The casino I frequent is drying up...

[Mark1808]

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The room has become like a pool of pirhana after the floods have receded. All the big, slow, dumb fish have been eaten. Even the smaller, more minnow-esque fish are all long gone. No limit caused a feeding frenzy when all the regular fish were suddenly playing a game that was over their head. A few fat pirhana ate some big, easy meals, and the carnage drew even more predators into the kill zone.

But in an isolated pool, there were too many pirhana. No limit is a top predator's game, but an ecosystem without enough prey collapses. That's when things get ugly.

Even the stupidest small fish will eventually wisen up if they never win. If you've eaten up all the dead money, it's inevitable that as long as no limit is the main game spread, the games won't be good anymore. Games in more isolated areas, with fewer influx of new players (i.e. tourists), will see this effect sooner.

Inevitably, balance amongst the fishes will be restored, but where will poker be when that happens?

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Poker is fun and addicting and attracts sick gamblers. If the fish dried up and went away who is Las Vegas making their money off in games of chance with expected -EV? Game selection will always be key but I believe their will always be exploitable action in poker rooms to varying degrees.

[Poshua]

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Poker is fun and addicting and attracts sick gamblers. If the fish dried up and went away who is Las Vegas making their money off in games of chance with expected -EV?

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The thing is that table games are more fun than poker. 85% of your time at the poker table is spent folding, sitting, waiting. Don't get me wrong, I like poker a lot, but the attraction is that it's fun and you can be an advantage player. However, if I could make the same amount of money playing craps and poker, I would spend all my time at the craps table.

So, when bad players figure out that they are, in fact, -EV at poker, they're more likely to go play table games instead, because they are similarly costly and more enjoyable. They're not "busto" in the sense that they are broke and have no money left to lose, but in the sense that they've finally figured out that poker is a bad investment.

That said, while I think the fish are not an entirely renewable resource, I don't think there's an acute overfishing crisis (at least in the northeastern markets). It's more coal than oil-- the world will eventually run out of coal, but I plan to be long dead by then.

[RR]

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Poker is fun and addicting and attracts sick gamblers. If the fish dried up and went away who is Las Vegas making their money off in games of chance with expected -EV? Game selection will always be key but I believe their will always be exploitable action in poker rooms to varying degrees.

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You are assuming casinos will continue to offer poker. With a different demographic playing poker these days the casinos aren't in as much of a hurry to get poker players out of casinos, but when people quit coming in demanding to play "that all-in game on TV" casinos will cut back/eliminate poker tables. In general casinos don't like poker players. They view them as competing for their guests money and they are less valuable than a nickel slot player. They used to be valued about the same as a nickel slot player, but that was when they played 3 coins at a time instead of 45 or 100 nickels at a time.

[Poshua]

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Poker is fun and addicting and attracts sick gamblers. If the fish dried up and went away who is Las Vegas making their money off in games of chance with expected -EV? Game selection will always be key but I believe their will always be exploitable action in poker rooms to varying degrees.

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You are assuming casinos will continue to offer poker. With a different demographic playing poker these days the casinos aren't in as much of a hurry to get poker players out of casinos, but when people quit coming in demanding to play "that all-in game on TV" casinos will cut back/eliminate poker tables. In general casinos don't like poker players. They view them as competing for their guests money and they are less valuable than a nickel slot player. They used to be valued about the same as a nickel slot player, but that was when they played 3 coins at a time instead of 45 or 100 nickels at a time.

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Randy, I think it's a mistake to assume even that poker on TV is a fad that will end. Obviously it won't be as big as it was at its peak, but unlike your typical fad (say cigars in the late '90s) it wasn't a random resurgence of a specific product. Rather, it was that the innovation of the hole card camera finally made poker on TV watchable.

Occasionally, they show old WSOPs on ESPN Classic with no hole card cameras. They are incredibly boring, because you have no [censored] idea what is happening.

Do you still get people in the room where you work demanding "that all-in game on TV"? I feel like, in AC, I see very few players who are confused about the limit v. no-limit distinction.

[Rick Nebiolo]

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Poker is fun and addicting and attracts sick gamblers. If the fish dried up and went away who is Las Vegas making their money off in games of chance with expected -EV? Game selection will always be key but I believe their will always be exploitable action in poker rooms to varying degrees.

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That exploitable action will be far harder to find in the future.

Keep in mind "the sick gamblers" have a lot more fun when much of the rest of the table also consists of sick gamblers. The reality is a uneducated gambler is a lot closer to breaking even and perhaps having fun at table games other than poker; especially as the games tighten up. As the poker tables toughen he loses both to the rake and the other players. In the simpler table games he simply loses to the house edge and is at least treated right by the staff (as opposed to being ridiculed by his opponents).

The kind of tourist I often see at the tables in LA are young kids from out of town who probably read these forums and beat online a couple years back sharing an apartment or hotel (often for the summer). Learning to handle chips and so on is easy for them.

Meanwhile the middle aged chumps (like me I guess) might have to go back to limit.

~ Rick

[steamboatin]

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This why in the pre-boom days casinos would not spread NL. They started spreading it with the boom because people that had never played poker in a casino were coming in demanding it.

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Just like when cigars were hot. Time to start shorting NL.

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Cigars are making a comeback.

[One Outer]

Ugh, people have been saying that this was going to happen for years. And they're absolutely right. There's a reason that NL was never played as a cash game anymore before the poker boom.

Limit games are going to make a comeback, thank god. I see this everyday at Canterbury Park. Just yesterday afternoon I was playing with an old guy that absolutely sucks. He's been playing there for years, and although I don't know his name I can remember playing with him three years ago. He was up like a rack and having a great time. This never happens in the NL games. He would have sworn off poker forever a long time ago if we had NL here.

[hime]

Cigars never went away.

[knifeandfork]

wow this actually turned in to a thread! This thread reminds me a little bit of that old school book i read by George Wallace about" poker a guaranteed income for life " Here in VA we have had very juicy games for a long time now but i have noticed a few more skilled players filtering in. thinkers still get a piece of the pie that has not grown big enough in relation though.
more on track with the thread almost all games here that were nlhe are now 1/2 nlOhigh 1/2 nlhe and i think this shows a trend (that is good) towards people being tired of only nlhe. We get more action in the omaha games and the pots are 70% LIMPED by 70% of the players (at 5/10 given).
I would love to see OESHT as the next big game myself as there is one mixed game now that i drive an hour to get to but its the most profitable game i play in (10/20 limit). that is in part my fault due to a thin bankroll not capable of playing the deep stack games here properly and having to short stack and nit it up. so cheers to limit mixed games being the next big thing
jason

[UncleKraut]

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I think the OP might be in Oceanside, where, yeah, the NL games are evil tough compared to anywhere else. But I play everywhere in SoCal and Vegas, and it's only O'11 that's like that.

As to the comments about limit vs NL, I don't think they apply to the pseudo-NL games that LA spreads, the 5-10 $500 max buy-ins, which are kind of a nice compromise between NL and limit.

And as to the net kids being tough, I think it's a myth. A million billion hands of online poker still provides 0 hands of real poker experience. I play 5/5, 5/10, 10/10 and 10/20 NL all around, and there are very few good young players in these games, and the handful that are good ARE good because they're smart and have good instincts, which they'd have without ever playing online. People either approach the game as something to be studied, or as gambling fun. A thousand hands live, well-thought out (which you have time to do, live), is better experience that a gazillion hands of 10-table click-click-clicking where you don't get to see you opps and learn.

What online does do is create legions of deluded young boys who think they're good at basketball because they win at tennis.

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Yeah the games at Ocean's 11 might be tougher than anywhere else, but the 5-5 at Ocean's is still easier to beat than .1-.25 on Full Tilt.

So not really that tough.