No Limit comes to Washington

Well, sort of.

While playing poker in casinos has been legal as long as I remember, Washington has a screwed up set of laws.  First the maximum poker bet in tribal ("Indian") casinos has been $500, but in card rooms the max was $20 when I started playing several years ago.  They upped the maximum to $40 about 3 or 4 years ago which led to a bunch of 20-40 limit games, which is actually decent stakes, and some 2-40 spread limit.  The 2-40 game was a huge improvement over the 3-6 and 4-8 limit games that dominated the area.  Not only could you bet enough to get people to fold but you had huge implied odds which made it "correct" the play a lot of speculative hands, even against raises.  This led to much more action and much more profit.  But still it wasn't even close to no limit -- the $40 max came into play in almost every raised pot.

The Washington Gaming Commission has been debating higher limits probably since the day they upped the limit to $40.  Finally a month ago they decided to allow a trial of hold 'em with a $100 max bet with the law going into affect 30 days later.  Friday the 15th was day 30 and The Hideaway was one of the places that got a 3-100 spread game going.  It's still not true no limit but in playing a few hours I only saw one hand where the $100 max came into affect.  With a $200 max buy-in, you run out of chip before you run into the cap.  Note that if someone bets $40, you can then raise to $140.  It's really hard to have a deep enough stack and big enough pot that you'd want to bet more than $100.

Anyway, I played in the inaugural game after work on Friday.  Lots of people were interested in playing or at least willing to try.  The game was really good.  I doubled my buy in over 3-4 hours and it would have been much, much better had I not lost a huge pot on a bad suck out.  But that's poker.

I expect I'll still play at Snoqualmie with the 2-5 no limit, but this game is a good alternative.