Anyone love no limit Texas hold-em??

I joined the poker revolution in 2001 before ESPN brought in the poker boom in 2003. Since 2003, poker has seen such a massive increase in both players and viewers. You have ESPN running World Series of Poker events all the time, GSN with little poker marathons on weekends with High Stakes Poker, (by the way, Norm MacDonald is the new host this year as Gabe Kaplan has been replaced), WPT events with Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten, and the Heartland Poker Tour, seen on various local sports cable channels.

I love playing the game even though I've suffered some incredible bad beats. I've also won some major pots, (fake money. I don't play with real money). Love the personalities that poker brings. Some of the names are legendary. Brunson, Negraneau, Ivey, Hellmuth, Matasow, Harrington, Lederer.

Does anyone here love poker??

usually 5-8 of us..

blinds 25/50

lots of weed :smoke:

Usually 100/200 No weed though

My friends and I used to play almost every weekend, but that's been curtailed back to a fairly rare occurrence lately. Still, four of us went to Tunica for the weekend, partly to celebrate one friend's 40th birthday. It's funny how different card rooms can be, even when they are next door to each other. I spent the weekend going back and forth between two rooms, losing money at one then heading over to the other to win it back. Next time we'll be staying at the casino with the good poker room so we don't have to worry about getting in enough time at the tables to cover the play requirement for the cheaper room.

Most of us got started playing in 2003, right about the time Moneymaker won the WSOP. Playing online then was REALLY good, as there were a lot of BAD players. If you learned what you were doing, you could make a good deal of money at places like Party Poker. Now it's spotty, as there are occasional hacking or cheating scandals (see Ultimate Bet/Absolute Poker), and a lot of the players are really good - even at low limits. Live poker has always been much more fun anyway. The only down side to casinos is the cigarette smoke. We all came back smelling terrible.

Do the people you play with have some kind of stake in the outcome, or are they the kinds of games where half the table pushes all-in every other hand? Those games barely seem like poker to me, although they can be fun sometimes.

I like limit Hold 'Em better, as it suits my personality and playstyle much better than NL. (And Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Low, a challenging, exciting game that I am terrible at.)

I think it's almost the perfect poker game. Nice balance of information and chance. And most of all, it's fast. A good dealer can get in thirty hands an hour. You can also play large rings, up to ten players or so. Can't do that with draw or 7-stud.

I play live about once a week and online almost daily. I profit at the levels I play at. I look at it as a hobby that pays for itself or another way to look at it: it helps fund my other hobbies like my astronomy.

Meh, bad beat stories are boring. Everyone has them. Bad beats are mathematically inevitable and are simply part of the game. If I get all my chips in good (odds in my favor) then I done good regardless how the hand plays out.

You failed to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_After_Dark">Poker After Dark which is the middle of a cash game ($150K minimum buy-in) this week. It airs in the middle of the night on NBC but you can watch current episodes http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/23011821">here. What I like about PAD is that, unlike most televised poker, they show almost all of the hands so it's a little more realistic.

Entertaining players: Durrrr, Ivey, Viffer, Elezra, Seed and Scotty Nguyen.

Back when I was unemployed a few years ago I spent all day watching it (trust me, it's not hard to find it on TV ALL DAY). And I'd play on Poker Stars.