Can the Foxwoods $1-$2 No Limit game be beat?

[Bubbagump]

I haven't played the No Limit games that are spread at Foxwoods but I was sitting in a 5-10 HE game today and a discussion broke out about the No Limit games being spread in the room. I did not know until today that players are charged time in these games. I was further surprised to hear that the time charge in the $1-$2 game is $10 and hour!

Is it just me, or does this seem really high considering the blind structure and the max buy-in is $100?

Bubbagump

[daryn]

it's a big rake.. but if you ever sit down in the game, you will know that it is beatable. if you have the roll though i'd say just play 5/5

[pshreck]

I have played this game about 6 different days in the past 10, and have beaten it every time. Im up 750, thats including paying out roughly 240 to the casino. Only one time did I even have to reload...

This is my BIGGEST peice of advice. DONT play in the mornings... the players are better, and there isnt much money on the table. Later in the day, plenty of fish have gotten lucky and have some bigger stacks. They play incredibley loose (cold calling 20 dollar raises pre flop) and are begging to give away their money. Knowing when and how to play your draws is what I would say is the key to winning.

Other than your regular good poker skills, the one thing I reccomned is to be willing to call pot sized bets with your open enders and flush draws (ofcourse depending on the size of your opponents stack). If your flush or straight hits, THEY PAY OFF... almost always. In the tune of a 50 dollar bet into a 40 dollar pot, etc...

Other than that, raise raise raise with your hands that are made pre or on the flop.

Very beatable game, period.

[TomCollins]

WPT-Wannabe fish make this game beatable even for a $20/hr rake.

[Dynasty]

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it's a big rake..

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I'm not sure $10 an hour is so big. Usually, a game like this would be raked $4 per hand. So, paying a $10 time charge is like paying rake while winning 2.5 pots per hour (maximum rake).

[daryn]

yeah i guess it's comparable.

[MrBlini]

It's comparable unless they're collecting $50 to deal 7 hands a down. Most of our dealers the night I played couldn't get an orbit's worth of cards out.

[mikech]

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I'm not sure $10 an hour is so big. Usually, a game like this would be raked $4 per hand. So, paying a $10 time charge is like paying rake while winning 2.5 pots per hour (maximum rake).

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Although it's a comparable rake to, say, the Taj baby NL, I think Foxwoods is taking a bit more off the table. The house is raking $100/hr in this game (if the table's full), while at the Taj 1-2, the rake is 10% of the pot up to $4 max. So they would need to deal at least 25 hands per hour to match FW's $100, and that's if every hand built up at least a $40 pot, which isn't the case.

[mikech]

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It's comparable unless they're collecting $50 to deal 7 hands a down. Most of our dealers the night I played couldn't get an orbit's worth of cards out.

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Right, that's the other thing. In the Taj game, if they only manage to get out 20 hands in an hour (either due to dealer inefficiency, or guys that watched too much WPT staring each other down before every decision), you as a player sitting in that game don't suffer (other than from boredom), it's the house itself that loses revenue. In the Foxwoods game, dealer inefficiency and kids putting on a Hollywood production even to fold do cost you money.

[scrub]

The house probably takes more off the table with a raked structure, but a good NL player in a game this loose pays more with the time charge. You're just not winning that many big pots per hour. At least not once the stacks get a bit deeper than the initial buy, and probably not even at the initial buyin.

Another consideration is that you can't "top off" the time charge in the FW game until you get below $40. While the players are so terrible that you can make a killing on a short stack, the real high winrate in that game comes when you get on a deeper stack and can start picking off morons who have doubled through a few times, so I think this artificially short stack at the beginning hurts you.

That being said, the game is extremely beatable. It's just not beatable for as much as the capped NL 1/2 games offered in NYC and AC. Those games, when they are good, seem to be worth less than the average 20/40 but more than the average 10/20, and have pulled many regular winning players from these games into them. The FW 1/2 does not seem to be worth as much and does not appear to have the same crossover with the lower mid-limit hold em games.

scrub