live poker

I'm not sure how qualified I am to answer this, I mainly play 1/2 to 2/5 live in London but it's besides my job so not as a main income. To be fair when I went to Vegas two years ago during the wsop I also found that the cashgames were slightly tougher than the ones in London. The fish/reg ratio here just seems bigger compared to vegas, which kind of surprised me. I mostly played at the Venetian / Ceasars, if anyone knows of a better place to play let me know as I'm going back this summer..

I will review my own hands very critically with two good friends after most sessions and play with a stop loss of 2 buyins (=400bb). I don't really do earning limits, I'll just play until I'm tired which after a working day is usually 5-6 hours and on a weekend could be up to 9-10 hours. Sure it gets frustrating when you play decent and grind up an extra buy-in just to run into a set over set cooler, but the majority of the times I find that there is so much value to be had from the 2-3 fish that I have on each table that it's worth the patience that's required. Playing against these guys is easy but boring sometimes, they'll call any pair / any draw on any board pretty much so you're kind of waiting to make hands otherwise there's not much that can be done to get them off a hand. Luckily they don't pay attention to any of this so you can make bluffs small and value bets big.

I don't see it as stressful at all, I really enjoy playing live - in fact a lot more than online for about 2 years now. Maybe this is because I have a job and don't rely solely on poker any more. I used to and definitely had more stress when it was my main income so I think it was a good change. As for distractions, I actually try to talk to the players on the table as much as possible. I'm stoic during a hand but around that I try to be good company at the table. There are still a lot of recreational players that play these stakes and they usually don't go to the casino to hear chips shuffling for 3 hours. Joeingrams blog also had some discussions about chat at the table it's an interesting read. I never talk about strategy or give them advice but just want to make sure the atmosphere is enjoyable for the fish.

I think some people are just a little ADD going from online to live poker. I just try to watch as many hands as possible, how the people in the hand are acting, their sizing, timing, facial expressions, etc and assign them a range. A lot of this energy feels wasted bc you rarely see showdowns, but if I see a showdown and miss everything leading up to it I feel like an idiot. Making that natural is difficult imo, but when you have that down you can use the time at the table as a time to socialize with strangers or you can always go deeper into technical analysis while you're playing. i.e define everyone at the table's VPIP/PFR and 3b% by counting the hands that go by and who enters them. I don't do that, but I think I have a good feel for what's going on. Some people are very HUD reliant though and counting how many hands people enter the pot with helps them a lot. That's all I can think of right now. Hope that helps.

time to go back to league

I found myself asking similar type of questions post black friday when I was in vegas for 6 weeks trying to become a live poker superstar. I don't think it helped much knowing if I lost 25BIs i would have no money.

I came to the conclusion that anyone that plays live professionally is fucking insane too. I wasn't sure how people could get motivated to drive 20 mins to the casino, play a ridiculously slow pace for 4-10 hours, sometimes have a few big hands decide your entire session and future mindset for the rest of the day/days to come. Me coming from a 24 tabler background to this knowing I could move out of the country was always the crutch I fell back on and didn't work as hard to improve on things that would make me a stronger live player..

I think the first 2 guys that replied in here had some good ideas for a few different ways you can approach it in terms of mindset and ways you can try to keep yourself more focused/locked in during it. I did write something and link to another blog I read that focused around live players and chatting with others at the table which I think was one of the only ways I survived playing live. Once my spirit got down I stopped talking to anyone at the table all together and thats when I was the most miserable as a live player.


Where abouts downtown are you living?

On January 23 2014 07:50 Hoolz_1907 wrote: I'm not sure how qualified I am to answer this, I mainly play 1/2 to 2/5 live in London but it's besides my job so not as a main income. To be fair when I went to Vegas two years ago during the wsop I also found that the cashgames were slightly tougher than the ones in London. The fish/reg ratio here just seems bigger compared to vegas, which kind of surprised me. I mostly played at the Venetian / Ceasars, if anyone knows of a better place to play let me know as I'm going back this summer.. I will review my own hands very critically with two good friends after most sessions and play with a stop loss of 2 buyins (=400bb). I don't really do earning limits, I'll just play until I'm tired which after a working day is usually 5-6 hours and on a weekend could be up to 9-10 hours. Sure it gets frustrating when you play decent and grind up an extra buy-in just to run into a set over set cooler, but the majority of the times I find that there is so much value to be had from the 2-3 fish that I have on each table that it's worth the patience that's required. Playing against these guys is easy but boring sometimes, they'll call any pair / any draw on any board pretty much so you're kind of waiting to make hands otherwise there's not much that can be done to get them off a hand. Luckily they don't pay attention to any of this so you can make bluffs small and value bets big. I don't see it as stressful at all, I really enjoy playing live - in fact a lot more than online for about 2 years now. Maybe this is because I have a job and don't rely solely on poker any more. I used to and definitely had more stress when it was my main income so I think it was a good change. As for distractions, I actually try to talk to the players on the table as much as possible. I'm stoic during a hand but around that I try to be good company at the table. There are still a lot of recreational players that play these stakes and they usually don't go to the casino to hear chips shuffling for 3 hours. Joeingrams blog also had some discussions about chat at the table it's an interesting read. I never talk about strategy or give them advice but just want to make sure the atmosphere is enjoyable for the fish.

i think it's a pretty good answer and agree that the key is don't let poker be your only source of income. with the feeling that your livelihood/prosperity depends on your results on the felt, combined with poker's inherent large variance-to-expectation ratio together with live poker's slow pace of cumulated volume, self-defeating emotional swings are going to be extremely hard to avoid and a living is going to be extremely hard to sustain.. you pretty much HAVE to have either a huge level of savings/investments, or other more secure income streams that are enough to live on, or both, in order to be able to maintain the right mindset required over the long term.

I used to listen to poker podcasts years ago, and the well known limon on 2p2 who is a long-time livegame rounder said the same thing. He has passive income generating investments in local businesses and plays poker because he likes it and likes the extra income, not because he has to or needs the income