During 2008 and 2009, it was near trivial to be able to find 24 reasonably good tables at 100NL FR, and close to as many at 200NL and above. Since then the games have gotten tougher, Black Friday happened eliminating the US market, several other countries have segregated their players pools (France, Spain, etc), and Pokerstars introduced ZOOM Poker.
This combination of factors has shrunk the recreational player pool significantly, and thus made game selection far more of an art than it was previously. The good news is, it is still possible to make a good living playing nothing but full ring poker. To do so however, I feel that mixing stakes as well as regular and ZOOM games is very close to necessary. Surprisingly enough, the ZOOM pool at 100NL FR is actually quite soft at times, mostly because around half the "regular" players are not from the normal cash games, but instead must be coming from SNGs/MTTs or elsewhere, and in general these players have very little idea what they're doing, though unfortunately they'll probably improve over time, or stop playing cash when they figure out they are losing players.
One night in fact, the ZOOM player pool at 100NL FR was looking so amazingly soft I snapped a screenshot. The different shades of blue are players I have tagged as different degrees of fish. Yellow, red, and green are regulars. Keep in mind this was a rarity, and at times the pool is equally terrible.
People have been saying that full ring poker has been dying since I began this blog in 2008. While it may in fact be on the way out, its death has been so slow that I'm not worried. A dedicated player who keeps getting a little better every year can still crush, and while it may be a lot more difficult to put in volume than it used to, the changes to the Pokerstars VIP system have made it very clear that volume isn't the way to go anymore if you like money.
3 comments:
Would you coach table selection ? I agree it is an art and you're the best. I find it incredibly difficult and gruelling to constantly keep an eye on every tables, close the ones that are not good anymore, replace them... it seems like there's never enough tables starting compared to tables you want to quit.
What are your criterias for closing a table ? Do you use any type of software ? What do you think of table scanner ?
agree, especially to the last point
I don't use any table selection software. I simply pay attention to the lobby when I'm looking to add tables to my session and am reasonably vigilant when it comes to color coding players, which makes it easier to tell if a table is good. My quality of game selection is probably overrated significantly by quite a few people.
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