The State of Live $1-$2 No Limit Hold’em

While at this year’s World Series of Poker, I took the opportunity to play in quite a few different $1-$2 No Limit Hold’em (NLHE) games at casinos all over Las Vegas. I also watched some friends of mine who were out for a quasi-annual pilgrimage to poker Mecca. In short, I feel like I got a good snapshot of the $1-$2 NLHE action in Las Vegas.

Of course, this game is crucially important – it is the “default” poker game played in casinos all over the U.S. now. What used to be $1-$5 Spread Limit Seven Card Stud and became $2-$4 (or $3-$6) Limit Hold’em is now $1-$2 NLHE. If you walk into a random small poker room in a U.S. casino, the most commonly spread (if not only) game will be $1-$2 NLHE.

While there were certainly plenty of games and plenty of interest, I’m not completely comfortable with the overall state of this bellwether game right now.

First, I’m not sure the game is beatable. Many casinos are taking 10% rake up to $5 (i.e. the rake is capped when the pot reaches $50 – not hard to do) plus a dollar for a bad-beat or high-hand jackpot. Now add a dealer tip and you have $5 to $7 leaving the table every hand. Shuffling machines are becoming the standard; with them, seeing 35 hands per hour is not uncommon. 35 x $6 = $210 disappearing from the table every hour. That’s over two minimum (and common) buy-ins siphoned off each hour. Do that for four hours and every person in an eight-player game has donated a buy-in. Players’ bankrolls really aren’t up to that.

Second, well, I hate to say, “I told you so,” but I told you so. Six years ago, in the third edition of “Winning Low Limit Hold’em,” I wrote that I didn’t think the growing trend toward No Limit Hold’em was good for the game overall. Sure enough, I saw many novice players dump one or two buy-ins in situations where they didn’t need to get broke. Usually, it was because they couldn’t let go of a big pair when every indication was that that one pair was no good. Then, frustrated with the entire experience, they stood up and left. They may well have gone to the blackjack or craps tables where they don’t have a chance either, but at least the money bleeds away slowly and they get to enjoy the gambling experience for a while.

Note that if they were playing Limit Hold’em, these errors would be far less costly. A grossly overplayed big pair might cost you $50 in a $3-$6 Limit Hold’em game rather than $100 or $200 in NLHE. So, people who should have a learned a painful but non-lethal lesson were gone from the game.

Third, those who benefited from the double-ups often fled the game for a similar reason: they were afraid of losing all of their chips in a single hand gone bad. This was particularly noticeable when a player won a high-hand jackpot. In one game I played, one of our players hit a straight flush and was rewarded with a $600-ish jackpot. He wasn’t the strongest player at the table and I was delighted. Not so much because I thought that I’d win the entire $600 (or even any of it). But, I thought that much of that $600 would come back onto the table and get spread around, enriching the entire game.

Bad read. The young man left the game almost immediately after hitting the windfall, but left his chips there for us to admire. Then he came back, played a couple of orbits of the button without voluntarily putting a single chip into the pot and cashed out.

It saddened me to see so many players dipping their toes into the live poker pool only to leave in frustration (at losing) or fear (of losing a big stack). So, with that, I offer four suggestions that may help.

1. To the players: Be smart consumers. Some rooms cap their rake at $4, some cap it at $5. There was absolutely no correlation between the rake cap and the quality of the poker room. $1 may not seem like a big deal, but an extra $25 per hour makes a difference in stacks around the table. Similarly, I encourage you to avoid rooms that have high-hand or bad-beat jackpots (there are plenty). That’s just more money leaving the table and, as I showed above, even if some of it comes back, it rarely stays. Furthermore, I will bet serious money (thousands of dollars) that the rooms are taking an “administrative fee” from the jackpot drop.

2. To the players: Don’t play small pots. Particularly in the high-rake rooms, you simply can’t fade the vig. Consider this: you make a very reasonable opening raise to $7. Two people call. The flop comes and you like it (or don’t). You bet $15 (about 60% of the pot). You get one caller. You like the turn (or like two-barreling), so you bet $30; your one opponent gives it up. Congratulations, you’ve won a $54 pot. Well, not really. The house took $5+$1 and you threw the dealer a dollar. That’s 13% of the pot, 22% of your profit.

Or, suppose two players get all-in pre-flop for $50 each with Q-Q versus A-Ks. The official stats on the race are 53.8% to 46.2%. But guess what – when the house gets its $7, there’s only $93 to win. The ladies are exactly breakeven in this race; the A-Ks loses a full $7 (14%) of his $50 investment.

Moral of the story: try to win fewer pots, but make them bigger.

3. To the poker rooms: seriously consider capping the action in your lowest stakes games. That will protect the players, keep them in action longer, and encourage somebody who has won a bunch of money to stick around. This procedure is already well established on the internet and in the very biggest live games going on in your town. If I were running the poker room, I think I’d set the cap at 100 big blinds ($200 in a $1-$2 game). So, no player can contribute more than $200 to a single pot. That still produces adrenaline-pumping pots.

4. To the poker rooms: let the players run the board twice if the pot is over some amount (e.g. 100 big blinds). Yes, it slows things down and you get in fewer hands blah blah blah. But, it also dramatically increases the chances that instead of one busted player leaving and one doubled-up player about to leave, you’ll have two relieved players who got all that excitement “for free.”

There’s also one general comment I’d like to make to poker room managers: I saw too many instances where it seemed that the poker room’s procedures and rules were set by the regular players. This is a bad idea. I’m all in favor of listening to your customers, but we are a unique business: some of your customers want to eat some of your other customers. It’s like letting the lions decide which cages at the zoo will be open when.

For instance, your regulars will probably squawk at the idea of capping the betting action. That’s because they want to get all $350 from the guy who can’t lay down pocket kings. But, you want that guy to stick around longer (and, yes, pay more rake). Use your best judgment about what’s good for the overall game and your whole player community – not just the few guys who are in your game six days a week.

Lee Jones is the Card Room Manager for Cake Poker and has been in the online poker business since 2003. He is also the author of “Winning Low Limit Hold’em,” which is still in publication over 15 years after its first printing.