls did offer little cash payouts though, right? That at least makes the final table into real poker.

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twodot
Aug 7, 2005

You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Murgos posted:

Yeah, sorry, 90% was me being dramatic. It doesn't matter though if you can count on even 1 person (much less 2 or 3) going all in on any two cards then your only recourse is also to go all in or fold away your stack. So, it becomes a game of going all in on coin flips until you get enough coin flips your way to build a big enough stack to get to heads up. At that point the heads up can be pretty fun, but not really because there is no risk. You just hop into the next free tourney starting in .01 seconds regardless of if you win or lose.
Playing in free online tournaments where there are effectively arbitrary opportunities to play is definitely not a way to get good poker behavior.

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