High Rakes are Killing Limit Hold 'em
A successful poker room is like a pyramid. That is, there are more small games than large games and the regular small stakes players tend to feed into the larger games.
However, in small limit hold 'em games, the rake is now so large, that it's very difficult to develop regular players. (Thus, you don't have the players to start games and keep games going.) This result can lead to an upside down pyramid which in turn leads to less games in the future. And the answer to this is to reduce the rake in the small limit hold 'em games.
(In the small no-limit games, even though the rake is also high, it's still not high enough that a core of regular players can't develop.)
Right now we can see this in The Bellagio Poker Room where I usually play (which in general is well run). There are almost always more $30-$60 games than $15-$30, and no games of smaller size.
For more discussion, see my Cardrooms book where I address what I think are appropriate rake sizes for small limit hold 'em games:
https://www.amazon.com/Cardrooms-Everyth...
All comments are welcome.
So the school bus driver making 40K ---should be making $80K in 25yrs? The teacher who's making 45K ---should be making 90K in 25yrs? It doesn't work like that! Yes, for some people the statement holds true, but for most it's a joke.
It does work like that in most of the exact sort of job you are mentioning. Typically public-sector employees get a cost of living increase of 2-3% per year, regardless of any additional increase for performance or promotion. If you get an extra 3% per year, you will more than double your salary in 25 years. And a bus driver who is making 40k per year today was indeed probably making around 20k in 2000.
A successful poker room is like a pyramid. That is, there are more small games than large games and the regular small stakes players tend to feed into the larger games.
However, in small limit hold 'em games, the rake is now so large, that it's very difficult to develop regular players. (Thus, you don't have the players to start games and keep games going.) This result can lead to an upside down pyramid which in turn leads to less games in the future. And the answer to this is to reduce the rake
an average player age of around 70 is killing limit holdem. see also: zero stud games, zero lowball games. the games died because all of the players LITERALLY DIED. Capped NLH is an incredibly flawed game which requires sklanskys "invisible antes" to continue existing but people keep showing up and putting those antes in so here we are! But even with NLH the games get smaller every year and the average age of a big losing player gets older and older with no big losing younger players to replace them.
an average player age of around 70 is killing limit holdem. see also: zero stud games, zero lowball games. the games died because all of the players LITERALLY DIED. Capped NLH is an incredibly flawed game which requires sklanskys "invisible antes" to continue existing but people keep showing up and putting those antes in so here we are! But even with NLH the games get smaller every year and the average age of a big losing player gets older and older with no big losing younger players to replace
Average age of 70? LOL. I play a ton of mid stakes Limit Holdem live and I can count the number of regs over the age of 60 on one hand.
How often do you want them to win?
Even if they’re real terrible -20bb/100 players, they win/break even almost half the time (40%) in a 200 hand sample.
This is all explained in my Cardrooms book. They should, on average, win 1 out of every 3 four hour sessions that they play. They'll still lose in the long run, but they'll have enough wining plays to encourage them to keep coming back.
The problem is really not that rakes have increased. They have mostly just kept up with inflation. The bigger problem is that the stakes of games have not increased to also keep up, because they have all been swallowed up into low stakes NLHE.
When I started playing, a typical card room would spread like three stakes of NLHE, at least four stakes of LHE, and a handful of O8, stud, or mixed games. Now 90% of the games in almost every room are 1/3 NL. There isn’t even a possibility for most players to discover if they could be winning players in any other game, or even if they like any other game.
Yeah, maybe a room spreads a single 3/6 or 4/8 LHE game for the purpose of appeasing a handful of OMCs. But why should anyone care if they can win at this game? If you actually work and become a winning player, there’s no higher game to move to, so no one who want to become serious about the game would want to invest the time to try it.
The problem is really not that rakes have increased. They have mostly just kept up with inflation. The bigger problem is that the stakes of games have not increased to also keep up, because they have all been swallowed up into low stakes NLHE.
When I started playing, a typical card room would spread like three stakes of NLHE, at least four stakes of LHE, and a handful of O8, stud, or mixed games. Now 90% of the games in almost every room are 1/3 NL. There isn’t even a possibility for most player
Rooms are spreading what people want to play. They'd love it if they could spread more limit games.
There are rarely any limit holdem games above 20-40 at commerce since they were forced to pay a 4 handed jackpot last fall due to a legal demand letter and in response raised the qualifiers and doubled the drop.
All the 40 and 60 games went to the bike. But I’m at commerce right now and would love to say hi, old guy (but still under 70) at seat 5 in the 100 mix if you are still here.
There are rarely any limit holdem games above 20-40 at commerce since they were forced to pay a 4 handed jackpot last fall due to a legal demand letter and in response raised the qualifiers and doubled the drop.
All the 40 and 60 games went to the bike. But I'm at commerce right now and would love to say hi, old guy (but still under 70) at seat 5 in the 100 mix if you are still here.
I hadn't heard about this, very interested to know more about it.
If you have details, maybe you could post in the Commerce thread?
There are rarely any limit holdem games above 20-40 at commerce since they were forced to pay a 4 handed jackpot last fall due to a legal demand letter and in response raised the qualifiers and doubled the drop.
All the 40 and 60 games went to the bike. But I'm at commerce right now and would love to say hi, old guy (but still under 70) at seat 5 in the 100 mix if you are still here.
games leave commerce, then come back, happens whenever other casinos do huge promotions, this time a little different since commerce screwed themselves by messing up the jackpot and destroying the high limit poker area, maybe high stakes poker at commerce really is over. Im at commerce most days from around 10 until around 3. Including today!!!
I hadn't heard about this, very interested to know more about it.
If you have details, maybe you could post in the Commerce thread?
this is not what commerce execs say happened. they say they didn't have a current license for the aces over tens jackpot so they had to revert back to the quads lose jackpot they were licensed to spread until they get approval from the gaming board. Their story makes a lot more sense since the commerce doesnt pay the jackpot, THE PLAYERS DO, the commerce doesnt care at all about paying it out as long as it happens at the rates they predicted because they have already raked all the JACKPOT DROP money they pay out. The commerce wouldn't destroy the entire top section by changing the jackpot payout just because they had to pay one 4 handed jackpot, paying that jackpot cost them ZERO, losing 5-7 games daily to bicycle club is costing them millions.
I hadn't heard about this, very interested to know more about it.
If you have details, maybe you could post in the Commerce thread?
this is not what commerce execs say happened. they say they didn't have a current license for the aces over tens jackpot so they had to revert back to the quads lose jackpot they were licensed to spread until they get approval from the gaming board. Their story makes a lot more sense since the commerce doesnt pay the jackpot, THE PLAYERS DO, the commerce doesnt care a
One would think, but I was there and the story I got differs. I was at an adjoining table when it hit and they were told the jackpot isn’t valid 4 handed. Which is the rule as it had always been related whenever I played there.
What I was later told by a player who participated in the jackpot was that the guy who would have gotten the big end then searched the Commerce website for the jackpot rules and found a page with the rules that didn’t disclaim jackpots for 4 handed play. It appeared the rules had been copied from another room (the bikes iirc) without being edited. The player had his lawyer send the bike a demand letter with the publicly available page, and the bike then paid the jackpot.
This triggered them doubling the jackpot drop and switching to quads as qualifiers. I was staying at Commerce almost every weekend last summer/fall putting in the 35 hours every weekend in the 40 LHE games. They treated me great, not just the floors, but the poker manager and front desk staff too, but I was forced to switch to Bike when all my games moved there.
BTW: The Bike made its jackpots harder too recently, and just a week ago took them off the 60 games. So far hasn’t seemed to hurt the 60 at all. The 40s seem sparser (though I only play them briefly now while waiting for bigger games so take my census with a grain of salt).
Anyways back to the original topic. The mid stakes LHE player pool at the bike is almost entirely regs from Commerce, and age ranges are same. I can only think of two 40/60 regs that I’m sure are over 60, dozens are in their 30s-50s. I think a better perspective isn’t that the player pool is too old, but too small and never seems to have any new blood to replace older players who stop playing.
So maybe i need you to teach me how not to be such a huge PLO fish in case my games die before i do.
No the difference is they don't have enough bad players who actually want to gamble in their player pool.
If more bad players liked limit hold em there would be a lot more limit hold em games. It's that simple.
It is the fish that determine what games get played. The regs go where the money is. That is why everything went to limit poker in the 80s and 90s, as fish wanted to play bad and not bust out. Then NLHE because fish saw it on TV. Same now where the whales don't want to play NLHE against GTO types, etc. So the high stakes games now are mostly PLO or mixed games.
I also think that poker rooms would be much better off with lots of limit games instead of lots of no-limit games. One reason is that the dealers will do better tip wise.
How is a poker room better off with having lots of dead spread limit games (because there aren't enough players to fill them) than active NL games?
Point is, casinos will run whatever the players demand. If there is enough demand they will open anything.
I get that poker rooms can encourage certain games, but that doesn't make up for the fact that there has to be a market of players who actually want to play these games.
Every poker room I have ever seen that has low limit LHE, the tables are filled with the same elderly regs who aren't interested in moving up and are just there to pass the time. That is not the audience needed for a booming poker economy
You need both. The regular players help to start games and keep them going. The bad players pay for everything.
This might be true for smaller market poker rooms, but is most definitely out of date for larger poker rooms.
When there is a large market (such as low limit NL holder in Florida, Texas, California, and Vegas) regs are not needed. Games will start on their own without regs simply because there are enough players looking to play at a given time.
This is the point. Having games with low rake is certainly better than having empty tables. Plus, if it helps to create regular players that can feed into other games, it's even better. But this won't happen over night.
This is true to a limited extent. If the low rake games don't lead to business at other games than they are a waste.
Poker is barely profitable under the best circumstances. Any argument that requires a poker game to be a loss leader for other action isn't going to get a lot of leeway.
Go into a large poker room and count the number of winning players sitting at the tables compared to losing players. You should see many more winning players than losers. What happens is that a player who plays lots of hours and wins should count as many more players than someone who only plays a few hours and loses.
You're making an argument that I hear all the time and is wrong. You need to consider how much the winners play compared to the losers.
I don't think this is even close to true.
I think poker thrives because there are lots and lots of players who are mild losers but are able to mentally fool themselves that they are winners. They play for lots and lots of hours and lose a moderate amount but if you asked them they think they are winners.
When pressed about their actual results (i.e. if you are a winner, why are you constantly adding to your bankroll?) they will make excuses (i.e. I am running bad. I would be winning except for those times I played bad. Etc Etc.)
It doesn't matter if the recs care about the rake or not. What does matter is if the game in question can over time develop regular players who will help start games and keep games going.
This is true, but for reasons thay go against your inital point.
Developing regular players who help start games and keep them going does not mean they are winning players.
The bolding is mine.
Part of the problem here is that poker room managers have to deal with casino executives who know little about poker, and these are the people who don't want to reduce the rake in any games.
I don't think this is as big of a problem as you think it is.
I think your information is 20 years out of date. The world has moved on.
As I've tried to point oout in this thread, in my opinion, this is wrong. The small games should allow a few players to become regular players who will then try to move up and feed the larger games. The high rakes today in limit poker stop this.
I think this is a misreading of the modern market.
Higher limit games thrive on players who are willing to drop X amount of money in a casino and they choose to do it on poker. These players didn't come up through the ranks, they earned their money elsewhere (business, crypto, inheritance, whatever).
I think you are used to an old world environment where the only way people got experience in poker was to play and grind through the stakes. Now a days there are faster, more efficient ways for people to play higher limits.
Nowadays, people play in college, or bars, or at home games, and can get a decent familiarity with poker. A bit of Googling will get them better, close enough in skill that they can now play in higher limit games without completely looking out if place.
They are still long term losers and attractive to high limit players, but not embarrassingly so.
I think the predominance of poker everywhere (easily accessible) has made it easier for both fish and grinders to short circuit the idea that you have to grind up levels at poker.
Instead, people play poker at the levels they are financially comfortable playing.
It's terrifying that you could be so out of touch with reality.
Yes, I would assume income would rise....for some! but even then, your average person isn't going to double what they were making.
So the school bus driver making 40K ---should be making $80K in 25yrs? The teacher who's making 45K ---should be making 90K in 25yrs? It doesn't work like that! Yes, for some people the statement holds true, but for most it's a joke.
I don't think you understand basic economics.
It is the fish that determine what games get played. The regs go where the money is. That is why everything went to limit poker in the 80s and 90s, as fish wanted to play bad and not bust out. Then NLHE because fish saw it on TV. Same now where the whales don't want to play NLHE against GTO types, etc. So the high stakes games now are mostly PLO or mixed games.
exactly it's not rocket science. All you can do is offer a game, if people don't want to play it you can't make them.
If a casino offers certain slot machines and nobody plays them then they take them out. Poker is no different.
Rooms have tried things that didn't work- like electronic tables or Aria trying a table with 2 dealers dealing 2 hands at a time. It didn't work. Nothing wrong with trying something to see what happens. People overwhelmingly just aren't interested in playing limit hold em.
I always preferred NL and I think it was more a lack of demand than rake that killed Limit games on the sites I play/played on. I don't play live so I would like to ask if limit games run well or at all in that scene?
It does work like that in most of the exact sort of job you are mentioning. Typically public-sector employees get a cost of living increase of 2-3% per year, regardless of any additional increase for performance or promotion. If you get an extra 3% per year, you will more than double your salary in 25 years. And a bus driver who is making 40k per year today was indeed probably making around 20k in 2000.
You sound crazy! So a bus driver in 2000 making 40K -- should be making 80K in 2025? nonsense!
