Player Crushing Our Home Game (2 Viewers)

[acezag]

Thank you for all of the feedback!

Background: This game has been running for about 1-1.5 years. We started at 0.50/1 and somehow grew to a 5/5 game. Everyone is around the same skill level (I'm pretty sure money was going around in circles). But the past 3-4 months have been much different, with lots of money funneling towards the strong player - and many of the weaker players getting extinguished.

1. I'm not worried about cheating. We have a dedicated dealer and there does not seem to be any funny business.
2. The player has mentioned that they started receiving coaching. I can see a lot more calculated aggression and pressure on everyone. I personally am fine with it, I enjoy the challenge, but I do see other players getting stacked/wiped out.

Originally my biggest concern was the health of the game. But as I read through everyone's responses, it sounds like this is unavoidable. As the game evolves, players will improve and everyone will have to adapt or be willing to tolerate this - "quit whining and get better"

I'll also try reaching out to the players that haven't come in a while to see what happened.

I think a lot of our responses assumed you were talking about small stakes casual home games - trading a hundred bucks a night kind of thing.

5/5 can be trading paychecks in a single hand. That's really a different beast, especially if someone is paying a pro so that he can take more of those paychecks. I'm not putting that game together so that one person can feed his family.

 

[Gus]

Good to see this thread and the various dynamics of home games. I'm hoping to start my own eventually (need to remodel the basement first) but am poking around trying to find a regular game in town.

The thing I want to avoid most is a game with more than one or two legit sharks. I'm happy for you that you're extremely good, but unless you're a raucous good time I'm not interested in getting smoked every time. I remember sitting down to a 1/2 table in Vegas around noon once and there were like 7 players there all wearing headphones or sunglasses sitting on stacks of $1k+. Got one hand, realized these were all grinders who had been there since the night before and so I just left.

I would like to have fun playing poker with other people who want to have fun. If anyone's there to genuinely make money it's probably not the game for me.

I just listened to this "Brazil God" interview on Skill Game Mafia and he said something that really resonated. The lower/mid stakes players were all poker players. The high stakes players were all successful people who liked to play poker. Therefore playing high stakes was playing with a group of fun interesting people and playing low/mid was just boring grinders trying to beat you.

With regards to the original post, I can sympathize with people not wanting to continue because you know what, the game doesn't seem fair anymore.

 

[Jimulacrum]

The thing I want to avoid most is a game with more than one or two legit sharks.

The challenge is that the sharks tend to accumulate, while the fish gradually drop off and need repopulating, especially if the stakes are significant to them.

 

[merkong]

We started at 0.50/1 and somehow grew to a 5/5 game.

Somehow? I wouldn’t know how to do it if I wanted to.