[Former Spank E]

Excellent! My favorite answer is that limit allows people the illusion they can play at "limited" risk (pun intended). Naturally, my asking why limit hasn't gone away entirely was facetious, as I realize that even games which HAVE "dried up and blown away" took years, decades to so do (see draw poker). The chess analogy, however, does seem like comparing apples and oranges--yes, I know they are both games, but then so is hockey and there is no reason to believe that a new poker form would replace an entirely different game just because both are games.

I probably really wanted to get at why good players let themselves in for so much psychological brutality--bad beats are not fun and the energy deployed philosophizing about "in the long term..." and "over time..." etc. doesn't seem worth it to me anymore. I mean, why hate even a single second of your job if you don't have to? Even by the time I had moved "up" to 4-8 limit I considered the prospect of playing a 1-2 limit game akin to dental surgery without an anaesthetic. Yes, I realize that, "in the long term, I'm the one making money from my more consistently correct decisions," and that "over time, they're paying me as a result of making -EV decisions." It's just that, with the tidal wave of newbies who think they've learned about NL hold 'em from watching heavily edited, 6-person final tables on the Travel Channel, I can barely think of a rationale to willingly subject myself to the bad old days of watching half-wits make even so much as a shekl at my expense by playing like fools. Just venting!

Thanks for your outstanding reply.