Paul Kammen's book

[Paul77]

Hi there,

Well, a few comments on Kammen's book, and seing how as I'm the author I thought I'd post a few [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]) These quotes are from Andy's posts...

Does anyone, and I mean anyone, play this tight? In good low-limit games, I’m around 25%, and in tough games, I’m probably around 18%. Seems to me that anyone playing 10% of his hands is going to go like Broomcorn’s uncle.

Yes, that is slightly tight, especially for Canterbury's High-ante games, but for a low ante structure game or spread-limit game with no ante, it's not overly tight.

Canterbury’s $2/4 game has a $.50 ante and $1 bring-in, and that is the model that Kammen uses for his discussion. I think that Canterbury’s $3/6 game, with the same ante and bring-in, would have been a better model.

Maybe, unfortunately this game never goes off. $4/8 does on Tuesdays, but for stud 2/4 is about it.

I wonder what he means by “a few.” I don’t know how many times I’ve been rolled-up, but it’s at least 100, which is more than a few. I wonder just how much this guy has actually played.

More than a few, but it's very rare. I play about 10 hours per week on PokerStars and Canterbury. Last time I was rolled up was Sunday night in a Satellite, unfortunately it was with rolled up 9s and my opponent had rolled up queens. Bummer.

Kammen says that your default play should be to slow-play big full houses or better on fifth. I think that this is a mistake in most low-limit games.

If the game is loose, certainly play it hard, but I'd rather play it loose-passive and call and hope players hit the flush or straight to extract more money from them.

[Andy B]

[ QUOTE ]
Kammen says that your default play should be to slow-play big full houses or better on fifth. I think that this is a mistake in most low-limit games.

If the game is loose, certainly play it hard, but I'd rather play it loose-passive and call and hope players hit the flush or straight to extract more money from them.

[/ QUOTE ]

Most low-limit players won't fold a straight or flush draw no matter how hard you play your full house.

[Andy B]

[ QUOTE ]
Canterbury’s $2/4 game has a $.50 ante and $1 bring-in, and that is the model that Kammen uses for his discussion. I think that Canterbury’s $3/6 game, with the same ante and bring-in, would have been a better model.

Maybe, unfortunately this game never goes off. $4/8 does on Tuesdays, but for stud 2/4 is about it.

[/ QUOTE ]

At the point at which you wrote your book, I think CP's $3/6 game went off several times a week. In the $2/4 game, the ante is too high and the bring-in is too high (not to mention the rake and the jackpot drop). I am not aware of another B&M $2/4 game anywhere. It is a common limit on-line, but I believe all sites that offer it have a $.25 ante. So you chose as your basic model a game that has one table going in the entire world, maybe two at the time you wrote your book.

Lots of games are structured like CP's $3/6 game, including Party's $3/6 game, Paradise's $6/12 game, the $6/12 games in Arizona (I'm reasonably sure about this one), and all $30/60 games. Other common limits are pretty close to this, such as $15/30 and $75/150.

Why Canterbury and the poker sites use a half-bet bring-in I'll never know. If you have a limit where a 1/3-bet bring-in is inconvenient, such as $20/40, the bring-in should be slightly lower. The $5 bring-in encourages action in two ways. It encourages limping, because $5 is pretty cheap relative to the future bets, and it encourages early raises, because the difference between calling $5 and $20 is pretty significant. If the bring-in were $10, there wouldn't be all that much difference between the hands I'd play for the bring-in and the hands I'd play for a full bet.

Anyway, I think that $3/6 is a better model, because it's structured like a real stud game, and you can make adjustments relative to that baseline as appropriate to the structure of your preferred game.

$4/8 stud also usually goes on Fridays, and I played in it Friday night. The stud jackpot was over $13k, and according to one of the players, it had been going every day last week because the jackpot was so high.