Poker Site

There are many players who go down the live poker route because they want to experience the thrill of playing live. Playing live is still exciting but you need to remember that when you play live in a casino setting then you are being charged for the privilege of doing so. I have not played live poker in a casino setting for eight years now and I have no frets about that whatsoever for several reasons. Firstly let us look at the earn rate of a very good live player at a level like £2-£5 no-limit hold’em. Based on the benchmark earn rates for many players at this level then a good solid winning player could be making as much as 8bb/100 hands.

This means that they are making £40 for every 100 hands that they play. In online poker then with this kind of earn rate then you would be seeing possibly several hundred hands per hour. However if you were on a relatively slow game because of dealer inexperience or players arguing about pots and rules etc and misdeals then you may be seeing as little as 25 hands per hour. So this £40/100 hands earn rate needs to be divided by four and so the hourly rate is now only £10/hr as it would take a live player in this situation four hours to see 100 hands.

This is still winning and doing very well except for one very important factor! This is to do with the casino table charge which casinos tend to charge every hour. In this instance then the casino charges £10/hour and this wipes out the earn rate for this player so that they are breaking even. When you factor in the costs incurred in travelling then they are losing money despite earning a very impressive £40/100 hands. So you can see now why I do not play poker cash games in live casinos.

The low number of hands per hour means that whatever earn rate you make in terms of big blinds per one hundred hands has to be divided because no live game sees one hundred hands per hour. This is the cost of playing live and you need to have an absolutely crushing earn rate to make money playing live and this means that you must have a large skill advantage over your opponents. So perhaps now you can see why I do not play live and when you play online then despite the average game being better then you do not need to be as good in many ways because of the capacity to be able to play multiple tables.

So in this instance then a player who was making far less in terms of bb/100 could be making far more because the £/100 figure would be multiplied instead of divided. If you are making £40/100 hands and playing 300 hands per hour multi-tabling then you are making £120/hour. This is miles away from our previous example where you were only seeing 25 hands per hour in the live casino and thus having to divide your £40 by four.

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