For reasons I can't really fathom, the entire time I lived in the San Jose area, I thought that Bay 101 was a health club or something like that. Despite the fact that their logo contains a club symbol. Yes, I'm a moron. I accept that.
Since I was in the area, and since I had never been to an actual real poker room, I decided to spend some time Saturday afternoon, seeing how I would do against live players who I didn't know in a competitive environment, as opposed to playing against either friends or playing online at PokerRoom.com. I set for myself a reasonable limit, bought in for half that amount, and sat down to play some 2-4 Limit Hold 'Em.
I played extremely tight for the first two hours I was there. I only got into about a half-dozen hands the entire time, got nothing to show for it, and at that point, the blinds and collections had pretty well depleted my "start with half" funds.
Feeling that I wasn't really playing too badly (I just couldn't get the cards I needed when I needed them), I bought in for the other half of my limit, and continued to play.
My fellow players were playing extremely loose, and taking down some serious pots in the process (I was in seat 1, the guy in seat 5 ended up with a chip-stack about six times the size of his buy-in, and he wasn't really showing all that great of cards when push came to shove.
I decided to loosen up my play a little bit, especially now that I had established myself as being a fairly tight player. I could afford to go in for a ocuple lesser quality hands, banking on the reputation I'd spent the previous two hours cultivating. Over the next two hours, I slowly crawled back to being within 10% of reaching my total buy-in.
Unfortunately, that was as close as it got. I got some serious bad-beats (Aces over 10s being beaten by a complete set of four 10's, for instance) from hands that you simply can't lay-down and that (in fact) you think to yourself "I've got the nuts and I'm going to raise the fuck out of this hand, because what could you possibly have that will beat me?"...
I walked away after losing my limit, and while I would have liked to come away in the black, I feel fairly good in that I don't think I actually played that bad, I just couldn't get the cards I needed. I hadn't loosened up so much that I was playing hands I should have gotten the hell away from (OK, there was that one time, but it was clear that the other guy had complete shit, except that his shit beat my shit... Ace-King High beating my Ace-Queen High).
The biggest complaint I had was that it was a typical low-limit table, in that people were willing to bet on shit hands. Very few hands didn't see at least six people in at the flop. But if it only costs $2.00 to see a flop, why not? Therein lay the problem, because then the pot-odds start to look appealing to people and they ride out hands that they really shouldn't, and get lucky on the river. My problem was that 2-4 was still about four times the table stakes I normally play at online (I've been doing .50-1, and on rare occasions 1-2, but 2-4 was still a step upward for me financially). I felt reluctant to get into a 3-6 or 6-12 game, because those stakes were further outside my normal realm of spending, and my small chipstake wouldn't have gotten me very far along in those games. But, I might have survived longer simply because the players would have behaved more "normally" and provided a better baseline.
On the other hand, we wouldn't be likely to see the two different non-english-speaking gentlemen who apparently didn't understand that they could actually "fold" or "check", and would just keep betting/calling all the way to the river, and invariably have nothing. People that incompetent generally don't end up in the higher-stakes games.
Overall, I would probably do Bay 101 again the next time I visit the Bay Area. It's a decent card-room, and if I hadn't been waiting for their low-limits game, I could have gotten on a 3-6 table within about ten minutes, which doesn't seem unreasonable.
