Home Games - Really This Time!

"Finally, and most importantly, no dickheads."
--Reader response

Finally, I present my distillation of reader response to last week's inquiry on home games. Unfortunately, in my effort to summarize the responses and look for the deeper trends, I think I probably have wound up pumping out the usual crap, but it has been helpful for me as I reflect upon my own weekly home game.

There were several overriding themes in the responses I received. The most prominent was "fun", and following from that, the idea that the people make the home game. Most people, it seems, attend home games mainly as a way of socializing. They want to share the table with people they enjoy being around. "No dickheads." This makes sense, of course - if that weren't the case, why not just go to the local poker room and play against a bunch of random strangers? Who wants to take time out of their life to sit at a table with a bunch of jerks?

Another common theme that ran through most of the responses was the idea that the money involved shouldn't hit anyone's wallet too severely, because in the end, nobody really likes taking money from a friend if the amount of money has a significant impact on that friend's life and / or financial well-being. Plus, if the stakes are kept low, there is little potential for things to turn ugly if one player's stack gets huge or another player has to reload several times during the course of the night. We all have an ego, after all, and even the most composed person can occassionally "lose it". Money has a way of making people do strange things.

I should point out that although most people's responses on this point ran in a similar fashion, there was a subset for whom the money was among the more important elements of a home game. These people felt that the limits should be set at a level where people could have meaningful swings in their stack so as to incentivize their own play. They were in the minority, however.

A third, but less prevalent, theme was the idea of constantly improving one's skills. Given that many of my readers are poker bloggers, I wasn't surprised by this. What did surprise me was that this aspect of the home game wasn't more heavily stressed by the people who wrote to me. I almost think that any opportunity to sit at the table and play cards can be a learning experience, but in home games, most readers were more content to "fuck around" than to concentrate on playing their top games. Several people who do value the skill improvement side of home games pointed out that they don't mind playing with people whose skill is not at the same level as long as they are enjoyable to be around -- tying back into theme number one.

Finally, for some of my respondents, home games represent the only opportunities for live play outside of a major vacation or trip to an area where card rooms are prevalent or poker is flat-out legal. This is an unfortunate consequence of some of the more conservative elements of our society.

What to make of it all? I think my own instincts and predispositions regarding home games fall in line with the majority of the responses I received, with one notable exception. While I do attend primarily for fun and for the social aspect, and while I feel that the stakes should be kept low enough so that everyone can enjoy themselves, win or lose, I also want to use the opportunity to improve my skills. Thus, I think my dissatisfaction with Above Malibu is twofold.

Firstly, although the stakes are low enough to minimize the impact to everyone, the fact is that in a 24 person tournament - which features a rotating crew of people - there are inevitably going to be a fair number of people that I just don't know. My connections with UCB are not as strong as they once were. I can't remember the last time I was at the theater. As a result, the faces that pop up at the Wednesday night tournament are, many times, new and unfamiliar. While it's true that a friend can be a stranger you haven't yet met, it is difficult to make the connections necessary for friendship over a game of poker. The existing friendships that I have at the Above Malibu tournament took a long time to form, and formed when the typical Wednesday night crowd was much smaller - maybe ten people at most.

The upshot of all of this is that I often wind up at a table with a bunch of people that I just don't know. Thus, for me, the experience turns into something more akin to a tournament at a local card room - except the buyin is only $10. Frankly, if I wanted to play a $10 SnG against a bunch of random strangers, I'd just stay at home and fire up Party Poker.

Secondly, as Above Malibu has gone through various waves of new players, my skill improvement from attending the tournaments has plateaued. As I said up top, I'm always trying to learn, and I think there's something you can take from any card game, but a table full of calling stations is still a table full of calling stations. There's not much to it, and again, I can fire up Party Poker for that. Above Malibu is peppered with some pretty serious card players - people who have made final tables in online and live tournaments of hundreds of entrants, for prizes of thousands of dollars - but unfortunately, they tend to be lost in the ocean of not-as-good players that swell the ranks from a one- or two- table affair to a three-table affair.

This is probably where I'm "going wrong", so to speak - the source of my dissatisfaction. I should be focusing more on fun, attempting to draw out enjoyment from the new players and the old alike, and worrying less about improvement. I have plenty of other opportunities for improvement, after all. What's a few hours on a Wednesday night with friends?

We'll see if I can implement this new attitude next week, when Above Malibu returns from a two-week hiatus and kicks off the 2005 tournament season.