Cap Games Online
Having been at a home game recently where we tried to play NL and PL games with a cap and it just confused everyone, I was somewhat glad to see that Full Tilt Poker is now offering capped NL and PL games. Perhaps it will increase the general knowledge and understanding in the poker world about what a cap is.
I haven't totally thought through the implications of this, but I wonder if I could use this feature to play in somewhat higher games than I normally do. It seems their $1/$2 NL HE games have a $60 cap, which means I could feel quite comfortable as high as $3/$6 NL HE game with a $180 cap. I also wonder what types of players these cap games will attract. Will the real fish stay at the regular games, or will they like the idea of a cap which will allow them to overplay things like top pair and overpairs? I am really curious to find out; I guess I'll have to get bought back into Full Tilt and see what the deal is.
Finally, I am pretty sure that cap games are really important for the future of poker. Limit poker was invented, in part, because people went broke too fast playing real table-stakes NL and PL poker games. The money and interest in NL HE, for example, dried up completely in the late 1980s and by the mid-1990s, limit poker was all everyone played.
I'd hate to see this happen again as people start to go seriously broke playing NL HE. Cap games may be the way to compromise between the two so we aren't all left with limit poker as the only option for juice games in a few years. History does, sometimes, repeat itself.