Phillipine Poker
Making this thread to hopefully help stay motivated, vent at the craziness of live poker in the Philippines, and get some advice on hands.
So far I've played poker in Manila, Angeles City and Cebu. What kind of craziness may you ask? At one casino in Angeles they allow rabbit hunts, and I'm not particularly opposed to it if it's on rare occasion. However you will sometimes get tables with people consistently requesting rabbit hunts after they fold to a 3 bet PRE FLOP!
Insurance is another plague on the game here. Most card rooms/casinos offer insurance on all ins, of course they are taking a healthy cut. This leads to often 5+ minutes on all ins, insurance needs to be recalculated on the turn as well...confusion over outs. They often need to document it with photos. Gets even more fun when side pots are involved.
"English only" at the tables but never followed. This doesn't bother me that much as I've yet to see any situations where collusion looked likely. What does get annoying is the amount of yelling back and forth between typically Filipino players. I've seen them drive away foreign rec players on multiple occasions. Generally ignoring any requests for English only or perhaps taking it easy for 10-15 minutes before resuming.
House players, this one is the one that by far affects the game most negatively. At some casinos close to half the players are house players, probably getting a significant portion of their estimated rake in an hourly wage. This wouldn't amount to much in the USA, but here in the Philippines if you can just play nitty break even or slightly winning poker along with the rakeback you are making more money than 90-95% of the population. This of course leads to terrible games.
My goals are to make a bit of extra cash, play good poker without tilting, and try to have fun.
Starting bankroll of 500,000 pesos (56 pesos to 1 dollar). Daily stop loss of 10% of the bankroll.
Feel free to ask me any questions about the Philippines or offer your own insight.
I've been in Malaybalay for almost a month now so haven't played at all. Don't think there are any poker games here. Will be headed to Manila in a few days and then likely on to Angeles after a short stay in Manila.
