Ask Me Anything - spoonitnow

[Eric]

What's your favorite dealer's choice form of "poker" in home games (midnight baseball, 3-5-7, screw your neighbor, 2-22, etc)?

[spoonitnow]

What's your favorite dealer's choice form of "poker" in home games (midnight baseball, 3-5-7, screw your neighbor, 2-22, etc)?

I really like Chicago, but I have very rarely played live poker of any kind unfortunately.

Okay so here's a fun dealer's choice story. Back in late 2005 and early 2006, there was this poker site called something like GameTime. They were known in part for having tables for their windows that were square-shaped instead of rectangular. One of the games they ran was a dealer's choice where the person on the button got to pick a hand from a list (if you didn't pick in time, a random game was chosen). I really liked the format, but there was a problem with the software...

...which was that the images for your opponent's cards were saved locally at the beginning of each hand, and you could just open up the file in MS Paint and quickly figure out what your opponents had.

So I figured it out independently, but I later discovered that other people had figured it out before I did (or at least around the same time). I emailed the support team about it, but it was never fixed. They actually went defunct not long after the UIGEA was passed.

Bonus Question: Did I exploit the ability to see the cards of my opponents on this site?

No I didn't, though I kind of considered it after the support team blew me off multiple times. For fun I even made a simple program that would automatically pull up the right files on an adjacent window over a screenshot of the table so that I knew what cards the opponents had seconds after they were dealt. Something really cool about this was that it worked on tables I was observing as well, so I could watch high stakes online games with my own hole card cam. :v

[Mike1013]

...Okay so here's a fun dealer's choice story. Back in late 2005 and early 2006, there was this poker site called something like GameTime. They were known in part for having tables for their windows that were square-shaped instead of rectangular...

Are you talking about GamesGrid poker? Man, I played there quite a bit back in the day and never heard anything about being able to access opponents' hole cards. Good to know about it even belatedly.

Regarding your advice to take up non-hold'em games, what do you think about playing in mixed games like HORSE and 8-game? It seems to me that the players who are proficient in the Hold'em parts of those games are utterly clueless in the other games. Similarly, those who are skilled at the "other" games usually are not adept at Hold'em. Do you think that being good at Hold'em and perhaps 2-3 other games in the rotation is enough to have an edge in most games even if one is mediocre at 1 or 2 of the games in the list?

How do you suggest that US-based players gain familiarity with the other games? There is probably enough action at PLO to get practice online, but it seems that the games other than NL Hold'em and PLO rarely run on sites that serve US clients. It's even hard for LHE players in the US to find enough action sometimes.

[spoonitnow]

Are you talking about GamesGrid poker? Man, I played there quite a bit back in the day and never heard anything about being able to access opponents' hole cards. Good to know about it even belatedly.

Regarding your advice to take up non-hold'em games, what do you think about playing in mixed games like HORSE and 8-game? It seems to me that the players who are proficient in the Hold'em parts of those games are utterly clueless in the other games. Similarly, those who are skilled at the "other" games usually are not adept at Hold'em. Do you think that being good at Hold'em and perhaps 2-3 other games in the rotation is enough to have an edge in most games even if one is mediocre at 1 or 2 of the games in the list?

How do you suggest that US-based players gain familiarity with the other games? There is probably enough action at PLO to get practice online, but it seems that the games other than NL Hold'em and PLO rarely run on sites that serve US clients. It's even hard for LHE players in the US to find enough action sometimes.

Q1: Regarding your advice to take up non-hold'em games, what do you think about playing in mixed games like HORSE and 8-game?

I feel like this should be the goal for someone who's looking to eventually make money from poker in today's environment. The days of specializing in one form of poker are basically over for people who are coming up. The more games, the better the opportunity to get an advantage over players who are not as well-rounded.

Q2: Do you think that being good at Hold'em and perhaps 2-3 other games in the rotation is enough to have an edge in most games even if one is mediocre at 1 or 2 of the games in the list?

Everybody is good at hold'em these days. To put that another way, it's much harder to get a decisive advantage over the field. Ideally, you would be proficient in all of the games by understanding the basics and putting hands in one game at a time.

Q3: How do you suggest that US-based players gain familiarity with the other games?

I suggest that US-based players don't try to go pro at poker and instead put that effort and energy into something else like starting a business. The return is much better and the future is much more certain because the poker landscape has consistently gotten worse every year for at least a decade.

Simply put, you really don't have the access to these other games that you would need to put that plan into action. If the poker landscape changes for the better, then that could change as well.