First Field Trip to Los Angeles (longish)

[mrcunningham]

In LA with some free time for the first time since I started learning poker last year, so thought I'd visit some of the card clubs. Since I am a 6-12 player in the Bay Area I tried the Bike, HP, and Hustler. I didn't make it to Commerce since I didn't have enough to play 9-18. My novice impressions:
1. The rake is higher than in the Bay Area. I think $4 rake and $1 jackpot at Bike and HP compared to 3+1 at LC and AJ. Given that I earn ~1BB/hour at 6-12 the extra 25% drop would seem to be significant.
2. I was very excited about playing with all of these LAG player in LA that I have read about on this forum. I was exceedingly dissappointed. Maybe just bad luck, but I played about 10 hours at the Bike on Friday 3-10 pm and Sunday 11pm-1am and I was surprised and dissappointed at how tight and passive the play was. Rarely do you see chopped blinds in the Bay Area, there was at least one chop per orbit at the Bike. Most flops were seen by 4 or fewer. Compare to AJ or LC 6-12 where during the same time periods generally flops seen by 5+. Also, except for a couple hours Friday when there were three good (i.e., better than me!) generally I was raising as much as the rest of the table combined. Most often people would fold to raises, and uncommonly would I get reraised. It was a little better at Hustler, and a lot better at HP with a few LAGgie players. I understand this is a small sample size, but is this standard for 6-12 at the Bike?
3. It was cool on Saturday afternoon at Hustler to see the table in the back with Larry Flynt playing with Phil Ivey, I think Ted Forrest and Cindy Violet. For some reason they were filming.
4. The food was good at the Bike, I had the BiBimBap and Thai fried rice. Cheap too. I didn't sign up for a players card. Didn't want to get junk mail and spam at home from these folks.
5. I was also surprised at how benign the locations were. Based on posts in this forum, you would think the casinos were located in war zones. People make Hustler sound like South-Central. Hustler is down the block from Gardena Memorial. This is an area that historically was settled by folk of Japanese descent from Hawaii. It's not far from the famous Gardena Bowl. This is really not the Ghetto. Also, the Bike has a Starbuck across the street. Starbucks does not build shops in areas where people will not pay for $5 cups of latte. It just seems people get more freaked out about LA than is deserved (see recent post from Lestat about where to live).
6. I was also surprised at how easy it was to get onto a table. I never waited more than 2 minutes during any of the 4 visits. This includes a Friday and Saturday. IN the Bay area we would be talking about a 10-60 minute wait. Were they all at Commerce?
7. In fact, one of the things I liked was the chance to play short handed. I would say that I had the chance to play 5-6 handed for 3 hours of the time I played, esp. at the Bike on Sunday night. In fact when I quit, that was the only 6-12 table, and the highest limit table in the joint. Anyway, it was wierd, since I don't play on line I rarely get to play shorthanded, but I tried to remember what I read in HFAP. Apparently that was enough, because the table didn't adjust. Multiple times I was shocked to find myself stealing blinds and pots with a raise. It has just never happened in the Bay Area.

Maybe just sampling error, but LA poker was not what I expected. Actually it made me feel fortunate to live on the Bay Peninsula where there are easy to get to good games with lower rakes.
MC-