OP
OP
Windwalker
4 of a Kind
I'm curious, even though that's not your type of game, does it attract the fat wallets that you can just dismantle? Or are there relatively good players there?
Off topic, I hear there are lots of poker games in Jersey that feature pork roll, bourbon, and bad movies if you're ever in town
As far as I can tell, there are 5 types of players at these “private” high stakes ($10/$25 to $100/$200) games in LA. Depending on the game, there is an over-indexing of one or two types of players.
1. Pros: people who only play poker for a living. Spend months away at a time in Vegas, are tight-aggressive players, and some well known faces if you watch some of the livestream shows. A hallmark of these players is that many of them are simultaneously playing on their phones or iPads on Pokerrr2 or Pokersbros while in the game.
2. “Recreational Richies” — people who are super wealthy (a lot of them, for some reason, are in the cannabis space) and love the camaraderie, and play 1st level thinking type poker - calling stations that occasionally have big nights because of sheer luck. Think that any two suited cards is a calling hand pre-flop; 5-bet on the flop with top pair; you get the type.
3. “TRTF”s: These are players who understand poker, can read others well, and know when they could be beat, but very hard to bluff them out of anything, because they’re “too rich to fold”. Very dangerous player type, if you’re trying to make a move when you’re stuck. Prone to dozens of “hero calls” every night.
4: “High Stakes Wannabees”: Players who absolutely don’t have the bankroll to play these games, but are decent poker players, who buy in for the absolute minimum, and often get felted because they don’t realize that types 2 and 3 exist at these games. They’ll do 1.5 buyins and leave with shell shocked looks on their faces, mumbling over and over again, things like “you called on the flop with that?!!”
5. “Fishskins”: They look like they’re a #2, but in actuality, they’re using a lot of math and table reads to control post-flop pot sizes and action, showing hands strategically, and slotting players into appropriate categories. Look like they’re playing any two cards, but in actuality, there’s some strategy behind what’s happening.
I think One of the reasons I get invited to a lot of games is that I look like a #2 that just gets lucky. I don’t play the same game enough and consistently for anyone to really see that I win too consistently for it to be just luck. That’s my theory, anyway.
. hard pass for me.
