The Degradation of the World's Finest Gambling Game

When I started playing poker for "serious money", it was playing ten-handed $2-$4 no-limit hold em (NLHE) on Party Poker with a max buy-in of $200, or fifty big blinds (BBs). Party had four tables; Paul and I would get on all the waitlists and eventually play four tables at once. It is not hard to play four tables of ten-handed poker at a time online, as most of your hands are folded before the flop. You can follow the action at the other tables without much difficulty, keeping an eye on the action and checking out hand histories.

Nine months after I started playing those tables, Party opened up higher limits while simultaneously increasing the max buy-in to 100 BBs. Deeper stacks lead to more intricate thinking, as pots swell, information increases, and more decisions must be made at later junctures in the hand.

Eventually, like many pros, I converted to playing six-handed cash games. I think six-handed is more enjoyable and interesting than ten-handed. It is right to play more hands, so there are more decisions - and decisions are what make games fun. As time progressed I grew more comfortable playing with even shorter tables, all the way down to heads up.

Party closed to Americans after the UIGEA, so I took my business to other sites. The two most popular sites, PokerStars and Full Tilt, do not offer any tables that seat more than nine players.

The most common and popular events at the World Series of Poker are $1500 NLHE tournaments, played ten-handed for most of day one and nine-handed the rest of the way. Players who want to play just one WSOP event often choose these $1500 "donkaments." After the first couple hours, the average stack in these tournaments is generally around 30-50 BBs. Many players, from novices to professionals, are most comfortable playing under these conditions. Even players like me, who find this sort of poker irritating and dreary compared to its other forms, can't pass up the value of a $1500 WSOP NLHE and sign up for as many as possible.

It's frustrating to me that this has become the most popular form of poker. Playing ten-handed live with average stacks of less than fifty BBs is so banal. I can understand "grinding" online, playing four or more tourneys at at time. But live, with people often thinking for a minute or two about what to do, is just too boring. It doesn't help that playing ten-handed is physically miserable, squeezed between men with no room to move. What worries me is the thought of amateurs coming out here to play their one WSOP event, cramming into a ten-handed table, playing five hands in three hours, and then losing queens to kings or whatever and going home disenchanted. Poker is such a wonderful, complex, fascinating game. I have this cliched image in my head, small groups of cowboys playing the game in a saloon or around a campfire. Playing ten-handed with short stacks is not the way it was meant to be played.