So … did I grab your attention?
Okay, not all poker rooms. And hate isn’t correct, either.
But it is true that I’d rather go to the larger cardrooms and casinos, and play larger limits, rather than go to one of the local joints attached to bowling alleys and restaurants, like what you find all over Washington state and California (see Poker Room roll call blog entry to identify some of these). Here’s why:
Let’s take as an example the room closest to my house, only two or three miles away, Roxy’s Casino in White Center. Roxy’s is actually attached to Roxbury Lanes, a bowling alley on Roxbury Ave. that skirts the southern boundary of Seattle on the west side. At Roxy’s they have four tables, and you can usually find either a $3/$6 or a $4/$8 limit table.
Join me as I sit down at the $4/$8 table , pull out a C-note, and buy a rack of blue-and-white one dollar chips. The cards are dealt to me while I’m waiting for the chip runner, who is one of the dealers not currently at a table. Looking around, I can recognize about half of my opponents. Not by name, but I happen to remember who they are, and usually the way they play. The bearded older guy in a wheelchair is at seat four. He’s tighter than OJ’s gloves. There’s the cheerful black guy in seat seven, he plays pretty loose but has a lot of fun, and tries to make sure everybody else does too. Seat three is that really pretty Asian lady with long, elaborately-decordated fingernails. She’s a really sharp player – remember to watch out for her, and trust her raises. Seat eight is that Asian kid who will play any two cards, and keep at it as long as he manages to snag part of the board (not a bad strategy in limit, to be honest, but one that will give you large swings in profit and loss).
As the dealer passes the cards out – I’m in middle position – there are two limpers when the action gets to me. These players play pretty quickly, and don’t have too much patience for stalling. I see that I’ve got a Ten of Diamonds and a Two of Clubs. Since I’m not Doyle Brunson, I fold. Around this time the chips are delivered to me. Four more limpers stay in the hand, including the blinds, for a total of six players. That puts the pot at $24.
The dealer puts the flop on the board. As he’s waiting for the players to react, he grabs three chips from the pot and puts them to the side; that will be the rake for this hand. He takes a fourth chip and slides it into a little slot close to the rake door. That chip gets added to the jackpot, which is awarded to any lucky player who manages to get a four of a kind or better.
The hand plays itself out – the black guy won – and as the pot gets pushed to him, he tosses a couple of chips to the dealer for a well-earned tip.
Can you tell yet what bothers me about all this?
Three dollars go into the rake. A fourth goes into the jackpot black hole. Two more end up in the dealer’s tip jar. That’s six dollars that depart the table during this hand – never to be seen again!
Every hand . . . every deal . . . every board . . . five or six or seven more dollars disappear from the table. By the time the button has made a complete orbit around the table, that’s somewhere around $50-$60 that disintegrate from play. That means that just to keep the same number of chips on the table, somebody needs to do a $50 rebuy (or a new player comes into the game with $50). Fifty new dollars have to appear every round.
Now, I’m not picking on Roxy’s. That’s just where I happened to be when I figured this out. Every poker room in the world that spreads $3/$6 or $4/$8 or whatever is going to inflict this experience on the players. Some places rake $4 or even $5 from each hand! That’s an astonishing handicap to overcome if you want to walk away winner from a table like that.
So what’s the solution?
Find a home game, where there’s no rake.
Play higher limits, where that kind of vigorish isn’t as large a percentage of the total pot.
If that isn’t practical, then I suppose just realize that it’s happening, and accept that it’s just the price of playing poker.
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