This is very general tho and minimizes as you climb up in stakes, but generally the same player would have a higher BB/100 winrate at a regular table and a higher hourly at a Zoom table
which one do you play? Which one is better for you?
I will stick my neck out here and say, that I think, the vast majority of players have a lower hourly winrate at Zoom. More volume means more rake, so even if your hourly winrate before rake is higher, your hourly winrate after rake might well be lower. This by the way also goes for excessive multitabling.
For this whole “trade winrate for volume” idea to work out, the rake need to be negligible compared to the winrate of a typical winning player. Which is absolutely not the case in modern online cash games from 10NL and up. The rake is often 10 BB/100, while realistic long term after rake winrates are low single digits.
I think exactly the same.Regular cash games I find are more profitable for myself. I find you get a sense of the players traits, but with zoom your constantly playing new players and can’t really predict what they’ll do.
Zoom is very addicting. It's difficult to play other types of games after playing too much zoom.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I feel identified with your thinking. The zoom is very mechanical in the small and difficult limits, not to say impossible, to take notes of the players and thus be able to exploit them and take advantage of them. Recently I am entering the world of cash, but I always got better results at regular tables because I was able to identify villain game styles and I knew how to exploit them and keep their chips. Another thing, in small limits I was better at max 6 tables than at 9 .. since we usually take surprises at 9 because there are many players who enter with very bad hands.I dont mind Zoom for the playing experience. There is no going on waiting lists, no waiting for the blinds to come around, which is certainly nice. Its also nice to be able to fully concentrate on one hand at a time and still get decent volume, which you can do by playing a single Zoom table. On the downside reads and dynamics are missing, so its a much more mechanic and simple kind of poker.
What really made me move away from Zoom was, that when I reached 10NL and 16NL, there was just to much difference in my winrate between regular tables and Zoom tables for me to ignore. Some of that might have been variance, and some due to the fact, that I mainly played regular full ring tables and not 6-max.
But at the end of the day I saw no reason to continue playing a game, where my results were way worse, and where I was actually losing money. It also helped me realise, how important it is to find soft games by table selecting, playing at the right time of day, playing on the right poker site etc.
The simple fact is, that we win in poker, when our opponents make mistakes, and the only way to win big (and overcome high rake) is to play against someone, who make big mistakes. And these players are just not found in Zoom games. For starters according to my database preflop limping occur less than half as often in Zoom. And since "raising against limp" generate way more profit than open raising, again according to my data-base, this absolutely matter.
So many people get obsessed about perfecting their ranges in every single spot, and if you plan on playing 500NL online, you absolutely need to. But for all us micro or small stakes players, who have to content with high rake, there is simply no substitute for playing against those fish, who will limp-call preflop with K8 offsuit and then call us all the way down with second or third pair. Its not fancy or glorious, but this is where, the profit comes from.
Zoom is very addicting. It's difficult to play other types of games after playing too much zoom.