Whats more rewarding the bleeding your friends dry of all their cash? at least at my age of 21 any home game I participated in would be as competitive as anything. I mean dude.. you should see the monopoly games that used to go on at boarding school, and that was play money!
Just had to let you know this particular comment made my day... Haven't had the experience of playing 1 yet, but i'll stay subscribed. May pick up some things if I ever should......And then you have me. Who raises 3x pre when I have a strong hand, and everyone yells, "HERE HE GOES AGAIN WITH RIDICULOUS PRE-FLOP BETS"
Yeah but it's like Larry' said G'... Do you really want to alienate the friends/associates that you see on a regular as opposed to some players that you may or may never see again? How do you go about avoiding this? There must be some ways that experienced players use to take opponent's(who might also be a friend, well at least until after tha game..) money w/o seeming like an *sshole in tha home games. Y'know, like being friendly and not coming across like they're there to take ya money, just there for a goodtime... When in fact... lol...It's just like that at the casinos as well. Everyone loves to limp. When you raise 4 or 5x they all moan and groan and curse under their breath. No cheap flops for them.
I actually stopped playing my home game because of this reason. We started playing for spare change initially after the Moneymaker boom. Moved to tourneys. Had leagues. Tourneys got bigger (like rent out a hall and have 60 players bigger). Moved away from tourneys to cash. Stakes went up (usually 1/2 occasionally 2/5).Whats more rewarding the bleeding your friends dry of all their cash? at least at my age of 21 any home game I participated in would be as competitive as anything. I mean dude.. you should see the monopoly games that used to go on at boarding school, and that was play money!
lol, good stuff... y'know WV', it's kinda funny, even if it's only from my micros experience. When I first starting playing I didn't mind adding people to my buddy list. But now, I avoid adding people w/o serious thought or even conversating w/ players even more. What ends up happening is that I end playing some of these "buddies" at tables where it would really count and it hurt my aggression levels, so yeah, I can imagine playing friends, with a definite edge such as you have, as opposed to unknowns... I hold it akin to like martial arts. I took up judo for 10-15 years (10 straight & 5 on/off) and you're obviously not supposed to use such skills against opponents that don't know any better, at least, not w/o a warning first. Sort of the same situation when not just eliminating a unknown fish but a "fishy" friend w/o at least being friend enough to give them a heads up (which as we know, you better than me, goes totally against the purpose of a casino-type game environment...).It was definitely a lot more fun when it was a smaller money. It got to the point where the $$s won/lost were so much that no one even drank more than a beer or 2. Even sober though some of the worst play you'll ever see. We called 1 guy Jackshit because his favorite hand was any Jx (he said he liked J little better "because then he had 2 ways to hit a straight"). The guy who dropped the most (Mr. 401k) would never bet if he had a strong hand but would shovel money in if he was bluffing. He'd complain to me at the end of most nights (unless he got lucky and won) how he just needed to play against different people because the problem was that we all knew his system too well.
Just had to let you know this particular comment made my day... Haven't had the experience of playing 1 yet, but i'll stay subscribed. May pick up some things if I ever should...
I can relate to this opnd'. Right after I earned the tiny bankroll at the funsteps initially I tried the micros and couldn't figure out exactly what to play. I chose the option of the .02/.04 PL games... Found out the hard way that when I knew I would have the best hand at the time I couldn't force weaker hands to fold by using AIs. So having to stick to a game that seems to based more on hand/pot odds relationships was harder for me because I was playing scared (hell, it took me some time to earn those few bucks...) It would seem in your case that when the wives forced tha game to lower stakes that the players were no longer scared to get it in against your bets/experience, huh?use to have a home games 2 or 3x's a week with 2 different groups of friends was crushing them at 5-10$ sng's was winning 200-300 a week off these guys until one of their wives said that i was always winning.now we play a .10-.20 cent blind cash game first buy-in 10 $ after u lose the first 10$ u can buy-in for whatever you're comfortable with. I get crushed in this cash game same group of ppl.
In college, a big group in my Fraternity regularly played all-night sessions of cash poker for very small stakes. We were cut-throat with each other but we had fun. We would even take one weekend once or twice a year and play a 24 hour session, buy a lot of food and drink, and purchased trophies for the top three players in cash won.
After we all graduated we played a weekly game on Wednesdays, still cut-throat, still small stakes.
I moved away, and started playing some larger stakes home games, along with playing at the card club. It was not among a group of close friends so it was about winning money.
These days, there is no way I would play any significant stakes at a home game. Certainly I go to a game with good friends and small game for fun. But, increasing at an alarming rate are not only are the incidents of cops busting large games (note: when police bust game they take all the money), but robberies of the games as well, many with shootings involved and life lost. Many of these robberies are inside jobs.
Several people in my local casino have told me of robberies in their own home games, including one where a player also pulled out a gun and actually fired shots, but the robbers got away (several players in this game felt they actually knew who set them up, but police did nothing)
This would never ever happen in England. Honestly I am glad I am not American.