High Rakes are Killing Limit Hold 'em

More than 1 thing can be true. Weird thread cuz everyone is right

I learned to play by playing LS limit in the early 2000s. Though the NL boom was underway for most of that time, limit was huge. At least in CA. I knew many reculars. A few regs trying to make profit. People who barely knew how to play, like my dad, might dip in.

Then: most popular game was 4/8 but there was a lot of 6/12 8/16 and even 9/18. Of course higher stuff too. I had a low income and was fine at those stakes.

Now: about 66% inflation, but stakes haven't moved up.

Then: insane action. You would hear someone say, "cappuccino" a dozen times a session. I once won $1100 in a 4/8 game. Half the table had built massive chip castles.

This meant: stakes were effectively even higher. Games were much more fun for recs. More profitable for regs. Rake mattered less. IMO it was also more fun to be a reg.

Now: it's 4 ways in a 3 bet pot. Wow, what a crazy game!

Then. Idk what the rake was but let's assume $ 100/hr. And it's gone with inflation to $166.

Now: can't have profitable regs, or it's absolute peanuts, especially with static stakes. Just making numbers up, but I think I'm being conservative. A $100 a week hobby in 2004 money is maybe a $50 a week hobby in 2025$.

Big impact on the game for all players. If we've been playing 5 hours there are 3 racks of chips missing from the table.

Lastly, the good players are much better. We stand on the shoulders of 20 years of solvers, training sites, and other stuff.

People who don't work on their games have picked some stuff up by osmosis but the gap is bigger, especially in games like 2 blind hold em which regs can play in their sleep. A new player who studies can catch up fast. A new player who doesn't study will be further behind. Though the stakes are lower.

There might be even more factors. Smart phones reducing the social aspect and the difficulty of being patient, for example.

I still say, if you could snap your fingers and have people used to playing limit Omaha that would be your best bet. You WANT a smaller skill edge and giant pots.

Anyone who has put in time at Boulder Station knows a reg can definitely turn a meaningful profit.

They have 2 tables rn on Monday afternoon with a waiting list of ten. The games are packed with older folks who just want to play cards and words like "range" or "blocker" are foreign. It's the closest thing I've seen to the old days. (I haven't been for a few years though).

they don’t employ silent props at the 4/8 or 40 NL lol

the lowest they do is at 8/16

they don't use them in 40 min/max nl. They use them to fill empty seats and keep games from breaking.

Agree with posters ITT that the premise is obviously true, but it's kind of like saying "higher wages and high food prices are killing fast food." Rake will never go down. As the costs of operating a card room increase, rake needs to increase apace. And that means that people need to be willing to play higher stakes for games to be beatable, and they should do so.

And it's not really that people cannot afford to. An inflation-adjusted 4/8 game from 2000 is roughly an 8/16 game today. I'm sure there's lots of interesting reasons why someone that has been playing 4/8 since 2000 is unwilling to make the jump to 8/16, but trying to keep a 4/8 game viable in 2025 seems to be a fool's errand.

All that aside, would lowering rake increase net revenue for a card room by improving the ecosystem? I'm not sure anyone here can really answer that, except to say that if casinos thought that would work, I think they'd try. Then again, I've seen how a lot of these places are run...

Correct that a 4/8 game game game from 2000 adjusted for inflation would be 8/16 now. The people who are playing 4/8 now are the people who were playing 2/4 and 3/6 in 2000. With few exceptions 2/4 and 3/6 are gone. 1/2 NL still being in a thing is stranger but I get it. I have noticed more and more rooms trying to migrate to 1/3.
The hard part about getting rid of the lower limit games is that people will complain who play those lower games. In a competitive market, if your competition still spreads that game and you stop spreading it, then those players will go to your competition so those games stay around longer than you want.

But yeah overall rake, especially with all the jackpot/promo drops is too high in many small/mid stakes games.

When I turned pro almost 20 years ago, the boom was still going strong, and no-limit hold'em was growing, but limit hold'em was robust. My local cardroom had 3-6, 6-12, 15-30, and 30-60 LHE games going virtually around the clock.

I quit in 2015. When I came back to it in 2018, the 15-30 game had died, and there was basically no path for players to grow from the small games up to the 30-60.

After the lockdowns were lifted, the big game never came back. Now the place spreads just 6-12 LHE and 1-2-3 and 2-3-5 NLHE -- and the 2-3-5 game has a perpetual winner's straddle -- think of playing with a rock -- making it the equivalent of a 5-10 game.

The world has changed. When I first got into poker, every poker room in Nevada could be guaranteed to have a 1-3 or 1-5 spread-limit seven-card stud game. It was the entry-level poker game for everyone. Now, the entry-level poker game is 1-2 or 1-3 NLHE, much bigger games (and in fact as rakes go up, 1-2 is beginning to fade away).

Public poker is being squeezed. The lowest stakes are being rendered unplayable by high rake, and the higher stakes are being rendered unplayable by private/curated games poaching the fun players, turning the games that remain into reg battles where everyone is trying to cooler each other.

what do you think a good player was beating those 1-3 to 1-5 spread limit 7CS games for and what do you think a good 1/2 nl player can make now?

I honestly don’t think we should care very much whether the literal lowest-stakes game in a poker room is “beatable”. Serious poker players shouldn’t be playing the lowest stakes game in the room. That should really be reserved for (a) people who just want to enjoy the social aspects of the game; and (b) people who are just learning the game before deciding whether to take it more seriously.

IMO, the biggest problem poker faces right now is we have no good mechanism for bringing new players into the game. People right now who want to try out poker in a casino or cardroom are in most cases faces with playing 1/3 NL or nothing. This is too high a stakes game for most new players! And this is made much worse by the fact that even these games have a bunch of wannabe pros in them.

Every card room should be spreading and promoting low-stakes limit games. And we shouldn’t be whining about the rake in these games, because these games are not for us.

New recreational players often don't even understand how limit poker works. It confuses them. Everyone understands no limit.

I play in a private room where one side of the room plays small stakes NL with low buy in max, attracting a decent amount of newbs. The other side plays between 10/20 and 30/60 mixed. At least a few times a month, a NL player will ask can I watch a couple of hands. We all say sure. They're always gone by the end of hand 1.

Yes. Generally the limit guys are OMCs who are trying to hit the jackpots.

Well Daniel Negreanu said increasing the rake was good for the game.
Nobody cared.
So it must be good, make the rake higher

the word you're looking for here is "fewer," Mason. Not "less."

We could use fewer comments like this.

Agree mostly with your points. But, we should mention the grave is probably taking more players from these tables than the rake is.

The pool was elderly 20 years ago and was never infused with new blood.

Betting in no-limit isn’t really any easier to understand than limit.
- You can’t just bet any amount in NL. If you are raising, you need to raise at least the amount of the previous bet or raise.
- There are rules about when a single over-sized chip constitutes a raise and when it is a call.
- There are rules about how you stack you chips and which chips need to be in front.
- And there are all several rules about side pots and when the betting is re-opened when someone goes all-in. (These last rules still apply in limit-poker, but they don’t apply very often because people are all-in much less frequently).

I mean, you're right, but people are still fundamentally more familiar with NL than limit. Most novices that have played poker have played NLH, most novices have not played any fixed limit game.

In any case, in my experience it takes people about one orbit max to figure out how betting works in limit. Not understanding the rules or how the game works isn't really the barrier. It's getting people past their objections about the structure of the game ("I can't get anyone off their hand," "it's just bingo," "there's no bluffing," etc.) But that's really neither here nor there with respect to this thread, and i don't intend to derail.

The rake is near unbeatable for the vast majority of players in 1/3 NL games in many rooms, yet that is literally always the most abundant game running. Most recreational players (regs and randoms) are at best vaguely aware of the rake effect , even the ones who mention it and complain about it don’t really realize the magnitude of the rake. The rake isn’t why limit is dying.

NL > Limit to them because
- It’s the popular more known and publicized game for decades now
- They pick poker because they know it’s possible to have an edge, so they play the game where they think they can exercise their edge, not the game full of nits
- They may pick poker because it’s slower and less crazy than table games, but limit is a step to far for most, they’re there to gamble.

For more serious players, there’s less opportunity if they move up than there is in other games. Because limit isn’t as popular, and because the game is much more solved than NL. As you go up edges and game availability decrease more rapidly

You’re right about that!

All of this. NL took over and limit largely died when rake was way cheaper.
You can't force people to play games they don't want to play.

Yes Mason I been fighting high rake for over 20 years..
Back to "playing for a living" lately .. paying like 500 or more a week to, just playing big mtts.

We have both been around poker a good while..

it use to be like 3 max on full tilt..

now its double or triple that

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO SET UP A LOW RAKE SITE WITH SOME CREDIBILITY. .USING LIKE POKER MAVENS OR WHATEVER

I have done this, set up a poker site last month, using Mavens, costs like 400 but i can't say the name, or spam i guess, can i pay u something reasonable to advertise it? if so pm me

but yes I like to talk about how poker is being kind of overcharged and we need to "unionize" to fight the greediness in poker..

I know sites need to advertise etc but a site could take off in time... without advertisiing.. Craigslist did right?

and people just want to charge what people are willing to pay because unfortunately most poeople dont realize its so much long term and takes the fun and profit out of the game... in which esp people like u and me like the game because we like the strategy and also we want to win money

Maybe you could talk the Orleans into starting a 15-30 list. They already have a base of 4-8 and occasional 8-16 games so you can build your pyramid from the bottom up instead of trying to convince Bellagio to lower their rake and then having to undertake the effort of getting all the low stakes players to relocate there.

People have been saying this forever and it's never going to happen. Nobody is going to make a site that is essentially just a printing press for grinders. It makes no sense. It also costs a lot of money to get players to feed the game. Wsex had a rake free model attached to their sportsbook (and their book was huge at the time) and the poker room was an absolute ghost town.

I remember Pacific Poker having higher rake than other sites and horrendous software. And my win rate on Pacific was higher than any other site because the players sucked even more than the rake and software.

3 dollars on FT in 15-20 years ago is double or triple with inflation.

Players are never going to unionize on any large scale bc players are even greedier and more short sighted than the sites.

Nits? No gamble? Jeeze, limit really does have a horrible reputation.

If anything the complaints I hear from no limit players trying to play limit is that you can’t protect your hand. If you want to nit it up, no limit is far more conducive. You’ll get destroyed trying to nit it up in a limit game.