Pro Poker Tips - What to Expect in Live Cash Games

Quite often some of my views on live cash games have not gone down too well in certain quarters. Unfortunately they are the result of past experience and painful experience at that. Wherever you go then you will find certain players who will do almost anything to get their hands on your money.

Whether this is fairly or unfairly it makes no difference. I have played in live games where the locals were signalling to each other and in some cases openly discussing hands in non-English during actual play.

The reason why I knew this was because there were certain words that their own language did not have pertaining to poker. When I complained to the card room manager I got nowhere and the reaction was basically of not wanting to upset the locals (of which I wasn’t one of them). So I did the reasonable thing and left the casino and never went back.

I have played live games since but they have been private cash games rather than casino cash games. Even then of course there is no guarantee of straight action but inside a casino, you are somewhat vulnerable if all you have ever played is online poker. In no way here am I saying never to play live cash games, what I am saying is that you really need to watch your back playing them but then again you need to police your own games anyway wherever you are playing as you cannot always depend on other people to do that for you.

I have had far too much experience of local faces soft playing each other and signalling each other for my liking. Signalling techniques when done well are very difficult to spot and if I wanted to play live these days I would try to make sure of a few things. Firstly that I didn’t stray too far from home and secondly that I was not seen as an outsider! I don’t like cash games where most of the players know each other and no one knows me or I don’t know them.

Unfortunately it is a poker playing jungle out there and there are enough low life characters, cheats, thieves and deadbeats that frequent our planet and the problem is that they don’t stop at the casino door.