Vegas Vs. Los Angeles poker

[MychilrensEat]

I have been playing poker, mainly online, for the past 5 years. I am in my early twenties, have zero obligations in my life, and i have decided to focus my time on playing live poker as a career. I am struggling between moving to LA or Las Vegas. I am trying to factor in all aspects of life such as location, cost of living, the quality and quantity of games. I would like to focus my time playing 15-30 and higher consistently with the occasional bump to 20-40 on up to 40-80. I am a No limit tournament player, and would require to play those on the side. Please help me out in my decision, and i would greatly appreciate feedback from those that have or are currently living this lifestyle. Thanks.

[cardcounter0]

I would lean towards Vegas. LA has a lot of loose agressive players which leads to wild swings in the old bankroll. Vegas has a very regular large supply of tourists, which is real good for the old bankroll. Also, the cost of living is much lower for Vegas than LA, which is easy on the old bankroll.
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[TLC]

As pointed out, the cost of housing is lower in LV. Despite a recent upsurge in LV, the median price of an existing home in LA is still 62% higher than LV.

You should also take into consideration that there is no state income tax in NV while CA reaches 9.3% at their highest bracket (~$35K).

Plus, there is less to do here in LV which means more time to play poker! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Ed Miller]

Advantages of LA

1. Much better games (not to say Vegas games are bad, but Commerce is unreal)
2. Much more consistent action at $40-$80 (you should be able to find $15-$30, $20-$40, and $30-$60 roughly 24/7 in Vegas, but $40-$80 only goes occasionally)
3. Lower average wait times, especially compared to the Bellagio
4. LA is more of a real city

Advantages of Vegas

1. Much cheaper housing
2. Less traffic/driving time
3. More tournaments
4. $15-$30 and $30-$60 games are worth playing. At Commerce, those limits are essentially not worth playing, so in LA you will be playing a lot of $20-$40 and $40-$80.
5. Vegas is fun

I'm sure I've forgotten some other stuff, but that's what I can think of for now. I chose Vegas, and I don't regret it. Once you want to play $40-$80 as your main game, though, LA is 100% better.

[Gabe]

I think there are more tournaments in Los Angeles. The 15/30’s are usually great. There are a lot of small no limit games here. On the other hand, the rake in the 15/30 and 20/40 is worse in Los Angeles. I agree with everything else.

[AceHigh]

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3. More tournaments

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Like Gabe said, I think there are more "real" tournaments in Southern California. Lots of little daily/weekly tournaments in Vegas.

[Blarg]

That state tax in California is an absolute killer, and you don't seem to get a lot for it. Everything in L.A. is always in a constant state of decay. It's an old city, and like New York potholes that last for 40 years without being fixed, L.A. is riddled with cracked bridges and rotten infrastructure. Cops are nowhere to be found; NY and some other big cities have like twice the cops per population. Which is fine if you don't like cops, but if your house is being machine-gunned two doors down from the police station, don't expect the cops there any time soon. They like to wait till the crime is over before showing up. The firemen are cool though.

L.A. and Vegas both have plenty of crime, so I don't know which one is worse on that count.

That state tax will eat up a lot of your income over the course of a year, or a lifetime. Enough to make the difference between a miserly and a comfortable retirement, even.

Then again, doesn't Nevada outlaw online gambling?

Oh, L.A. is where the movies are, so every homecoming queen on the continent for the last 100 years has been coming here to be a movie star. Failing that, they make little movie starlets for the next generation try, so L.A. has an incredibly regular crop of absolutely astounding looking women.

However, it's pretty much a money culture(as opposed to a "looks" culture like Hawaii where I grew up, or a culture where people are somewhat literate and value that, as some places are. Very few people read, and those who do read crap(used to work in a bookstore here as a kid).

The casinos here in L.A. are in sections of town you wouldn't want to hang around in. So you'll likely want to live in outlying areas and drive in from somewhere else, and L.A. has terrible traffic congestion. It can really be tied up in knots around the casinos. A lot of the dealers are pretty cute, and some are personable too, so that can cheer you up through some of the bad beats.

L.A. is a desert with water pumped in from hundreds of miles away. Vegas is a worse desert. Worse heat, worse look of deadness everywhere. L.A. has the beaches, but if you're a poker player you probably burn easily. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

L.A. has been said in national studies to have the worst, most inaccurate and trivial media of any major city in the country. Local t.v. news is almost totally worthless, and the local papers have all closed down but one, which was bought out a few years ago, and now the front page section is half its former size(as little as a dozen pages sometimes) and filled with ads and huge, pages-long photo stories and "soft" human interest news.

Vegas has a party atmosphere in a lot of places, but that kind of thing can get old and wear thin and phony after a while. L.A. is a corrupt old beast from ages old and only a thin slice at the top think it's a party. However, that's the slice that controls the media, so you'll constantly see the local papers and t.v. shows portraying an L.A. that doesn't really exist for the most part, as if it were the reality everyone lived 24 hours a day. It can be a strange dissonance to have to constantly live with the Martha Stewart and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous take on the city you see in the media when most everywhere you look it's such a different story.

There's a sort of hanging air of desperation about L.A., to brush away the messy parts, make the fairytale real, to become famous. To "get out there," to smile hard enough, to believe hard enough, to magically make it so. Sometimes it seems every waitress is almost famous, everyone is waiting to be struck by lightning. People identify intensely with movie stars and talk about them with as much passion as if they were family members. Family members who are movie stars. The most unlikely people, with no skills or particular talents even, talk about needing "to be seen," and "get out there," and the most unlikely people seem to know just what they mean and agree. We sell a lot of lottery tickets out here. Vegas has its own kind of desperation, but I'm not sure if it spreads as widely and deeply there as it does in L.A. The American dream seems so desperate here it's like it incorporated the American nightmare unnoticed, and the two filter through each other to make a pretty weird concoction, and people don't know which one they're gulping down or coughing up. People from Los Angeles often can't recognize another Angeleno, but people from outside almost always can.

L.A. has plenty of racial problems, but many people come from worse places in that regard. There's at the same time lots of talk about racial harmony and how the healing has already begun, but whatever exists at the party, people tend to go home to largely segregated neighborhoods at night. Los Angeles is right on the coast, yet many people here do not know how to swim and have never swum in the ocean. Many have never left the city or flown on an airplane, and many very rarely go outside their own neighborhoods. There is an widespread intense sense that who you are is and must forever remain where you're from, good or bad. For an enormous city that strives to be a "world city" like New York, it's surprisingly provincial at all levels of society.

[Nightwish]

Why not the SF Bay Area? The only downside is the cost of living, but everything else is way better than LA or Vegas. (OK, so LA or Vegas have more games, but if Tommy Angelo can live well by just playing the Lucky Chances 20/40, then so can you....if you play as well as Tommy, that is.)

[Billman]

[ QUOTE ]
There's a sort of hanging air of desperation about L.A., to brush away the messy parts, make the fairytale real, to become famous. To "get out there," to smile hard enough, to believe hard enough, to magically make it so. Sometimes it seems every waitress is almost famous, everyone is waiting to be struck by lightning. People identify intensely with movie stars and talk about them with as much passion as if they were family members. Family members who are movie stars. The most unlikely people, with no skills or particular talents even, talk about needing "to be seen," and "get out there," and the most unlikely people seem to know just what they mean and agree. We sell a lot of lottery tickets out here. Vegas has its own kind of desperation, but I'm not sure if it spreads as widely and deeply there as it does in L.A. The American dream seems so desperate here it's like it incorporated the American nightmare unnoticed, and the two filter through each other to make a pretty weird concoction, and people don't know which one they're gulping down or coughing up. People from Los Angeles often can't recognize another Angeleno, but people from outside almost always can.

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Having been born and raised in LA, one of my favorite commentaries on people who come to LA looking to "make it" is from David Cross (Mr. Show) who said that every waitress in LA comes here thinking that they're the one who's going to make it. They know that if they just try hard enough it will happen. Six months later they're saying "Ok, just don't get any in my eye."

The capitol of feature films and the capitol of porn located just 10 miles from each other . . . you do the math.

[Lucky]

an excellent read. Having grown up in L.A., I grew nolstagic reading your piece for the seething desperation of the good ole city of angels.