Poker in prison....AMA
So I have been playing online since the party poker days and played professionally for a few years before black Friday. Then just mostly for fun. I am in prison at a federal camp for money laundering. I get out in 2026 hopefully. So I just started getting back into poker in here but the games are SOOO much different. The dynamic is very bizarre. People will call river value bets so light because for some reason it makes you a coward if you fold too much and the worst thing to happen to someone is to get bluffed. The whole macho mentality is probably where most of that stems from.
I started a similar thread in live NL asking how beatable 10% take is in a game where high variance games are dealt and got a lot of questions regarding prison and poker. I am at a minimum security camp with mostly white collar guys some of which had American Greed episodes done on them. The field in these games is super soft nobody is positionally aware and nobody is keeping track of the pot sizes. There's only one other online pro who is here for a coke conspiracy he and I deal PLO and NL whenever we have the button the rest of the games are pretty crazy double even triple boards with 5 hole card hands. My out date is 2026 assuming I don't lose any good time. Everyone has a phone here but you can lose good time if you get caught with one. The cops here are too busy chasing down the contraband packs that come over the fence and inmates using K2 to care about poker games.
I grew up in San Diego and have a degree in biotechnology. I have been married 17 years and wife is in law school. I never thought I would be posting on here from prison.
So far Im playing about 25 hours a week at 1/2 am up about $640 in cash apps and about $70 in blue fin bags of tuna. Mostly eat fish for the protein as food here is trash. Cigarettes are banned in prison but they are big money here. An Oz of tobacco sells for about $100 w papers and $80 without lol. It's crazy how lucrative the contraband trade is here. Guys have people go to the store and buy 100 vapes at $10 a pop and sell each vape for $150 it's crazy these guys leave with more money than they came in with. Since it's a camp there's a lot of wire fraud white collar guys who run the tables and run sports books here.
No real gangs at a camp. What few gang members who are here are likely gang drop outs because the higher security prisons have a lot of politics so numbers are very important. If a gang member has security classification points low enough to go to a camp they are advised to get in as many fights and or do whatever it takes to be shipped to higher security if they want to "stay down for the cause." I know it sounds crazy.
The hardest part about adjusting to these games is not being able to run Sims or look at my database for problem hands. Online poker kind of spoiled me in that sense as I have probably played 1M hands online and maybe 2k hands live. I have never done one of these before so I hope that's enough about me for some questions.
