[jjshabado]

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Does the no max buy in at the 1/3 game make the game play much bigger than it is? What are standard opening raises? What would you say an average buy in is? What would you recommend buying in at? How do you anticipate the competition being over New Years?


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I was going to talk about this game in my TR, but I'll do it now.

The 1/3 game is played with $3 chips which makes it kind of different. It took me about an hour or so to really get use to the bet sizing and chip stacks. 3 is not a nice number, but once you get used to just thinking in terms of chips it gets pretty easy.

I usually play 1/2 with $5 chips and I found the 1/3 game played noticably smaller. While I'm use to $10-$20 preflop raises the 1/3 game had standard preflop raises to $9-$15. Each street compared similarly with the 1/3 game being typically smaller but still more chips.

I found this structure led to some interesting changes. A limped pot preflop would usually have $12-18 in it (compared to 8-12 in 1/2) and then a standard flop bet of $12 (compared to $15 or 20 in 1/2) had a pretty good chance of taking the pot down. The bigger preflop pot and smaller flop bet led to a great opportunity to practice my LAG game because smaller $ value bets seemed to have a greater effect from the multiple chips. Maybe I just had a particularly weak-tight table.

I didn't find that the no-max buy-in had a big effect. In fact I only saw two people buy in for more than $300 and they were both very good. Most people had stacks between $100-$300 and I think I only saw 4 or 5 pots greater than $250 in my 14 hour session.

Overall I found it really fun (lots of chips always is) but not as profitable as a 1/2 game, and definitely not as profitable as the 2/5 game at Bellagio was on the weekend.