I ramped up to heavy black max bets during COVID, during which casinos became very sweaty and accordingly felt more comfortable dealing deep pen. Suffice to say, I didn't even bother with a 4.5/6 game when 5/6 pen was everywhere (at least in my part of the country).

I only played 4/6 H17 a handful of times at 2x500/2x600 (and surprisingly did much above EV). I rarely played 8D, but I did stumble across a tolerant PA casino that let me blast 2x600 on a 6.25/8 S17 LS game (brutally slow and they weren't even a 247 casino, even at 2x600 my actual hourly EV was probably hardly 100$/hr).

I never felt comfortable playing games this bad, and it didn't even feel like the casinos were tolerant. I got more of the vibe that they couldn't afford to take a hit so they had to keep the pen that low, and even then they'd back off a winning counter pretty quickly.

I completely agree that if a casino is tolerant and lets you play forever then bad pen is still a good game, but in my experience this was never the case. All the tolerant places I played were absolutely crushing it in revenue and had decent penetration. The places with the bad pen seem to be just as quick to back off if not quicker. What is the point of playing some shithole, with shithole pen, only to get backed off quick. I don't know if anyone else has anything to share regarding this topic, I just kinda wanted to rant about it.

But at the end of the day, would you play a 4/6 H17 game? How about a 6/8 H17 game? [[NO SURRENDER]]