Category: Games

Whiling away the hours by beating friends into submission

Rent

When I go to a cardroom to play poker, I will usually pick up the poker magazines which are available for free there. I think my favorite read in all of them is Mike Caro’s column for Poker Player, which is always focused and insightful. A recent column, “Rent”, happened to discuss a topic that had been on my mind recently.

The core of the article is how poker rooms make money:

So, how does the cardroom or casino make money? Two ways. One is rake. The dealer, acting on the house’s behalf, takes money from the pots. Usually, this is a percentage – often five or 10 percent up to a ceiling, such as $4. Beyond that, in most public cardrooms, no more rake is taken from large pots. The other is rent. With rent, you’re buying your seat, typically by the hour or half-hour, and nothing is extracted from the pots you win.

He goes on to discuss the ramifications of rake and rent.

I was pleased to see that I had correctly figured out that you want the rake to be low relative to the limits at which you are playing. The rooms around here tend to charge a $4 rake at both the 2/4 and the 3/6 limit tables (less if the table is shorthanded, which is rarely the case). Consequently, I decided to stop playing the 2/4 games because (1) My observation is that the skill level is essentially the same at both levels, and (2) The rake is relatively lower at the 3/6 tables. Of course, it might be that my first observation is wrong, but I don’t think so. And of course I could win or lose more money at the 3/6 table than the 2/4 table, but the difference is not enough to matter to me. (I think if I moved to a 6/12 table – the next highest common limit around here – then I’d both face tougher competition, and risk losing more than I want to.)

So I was happy to see the well-respected “Mad Genius of Poker” agree with me on that point.

(By the way, poker rooms in Las Vegas tend to have a slightly different – and better for the player – rake structure. They tend to charge 10% of the pot up to a maximum, usually the same $4 at the limits I play. So in Vegas for pots under $40 the rake is lower. I only mention this in case any readers are surprised at the flat $4 rake I described above. Yes, it really is different.)

But I’m still puzzling out another point he also makes in the article. First of all, he notes that there is a third class of payment to the casino:

By the way, there is another kind of rent game that most players confuse with a rake game. That’s where the dealer position puts up a certain amount of money each hand, say $4, and that goes to the house in advance of the deal. That may seem like a rake, but it isn’t. It’s just rent by the hand, instead of by the hour or half hour.

The time I played at the Lucky Chances casino, they were using this form of rent: In a 3/6 game there was a $3 big blind, a $1 small blind, and a $3 dealer button payment. The $4 from the button and the small blind went to the house, and the big blind went into the pot. At other casinos, such as Bay 101, there’s only a $3 big blind and a $1 small blind, all of which goes to the house.

My thinking is this: If you never put in any money, and lose every time you check in the big blind, then you are paying $7 per orbit (passing of the dealer button around the table) to sit at the rent-per-hand table, but only $4 per orbit at the rake table. So in that case, the rake table clearly seems preferable. Of course, if you’re playing so badly that you never win a pot, then probably you shouldn’t be playing poker.

But what if you do play hands and win pots? In that case, your cost at the rent-per-hand table is $4 per orbit plus whatever pots you win minus whatever you invest in pots you lose. And at rake tables it’s… $4 per orbit plus whatever pots you win minus whatever you invest in pots you lose. So are they exactly the same, really?

Not quite. At a rent-per-hand table, there is $3 already in the pot before any bidding begins, whereas at a rake table you know that the $4 on the table as the blinds will disappear once the flop is dealt, so it’s not really “in the pot”. The other difference is that at a rent-per-hand table there are three players who get a discount to see the flop (two who already have one full bet in, and one who has $1 in), while at a rake table there are only two such players. This probably encourages a slightly looser table, which in theory should be better for the good poker player. On the other hand, the player with the extra bet in has the most advantageous position (in Hold ‘Em), which doesn’t seem like a good thing for the rest of the table.

So which is the better table for the player? I don’t know.

I suspect that Caro’s rent-per-hand scenario is actually different from what Lucky Chances does. Perhaps he means that the dealer’s payment does not count toward the bet, i.e. it’s not truly a blind bet, but a straight payment to the house. I’m still not sure whether this sort of table is better or worse than a raked table, though.

I do know that I feel like I prefer rake games over rent-per-hand games (I’ve never played a rent-by-time game). However, I do not consider myself a good poker player, so my opinion may not hold for people who are good poker players.

(p.s.: I have heard that Lucky Chances was going to change to a rake system over the summer. But I haven’t been back to see if that happened. I actually liked the place; the only reason I haven’t gone back is that Bay 101 is just flat-out much easier for me to drive to.)

And Sometimes, I Play Poker

On our trip to Las Vegas last January, I started playing poker, and have played it from time to time since then. In California, poker and other card games are legal, and the Bay Area features several card rooms. I play low-limit Texas Hold ‘Em, being not quite confident enough to try some of the spread limit games that go up to $100 or $200 around here.

At this point I would characterize myself as a “mediocre” poker player. I am not a winning player, but I play a tight game which keeps me from losing a lot. I actually feel I should loosen up my game a little bit more than I do. On the other hand, I watch people playing a loose game win some huge pots, and then steadily lose them over the next couple of hours. Mostly I envy their confidence, and I’m continually trying to remind myself that the money doesn’t matter to me. (And at these limits, it doesn’t, really. I’ve lost less at poker this year than one can spend on a new iPod.)

Last night I went out to Bay 101 for the first time in a while to play. Bay 101 is clean, spacious, has plenty of parking, and is always busy. (Right now it looks like their non-poker room is being renovated.) I was lucky to get there just as a new 3/6 table opened up, so I had no wait, compared to the 30-to-60 minute wait I usually have. This was the first time I’ve sat at a table as it was starting, so I learned that the players at a new table draw cards and high card starts as the dealer – the most advantageous position. I drew the high card (the Jack of Spades), which was a nice treat.

The table was loose, tending to be passive before the flop, and moderately aggressive after the flop, by which I mean: People who connected with the flop would bet, and other people would fold unless they had good draws. One player who would bet regularly with both good hands and nothing at all, and he won some hands both ways, but also lost quite a bit.

I had a pretty mediocre night. It seemed like when I played a hand, it usually didn’t go anywhere. Only once did I fold after the flop and then regret it, when my pair of 7s on the flop turned into trips on the turn. That was annoying, but since I had only second pair on the flop and was facing quite a bit of betting with few outs, I was annoyed but didn’t feel I’d played it badly. Being annoyed in those circumstances is one of those things I have to work on.

I had one really good hand: I was dealt a pair of Jacks, and everyone bet the limit before the flop. The flop came three undercards, with some straight possibilities. The turn and river left a board something like 3-5-5-8-8, and the guy on my right was betting into it, so I was obviously pretty concerned that someone had a full house. But Slansky says you shouldn’t fold a big pot if you think you might have the best hand, and I wasnt convinced anyone was playing a 5 or an 8. So I called, and I won! Go me!
I finished the night down money, mainly because of one hand where I lost a bundle due to a combination of bad luck and judgment. My feeling is that I still need to play more aggressively, and also perhaps that I need to play a little more loosely, especially when I’m at a table full of calling stations.

One weird thing about poker is that one session isn’t really enough to get good results or bad results due to your play; the variation in cards is too high. So I can have a losing session and feel like I was just unlucky, as opposed to playing poorly. But I can have a few hands where I feel I played really well. This is rather different from most other games I play. Overall I think I’ve played enough hands to know I’m not a good player. But I might yet improve. It’s a hard game to master, though. And I haven’t even played any no limit poker yet (which I’ll probably reserve for when I play tournaments, because playing no limit with my own money is a little too scary for me right now!).

Destroying Poker

Although I haven’t often written about it, I’ve been playing poker recreationally for the last 9 months. I’m not very good, and I stick to low-limit hold ’em poker games in the local casinos and in Vegas, but for the most part I have fun. (Losing $90 in 90 minutes at a $3-6 table would be the “not so much fun” part. On the other hand, I’ve won that much in 2 hours, too, so like I said, mostly fun.)

Anyway, I started playing poker because I wanted to have a game to play in Vegas in which I wasn’t playing against the house, with the odds de facto stacked against me.

One of my plans for this month was to investigate playing poker on-line. For instance, Poker On a Mac is a pretty nifty resource for those of us who own Macs and don’t want to install Windows on them. My plan was to play in some no limit hold ’em tournaments, since the casinos around here only seem to offer fixed limit and spread-limit games, which aren’t really the same.

It looks like I won’t get a chance, though, since the Republicans passed a bill making it illegal to transfer money to on-line gambling sites from most bank or credit card accounts. Actually, weasels that they are, they didn’t pass a separate bill but attached it as an amendment to the Port Security Bill at the 11th hour. The bill – which I think was regarded as one of those “must-pass” pieces of legislation, on to which some legislators love to try to tack unrelated amendments such as this – passed by a 98-0 vote in the Senate.

(The House passed its own bill regarding on-line poker. It passed 317-93.)

Many think that it’s likely that this bill will destroy the on-line poker industry in the United States – even the Motley Fool thinks so – and I’m inclined to agree. One blogger thinks that the on-line poker companies simply flubbed the ball when lobbying Congress.

Another blogger makes some grim predictions about the future of poker in the US. I can’t argue with his reasoning. One implication of his predictions is worth spelling out, since it affects the little casual players like me directly: It’s going to become a lot harder to play poker on-line. And that means that even if there are a few on-line sites which decide to risk the penalties of Federal law, the barriers for players to figure out how to get their money to those sites to play will be too high for most people (the casual or curious players), because they just won’t care enough to make the effort.

I wonder whether this will spill over into card rooms, too. With fewer members of the general public playing on-line, I could see card rooms lose popularity, and possibly increasing their rakes to make more money. The competition there would become stiffer, which in turn could dissuade new players from coming in to play, because the learning curve relative to the average player would become that much steeper.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: Poker at the big casinos is (I’m told) just not as profitable as slot machines. So a general decline in the popularity of poker could cause many of those shiny new card rooms at big casinos to downsize or go away entirely. Which means more players forced to play in less savory joints, which further dissuades the casual player from showing up.

The end result of this legislation is that it’s going to effectively destroy an industry and ruin a fun experience for hundreds of thousands of Americans in the name of… what? Helping those few gambling addicts who aren’t so addicted that they wouldn’t care whether they’re violating the law when they gamble anyway? (The correlation between the on-line gambling bill and Prohibition seems obvious, and I’m not the only one to think of it.)

For myself personally, the law means I’m probably not going to play on-line poker. Even though the players aren’t being targeted by the law, do I really want to take that risk? Moreover, do I want to go through the hassle of trying to get money to and from whichever sites remain active in the US? Not so much. I’ll still play in card rooms from time to time, but I missed my opportunity to get in a bunch of relatively inexpensive practice at no-limit hold ’em.

It’s too bad.

On the other hand, I’m trying to console myself that I really ought to be working on my writing rather than playing poker.