my freinds think there is are cheaters at the table- there are not.

[Luskmonster]

I run a home game for the guys I started playing with years ago. Home games can be tough when there are a couple of players who "stepped up" and the rest still just play for fun. In my experience the only way to keep it going is to more or less ban tournaments and keep it dealer's choice, and long as the dealer's choice is a casino style game. I mean, the fight we had to put up to go to .25/.50 blinds from a .25 ante was ridiculous. However, we still like playing with the guys so we play for nothing and don't play too aggressively.

The problem with the tournaments is two-fold. One, everybody is so cracked out on TV that all they want to play (and mistakenly think they understand) are tournaments. Two, once a couple of the guys get serious about the game, if you're always playing tournaments, those few serious guys are going to end up winning almost all the time. Before long no one wants to play anymore and they blame the people that tried harder to win for taking all their fun away.

This is why the cash game must be enforced. There's almost no way to win all the money if the blinds don't go up over the course of the night. Good players are almost always going to win, but the bad player's money is going to last way longer than it would in a tournament where he's got his fuzzy eyes on the prize that he honestly has no idea how to get at outside of sheer luck. Not only that, but sometimes the weaker players have profitable nights, and that means a lot to them. Hell, even break even nights are good for keeping the action going. There's going to be none of that with these silly tournaments. Almost all the tournament home games I know, or have known of, peter out eventually.

I've mentioned to new guys coming into my game that I knew were power players to "maybe take it easy on these guys, we're going to play all night, they play for fun, and not that well, and if you beat them out of the money before midnight it isn't as fun, and besides you're going to be able to quadruple-up between midnight and 3am most of the time anyway."

You might also just tell the "cheaters" that they're outclassing all the guys in the game and it's taken the fun out of it for them. In a $10 game you're trying to have fun, not get rich. If the same people win the money every week that isn't fun, it kills the action, and will kill the game.

That's my experience with this, for what it's worth. I've been running a game exactly like you describe above for over three years, and it's still running strong.