Live Games

If anyone wanted to claim that the economy is doing just fine, they could point to the bustling Commerce Casino with its loose-passive games. Same as it ever was.

Over the weekend, I played two of the Commerce's 5/10 NL varieties -- the $400 max buy-in and the $1,500 max buy-in games. Both were similar, with multiple limpers on most hands and at least four people seeing most flops.

I found that with so many limpers, stealing blinds was nearly impossible. Preflop raises were counter-productive unless I had a premium hand that I could raise for value. Otherwise, it made more sense to limp around with the crowd and try to hit a big hand. We all know how often big hands flop.

My impression is that position counted for even more in these games. I needed to have a positional advantage to get the most value from my hands when they did hit. Raising utg with JTs was foolish in retrospect because I had little expectation I could win the hand without hitting the board.

With so many people in each hand who wouldn't fold if they caught any piece of the flop, the best way to make money was to value bet constantly and rarely bluff. Unfortunately, you need to make hands in order to value bet, which can get pretty damn tedious when you see 30 hands per hour.

I know these loose-passive games are profitable, but I hate having to adjust my style to the point where I'm simply trying to hit and get paid off. I'm more comfortable 3-betting, 4-betting, blind stealing, continuation betting, bluffing and playing heads-up on the flop.