The cash games inside live casinos are double edged. On the whole the calibre of opposition can be much worse than the average online game at the same stakes. For example if you were playing in a £2-£5 game at your local casino with a £500 sit down then you may find some mediocre players in that game. But a £500 sit down game online would be a huge game and rank somewhere between NL600 and NL1000 when looked at in dollars.
These are serious levels and populated by very good players online. So there is definite mileage when you play live but you are faced by two substantial obstacles in your pursuit of making money. Many land based casinos charge hourly fees for you to stay in the game which is often called a table charge. This can be very high in some casinos and so you need to watch for this. Let us say that in this example that the casino took £10/hr from you as a table charge.
Let us then say that you had an excellent earn rate of 6bb/100 hands which was £30/100 hands in this £2-£5 game and so you were beating the game quite well. However in a live game scenario then the game will be dealt and played much slower and with dealer changes and arguments and misdeals and all of the rest of it then you were only seeing 30 hands per hour. This means that your hourly rate was 30% of the £30 because you were not seeing 100 hands per hour but 30.
This makes your hourly rate £9/hour but the casino is taking £10/hr from you. So you are actually losing money to the tune of £1/hr plus the costs incurred in actually travelling there and all the rest of it. So not having the option to multi-table and the far slower action is a difficult hurdle for players to overcome in live games and it takes a very long time to build sample sizes and so many players who believe themselves to be successful playing live are merely riding the variance wave.
