Playing Live

For the last 4 years I have made my living almost exclusively from playing in online MTTs. After Black Friday, that is just no longer an option for me. But much like I was in limbo 4 years ago when I was waiting for my bar exam results, I am again currently in limbo since we are leaving Sacramento at the end of June and have planned quite a bit of family/vacation stuff for July and August. So since I have an abundance of free-time on my hands, I have decided to finally look a little more deeply into the live card room scene here in Sacramento.

So far I've only been to two establisments: the Thunder Valley casino which is just outside of Roseville about half an hour from my house; and the Limelight cardroom which is on the corner of Alhambra and J which is less than 2 miles from my house (actually close enough to walk to if I really wanted).

The benefits of the Limelight is that it is so damn close, players get dinner for free, and the play so far has been pretty weak. The detriment is that they only offer 1/2 NL and most players only buy-in for $40-60 so it would be hard to pull in the $200-400 a day that I would need to average to make not getting a real job a viable option.

The benefit of Thunder Valley is that they offer $1/3 up to $5/10 NL and although I haven't played in anything higher than 1/3 yet, the games do not seem like they are incredibly tough so averaging a little less than half a buy-in a day at 5/10 might be possible. The detriment of Thunder Valley is that it is a ways away, and it is an Indian casino which means they don't follow California's statewide ban on smoking on the casino floor so you end up coming home smelling like an ashtray.

The detriment at all live rooms is that they rake $3-4 as soon as you see a flop and then you are expected to tip dealers on any pot you win so you really do need to play at higher limits so that the rake doesn't take away so much of your profit. Of course the higher you play, the better (in general) your opponents are...

Anyhoo, there are two more rooms in town the Capitol Casino and Casino Royale which according to their websites and from what I have heard may or may not have higher games. At this point I will probably just keep heading to the Limelight since it is so close and I am making a profit. If/when the game seems to be drying up on me I will probably try and take a look at the other rooms in town.

On the house front, the inspector came yesterday and I assume we will hear relatively soon if there was anything horrible that he found. The whole telephone game when realtors are involved gets really tiresome (inspector will give report to their realtor, their realtor gives report to buyers who will then probably have questions/concerns which they relay to their realtor who then talks to our realtor who then will finally talk to us) but I guess you just have to play that game. Hopefully all went well and then our next and last hurdle will be the appraisal of the house by the buyers/mortgage company.