Wade
  • Wade
  • Veteran Member Topic Starter
10 years ago
Music thread got me thinking. Any of you play poker (or other traditional card games).

I grew up playing a game called "dirty clubs" (a variation on euchre, but more fun, IMO) and shmear (sp?). Wanted to play poker, but was limited since my mother could never get over the experience of my father losing all his pay on the ship back from Europe after World War II. (I always wondered if he lost it to Dick Nixon, who apparently was a serious card sharp and more or less coming back from Europe at the same time.)

Played poker on and off from college to grad school, but eventually the list of people I played with died off to nothing. Got busy and missed the main hold-em craze almost completely. Got back in a couple years ago, but still struggling to find games.

Will play just about any game, but:

(i) don't want silly-ass wild-card games or prefer not having ones with weird names like "Chicago" and "Crazy Pineapple").
(ii) Getting much better at NLHE, and slowly better at Omaha, but still would rather play a traditional game without common cards like stud or draw.
(iii) Hi/lo split games have become a lot more fun as I've practiced more.
(iv) I don't care what Vegas casinos spread or don't spread. I don't care that "everyone" (including me) plays NLHE. Seven-card stud, and limit stud in particular, is still *the* game of poker, IMO. And always will be. I currently will travel a 100 miles or a bit more to play NLHE or PLO; but I'd travel twice that if I could find a limit stud game. More if I have a weekend or longer off.

/end rant

I know Foster's wife unit (or was it a preceding wife unit, Dave?) is a really good NLHE player. (Of course, Harrisburg is a bit far for me to go.)

Anyone else into the game?
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)
texaspackerbacker
10 years ago
What, pray tell, is NHLE - or PLO for that matter (other than a terrorist organization)? I checked Yahoo Search, and it wasn't there.

I watched the family poker games from the time I was old enough to know what was going on. When I was 6, my mother went to the kitchen to fix refreshments, and I first got to play her hand. Remember "deuces and jacks, man with the ax, pair of sevens wins"? My first hand ever, I had five queens and got beat by my uncle's pair of sevens. I almost always won. When I was in the army, I wangled an invite to the company NCOs' weekly all night game. The first time, I had crazy good luck and I won $86. The second week, they were hoping I would bet wild and they would get their money back. I had generally poor cards, but I played it close to the vest and still won about $5. They never invited me back hahaha. When I got married, somehow the old adage, "Lucky at love/Unlucky at cards" came true. Most of the times I played, I lost. I've played Texas Hold 'Em a few times - just family and small stakes. Mostly the kids and grandkids were into board games more than cards, though - and now it's all electronic stuff.

Growing up, I also played a lot of Euchre, Five Hundred, Dirty Clubs, and my favorite, Sheepshead (Shafskopf), also Cribbage. When I got to Texas, though, everybody played Spades. Before I got into writing in forums, one of my main fun activities was playing in Yahoo games. I maxxed out several IDs each in Euchre and Spades, not to mention Literati. I still go back there occasionally, but arguing with Dakota, etc. in here and a few other "evil assholes" in other forums is more stimulating to my need for competition beyond physical sports.
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If Anything I Say Smacks of Extremism, Please Tell Me EXACTLY What.
Wade
  • Wade
  • Veteran Member Topic Starter
10 years ago

What, pray tell, is NHLE - or PLO for that matter (other than a terrorist organization)? I checked Yahoo Search, and it wasn't there.

I watched the family poker games from the time I was old enough to know what was going on. When I was 6, my mother went to the kitchen to fix refreshments, and I first got to play her hand. Remember "deuces and jacks, man with the ax, pair of sevens wins"? My first hand ever, I had five queens and got beat by my uncle's pair of sevens. I almost always won. When I was in the army, I wangled an invite to the company NCOs' weekly all night game. The first time, I had crazy good luck and I won $86. The second week, they were hoping I would bet wild and they would get their money back. I had generally poor cards, but I played it close to the vest and still won about $5. They never invited me back hahaha. When I got married, somehow the old adage, "Lucky at love/Unlucky at cards" came true. Most of the times I played, I lost. I've played Texas Hold 'Em a few times - just family and small stakes. Mostly the kids and grandkids were into board games more than cards, though - and now it's all electronic stuff.

Growing up, I also played a lot of Euchre, Five Hundred, Dirty Clubs, and my favorite, Sheepshead (Shafskopf), also Cribbage. When I got to Texas, though, everybody played Spades. Before I got into writing in forums, one of my main fun activities was playing in Yahoo games. I maxxed out several IDs each in Euchre and Spades, not to mention Literati. I still go back there occasionally, but arguing with Dakota, etc. in here and a few other "evil a$holes" in other forums is more stimulating to my need for competition beyond physical sports.

Originally Posted by: texaspackerbacker 



NLHE = "no limit hold'em". The variety that supposedly comes out of Texas.
PLO= Pot Limit Omaha. Texas hold-em involves being dealt two cards and then combining them with three of the five common cards on the board that make the best poker hand. Omaha, on the other hand has each person dealt four private cards; you then use any two of those four cards with three from the common board to make the best hand. (In hi-lo variant of PLO, you use any two to make a hi hand and, if possible, any two (usually not the same) to make a low hand. Effectively, this means you're trying to weigh the relative strength of what other people might be able to put together using the same common cards and cards you don't have in your hand, and compare those possibilities to the six different hands you can put together. In Omaha games, you generally want to get better hands than in most other poker games: a straight or better (sometimes 3 of a kind, but that's risky) for high, an ace and a four or lower for low. I still haven't figured out how you successfully bluff in Omaha.

I'm a grinding probabilities player. That's a big part of why I think Stud the better game compared to the common-card games. They're more about luck and manipulating the other players. Bullying with the deep stack is easier to pull off, for example. Stud, on the other hand, and particularly the fixed limit games, are more about being better at reading the probabilities of cards and knowing the likelihood of one hand being able to beat the other. To me, Texas hold-em and Omaha are too much about gambling and too little about skill.

If I was at the top levels I might disagree, since after you've played a 50,000 hands or so, you and everyone else like you can do the probabs instantly, and grinding becomes grindingly boring. But I'm not and can't imagine being that good. But I am good enough with numbers that, I can do more with the cards exposed in a hand like stud and reduce the impact of the "luck of the deal" more. But in a game where even at the end of a hand you know the location of at most 9 cards (and in Texas hold-em, 7), and where someone with the bigger pile can threaten your entire stack at any point by simply going "all in" or "betting the pot"? That's too much about luck to my mind.

Of course, it may just be that I'm not any good. Given the amount that I've lost when I've played Omaha for money, that may be so. Even with only $1 and $2 blinds, the pot-limit option means you're going to get a fair number of hundred buck or more-sized pots in one evening. I'm getting better, but I still take a bankroll of $400 to one of those games. And it only takes one screw up, or one of many low-probability cards coming up, to lose a real big chunk of that; and I play with guys who don't pot it aggressively.

Which is why the gambling-loving players go for it: the possible "action" in either Texas or Omaha varieties can be huge. Play $1/$2 limit stud at a pretty average level, and $75-$100 bucks is the most extreme you are going to encounter for a 4-6 hour session; and if you play a lot, the average return/loss per session is going to be +/- $25-30. Hold-em and Omaha -- you can get amazingly good pocket cards (paired aces in hold-em; four consecutive straight cards in Omaha), and you can correctly bet, and lose with dismayingly high frequency, 10 times that amount in ten minutes. Dealing myself lots of hands, and playing online for play money, I'm more confident that I'm not going to lose that entire $400. But I still take that amount because there is a substantially large probability that I'm going to lose a $100-$200 stake in the first hour, regardless of how well I play. And when you drive 2 hours to the game, no matter how much you like the group you play with, you don't want to be done in under an hour.

PLO (and Texas holdem to a lesser extent) are, IMO, absolutely crazy games in my opinion. Even if I had a game closer, I can at most take that kind of risk every couple of months, and I only do it because the game in question runs a NLHE tournament first and the most I can lose is $25.

Limit stud, though, I'd be reasonably confident in playing even a $10-20/table without losing $200-bucks or more in a session, and I haven't sat in on a money game in a *long* time.

In one of the online free games I frequent, one of the chat macros you can use to "psych out" (rofl) your opponents will bring up a bubble that says "Afraid to gamble?" To which I sometimes reply, "Yes. I prefer to get the rest of you to do the gambling." Poker has unavoidable gambling/luck components to it. In statistical jargon, the standard deviation of the return is high. But a good poker game, IMO, is one where your level of mental skills can take a lot of that luck out of the equation. And if you are playing against people who think it is gambling involving no more skill than craps or a slot machine, your odds of being the one *not* going home tapped out increase substantially.

It's not well known, but former President Nixon paid for his law school using funds raised by playing poker. But he didn't do it by being *lucky*.



And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)
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