[Mukade]

Yeah, I used to play low-limit texas hold 'em most nights at the casino. There is a luck element involved, but like sc2, it is about being strategic, and statistical. However, tactics plays a larger part in starcraft than in poker. With poker, if you are walking away from the table with more money than you started with, you are a winner.

[deL]

It doesn't make you measurably better, they just share similarities so the same type of people may tend to play both.

[aztecx]

Originally Posted by Mukade

Yeah, I used to play low-limit texas hold 'em most nights at the casino. There is a luck element involved, but like sc2, it is about being strategic, and statistical. However, tactics plays a larger part in starcraft than in poker. With poker, if you are walking away from the table with more money than you started with, you are a winner.

Not really. Just because you walk away with more money once does not make you a winner. I don't know what the rake is like at the casino in Canberra but winning in the long run playing $1/$2 at Star City casino is impossible. The rake is just far too high. It's sick just how few people really realise this.

I believe that 95% of the people that play low-limit poker at the casino are huge overall losers at the game. It's actually kind of funny when someone starts telling you about all the money they are making at the casino playing these low-stakes. Basic mathematics can prove that these games are impossible to beat in the long run and should not be taken seriously. For me they are only a bit of fun after a night out getting pissed with the boys. Since luck (variance) is such a big part of the game poker, people will often blame their losses on 'bad luck'.

I actually had a degenerate gambler for a friend who used to play at the casino 3-4 nights a week. The entire time all I ever heard from him was how much money he's making at the casino and online. Obviously I can't ask the casino how much he's won or lost but I can definitely check his online profits and/or losses. After telling me he had made $1500 online in the past month I checked his stats only to find him actually down about $600. Even with this proof he was adamant that he had made all this money. After a while he changed his story to it doesn't matter how much he has lost online because he knows he's a huge winner at the casino. I explained to him that the games he is playing are impossible to beat in the long-run and that the money he says he has made would take years of playing the low-stakes to make. That's also IF you consider the rake to be less and the games actually possible to beat. He is probably one of the worst players I have ever played with and I'm not just saying that because he's a degenerate. His poker fundamentals are disgustingly poor and because of his addiction to gambling I can't see him ever improving. Gambling addicts get their fix from instant results and they wouldn't be able to get this high from playing the game correctly and slowly 'grinding' out profits.

I want to meet someone on this site that can post up their PS or FT account and show a decent profit over 50,000+ hands. I doubt anyone can and there are a lot of master leaguers here :P