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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0pfy3B7aAU tl;dw : turns out the top players in the game really are that good
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Aug 1, 2016 05:02
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 21:07 |
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I don't know the details in who exactly did what as far as Full Tilt sins go but Full Tilt getting shut down put an axe to my neck right when I'd finally moved out of the Micros as a PLO player. That was really bad timing for me and if that hadn't happened maybe I'd be a 5/5 PLO reg today instead of a 1/2 PLO casual (live monies). I know there's a ton of vitriol toward Lederer and Bitar especially. A long time ago I read Lederer's sister's (?) autobiography and it talked about Lederer a lot in it. Maybe it was his biography written by his sister? I forget. Anyway Lederer had been running books and small scale card rooms and poo poo like that for a long time before he got involved with Full Tilt and IMO he's exactly the sort of person to ramjam a ponzi scheme or siphon company money or whatever if he could -- he's the sort of person that can internally justify that stuff and then give you honest eyes when you confront him about the issues with what's he's doing because in his mind the operation is fixated in another way -- in this case I have no doubt (but also no evidence) that Lederer saw Full Tilt as his personal money pinata, that it was set up to be exactly that, and why are you mad at me, that's what this thing is, who told you it's one of the two premier poker sites available worldwide and a safe place to deposit real money and play poker with it? Ferguson I can see just being a dope and going along with what he'd told. Lederer I can't. raton fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 03:08
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I made this a long time ago and was considering buying it as :plo: The font for the text and the button shape was taken from Full Tilt screenshots
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Aug 5, 2016 04:26
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Terrorforge posted:I want to learn the game. I'm a Swedish tryhard with a working understanding of probability and a lot of experience with tcgs but virtually no poker experience whatsoever. Where do I start learning? Where do I start playing? A suggested trajectory: 1) Read Phil Gordon's Little Green Book 2) Put about 300USD on Pokerstars and play 0.05/0.10 No Limit Hold'em (these are the tables with a max buyin of ten dollars). Pay attention to what you're doing. Try to apply what you know from LGB. You will lose money at first but will figure a few things out as you go and eventually break even. You don't have to put 300 on at once but I would expect you to lose at least a hundred before you kind of figure the game out and likely another hundred after that until you figure it out well enough to not lose. If Stars has cheaper games (0.03/0.05, where the max buyin is five bucks) then you might as well start there. Real money games are real poker games, no matter how small the stakes. 3) Buy Hold'em Manager. It's expensive but vital to any real poker payer's success. There's another similar program called Poker Tracker that many people prefer but I think it's probably 70/30 for Hold'em Manager. This is a very robust stat tracking and analysis package for poker. Look up some guides for a basic Head's Up Display using these stats and start integrating the HUD into your poker play a bit, especially the VPIP and PFR numbers for adjusting how you play against different people preflop off of whatever base understanding you developed in part 2. 4) Start posting hands you have questions about to forums like 2+2 or here to get people advice on how you should play them. Never post "what actually happened" until discussion is dead as this will taint people's advice really badly -- give them the picture you had step by step and try to see how their thinking differs from yours. 5) Once you are making money at these limits you should feel confident enough to play in a live game at low stakes for fun without thinking you're doomed to lose. Many people play solely online but "can kind of hack it at .05/.10" is about equivalent to "can reliably beat the lowest stake live game in the area." 6) Buy Metha and Flynn's Small Stakes No Limit Hold'em and read that. 7) By now you'll know if you want to start playing tournaments or not. Whether you play cash games (where the money you win/lose is the money you win/lose and can enter or leave any time you want) or tournaments (where the money you lose is what you pay to enter and the money you win depends on how you place in the tournament and you have to be there at the start and leave at the end or when you bust out) is almost entirely a matter of taste. Cash games are the "pure" form of poker but then lots of people don't adapt well to the changes you need to make to be a reliable winner in tournaments so maybe you feel it's easier money -- maybe you just want to win big once in a while instead of grinding out your 4BB/100 slowly on a cash table, etc, etc. Anyway at this point you start looking into other poker variants, tournaments vs. cash, that kind of stuff, and try to vary what you play for some small part of the time you're playing. Every poker game will teach you something about your main game that you didn't realize so even just messing around a little with other stuff will help you develop. Additionally maybe you'll find a different sort of poker to make your main game instead. 8) Shift to video learning resources. JCarver's Twitch stream, sites like Deuces Cracked, etc. Hold'em Manager will tell you when you stop sucking because you'll have a positive win rate over a reliable sample of hands. It has little graphs and stuff. You could easily play live poker casually for half a year and still not be sure if you're garbage or not -- a really experienced player would know but it doesn't flow both ways.
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Aug 9, 2016 21:49
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Green book will cover why I said 300. If they have .01/.02 games then you can start with sixty bucks. When I was new .05/.10 was as small as it got!
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Aug 10, 2016 18:02
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I really don't advocate raise or fold only even for the newest player (except preflop first in and of course in a bunch of low M tournament spots). One of the most important early lessons you learn in poker is that you're not there to win hands, you're there to make money. There are lots of situations where if you raise there only hands that will continue vs you are hands that beat you and the hands you beat will all fold. This is an especially common spot for new players who are playing tight like they're supposed to be. Say you raise pre with AT (T means ten) on the button and get a call from the big blind. Flop is T65, big blind leads into you for 3/4 pot. Against your average low stakes player here a raise is pretty awful and a fold is idiotic. He could be reasonably betting here with hands you beat (T9, JT, A6 suited, 67, 87, 43, 99, 88, 77, sometimes 68, sometimes 54), hands you don't beat (JJ, TT, 66, 55, 65) and a few total bluffs/brain malfunctions. If you raise almost none of the first set will call very often (unless he's terrible) and all of the second set will. You've now effectively turned your good hand into a bluff where his range is so strong that you're only folding out rebluffs (it takes a really terrible player to rebluff regularly against an unknown here) with further aggression. Your actions change your opponent's likely holdings going forward in the hand. It's not good to set up a world where you always either win a small pot or lose a big one once you are involved in a hand and that's what raise/fold only postflop usually creates. I'm not saying that new players don't call too much. I'm also not saying that you couldn't try out raise/fold only as an exercise for 30 minutes to see how many folds can be found that otherwise you wouldn't get. I'm saying that poker is about making money and the best decision is always the one that makes you the most money. Let's say you have seen someone's cards and know they have two outs to your holding. Let's say that if you bet they will also suspect they only have two outs but aren't certain of this. Obviously you would love to make a bet and have it get called. But should you? It always depends. Will he imagine you're bluffing if you make a big bet? Will he bet for you big on the next street if you check back, and if this is the case is he more likely to call a repop by you because you already showed weakness or will he decide he's been trapped and give up right away? Will he refuse to bet any more given his suspicions but be unable to find a fold against three smallish bets to the river? You always have to be developing and weighing ranges and then sketching out a way that your hand vs. his range is not just good for you but the best for you. This is enough to beat the micros. Moving out of the micros requires also imagining what he thinks your range is and how that is altering his range and the weights in it.
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Aug 11, 2016 19:22
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I play on Bovada a little it's ok. Kind of the only option I think but I'm not up to date on online in the US so maybe I should keep my mouth shut.
raton fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 21:28
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Poker guys just put out a video illustrating really well the virtue of keeping "call" in your wheelhouse even in a spot where raises are generally very common for multiple reasons and on the surface entirely sane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=375FUg8be5E It's very easy to lose track of your goal in poker, especially when you're new, especially given how the game is custom made to engage every combatative instinct you have. In poker you are never trying to win a hand, you are always trying to make money. This includes out-of-the-small-stakes concepts like range balancing. The minute you lose sight of the profit motive you make mistakes imo, often big ones. raton fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 21:30
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First of all my general feeling in a spot like that is "this is a great chance to make a nice amount of money." I'm not generally thrilled to get my stack in with one pair (although there are lots of spots where I'll decide it's the way to go) but having The Best Pair Guaranteed in a pot without a lot of raises (just one so far and there are a lot of possible reasons for it) is usually a good spot. You raise pre (of course) and he has position but just called. It's likely at this point that he's a guy that doesn't play aggressively or he has a bad hand. I would raise here if I was him if I was going to play and I'd do it with a huge variety of hands, but this is penny poker and he doesn't know what he's doing either. What does he think you have? Basically he thinks you have an ace, or any two picture cards, or some medium pairs. Why? Well that's what people think you have when you raise preflop. The flop comes and you bet really small. Normal sizing on the flop is 3/4 pot (+/- 1/4 pot). The flop looks bad for you because there's no matchers to what he thinks you have (an A, K, Q, or J) and you look weak because of the small bet so he raises -- or he has like 23 and lol crushed it. My plan would be to call the raise and check the turn. If he checks back I'll bet about half pot on the river and expect to get called by all of his TX hands (x= any other card, the likely ones being broadway cards and 9). If he bets I'll call again and plan to check river. If he bets river then I'll have to think about calling or folding but will probably call. Normally the above plans would include me adapting my strategy to what cards come on the turn and river (eg: if x y z comes I'll be happy to get money in, if a b does I'll be unhappy but still probably have to call, I can fold on another T and real strength...) but with AA on a dry board you beat everything one pair and he has a lot of hands like that because it was cheap to play preflop. One other thing you should always mention at the start of your hand questions is how big your stacks are. Green Book is not very good about this but adjusting bet sizes based on how the money can go in through a hand (is bet bet bet enough, do you need a raise, if he raises is he threatening your stack or not, etc) is very important in NLHE. When you're new you can use a rule of thumb of 3x raises/bets pre, 3/4 pot bets flop and turn, 1/2 pot bet river but after just a little while you'll see where the holes are in this on your own. raton fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 20:50
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Two things I want to add: 1) anyone else commenting is likely to suggest a more aggressive plan than I have. I'm probably the worst player of the people who will respond so don't take me advice as baseline and weigh theirs against mine. Just average all of the opinions out for now, with experience you'll be able to discount some opinions entirely. 2) If I was playing against two or more villains instead of just one how I would play would change as would my gut feelings on relative strengths. I can't generalize for how because it depends a lot on the dynamics of the situation, but in general you should never carry rules of thumb based on heads up play into multiway play. raton fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 21:13
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Thanks, those numbers don't change my advice. If it's heads up you can say "effective stacks are 100bb" instead of naming stacks discretely. I'm sure you can see why the effective stack is always the smaller of the two stacks. If they let you buy in to 150x be hesitant to put in your stack heads up with one pair hands, even AA (unless we're taking preflop of course). Multiway you should always list stacks -- if everyone has 100bb just say that. If you don't remember just say that and expect that someone needles you for it a little. I also usually try to give my current reads on a) what I think he plays like and b) what I imagine he thinks I play like if those things have developed in that session. I find it a little irritating when people ask about a hand that they played live and don't offer any of this. Online it's sometimes too early to tell and you have less time to develop these thoughts anyway (though you should still put a lot of effort into doing it). Live though I'm never playing any given hand the same way against a grey haired old man in bad health that I am against a 22 year old Asian kid. I kind of assume if someone doesn't say something that an online hand is 100bb stacks with no reads / player info. You should still say that if that's the case though, there are some spots where it doesn't matter much, there are others where it's everything. raton fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 21:31
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Terrorforge posted:Is this true even if the stacks are of vastly different size? If they're at 7bb, should my play not be affected by whether I have 14bb or 140bb? A) If they only have a 7bb stack AND you're heads up then what good does your extra 143bb do? He can only call/raise 7bb max. If its him and another guy behind him with 80bb then there's no "effective stack." So yes. If he has 7bb and he's your only foe the effective stack is 7bb (in spots like this which are uncommon live but do happen in tournaments the action is almost always all in or fold based on hand strengths / likelihood of finding a better spot before you don't have a choice) B) If you're new no one expects it. But pretty soon you'll notice that, say, this guy is crazy aggressive or that you haven't seen that guy play a hand yet and it's been four orbits. raton fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 22:24
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There are people that play with small stacks on purpose in cash games, especially online, but in general they're kind of a blight. They way you play when you do that is way more speadsheety which really doesn't appeal to me. You're also more vulnerable to the rake unless you're playing high enough they the rake is getting capped preflop a lot. In not saying some of them don't make money but it's a pretty aberrant way to approach poker.
raton fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 22:57
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I think he wins two ways given the fairly weak call pre: flopping a set with 22 or 33 or binking two pair on the turn or river. T3 is possible or course, but it's a lot easier for him to have JT there than T3. I think 99% of Internet players would have reraised TT pre.
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Aug 17, 2016 13:19
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The money you make in poker is because, long term, your opponents make more mistakes than you do. If you both do the same right play in spot A and make the same mistake in similar but different spot B no net money changes hands if you play for long enough. If you warp the game so that, while in situation A you can't force a mistake from your opponent (because the situation is too clear cut), you can get him to gently caress up in B then you've made money (so long as you aren't paying too much to effect this change). Usually these gently caress ups come from understanding how he thinks/plays and swinging your game so that his faults open up more often and/or wider. Sometimes you find a way to play where he doesn't understand things very well. There are options. Shortstackers often wait for places where they have the better hand preflop (on average) and try to get the money in preflop. Because good ones spend a lot of time thinking about "under the gun A8 is +EV if I'm in vs UTG+1, but not UTG+2" type stuff they know that game better than people with deep stacks. Another thing to consider is that if you see five cards you end up with a lot more two pair/flush/straights than when you just see a flop and have to make decisions from there (because you sometimes fold to protect your remaining money with a bigger stack). Finally there are a lot of spots, especially in modern aggressive games and doubly especially in the insano aggressive games circa 2008/2009 where the big stacks are trying to manipulate other big stacks into big mistakes by pumping up the pot early and making it hell for the other big stack to make it to showdown (in such a way that is balanced so that they can't just wait and trap). They want to do this as much as they can, which means more than card strength allows, which means just on their cards they cant justify that play, it's their cards plus their play long-term. In other words they often are in trouble at the beginning of a hand but force hell later to pay for this. But if your opponent is all in on the flop how are you going to make him err on the turn/river? If you are the one short stacked guy at a table the other guys sometimes can't adjust to you because they have four to seven other guys with more money that they have to optimize against (because the goal is to make money, not to win hands). So even if they know what you're doing (many don't) they still can't justify a shift in strategy, which means the short stacker can keep saying "yeah I'll take that great preflop deal, I won't have to pay for it postflop like you would" over and over while everyone else has to keep handing him those freebies because they're trying to make money off of the rich men, not save nickels vs the poor. As a big stack get spots a lot where you're trying to isolate and abuse another big stack that has already come in but there's a short stack in the blinds or whatever. So as a big stack you might raise the other big stack knowing have position and the option to lean on him on every street. The short stack behind you then shoves over knowing a) a lot of the time the other big stack will fold and then his cards seem/are probably better than yours, b) he can't be drawn into mistakes later, either he is ahead now or he isn't, c) if the other big stack calls and you then call he probably just got it in with the best hand and that first pot will go to him more often than 1/3rd of the time -- essentially you two are paying him for the chance to play against eachother, etc, d) if he thinks you are good he knows you know this and can bluff this way a certain percentage of the time as well. Online you just leave the table after your double or triple up and find a new seat so you stay in this situation you've studied on. Also because there is less situational thought to it (while playing, while not playing you have to study and refine all in ranges a lot more than deep stack players because you can't use good post flop play as a profit source) so you can do this on more tables simultaneously than you could if deep stacked. There used to be (maybe still are?) shortstackers who would play 12-20 tables regularly, who had software that would sit them at new tables as they closed open ones, who had Autohotkey set up so instead of clicking a mouse they would hit like 1-5 for fold/call/bet/raise 3x/push or whatever, and would just kind of matrix out while grinding their custom made spreadsheets against the world. At lower stakes you don't see many short stackers that are good. But there were/are some players that are very good at it. tl:dr - imagine you could, if you wanted to, play a heads up basketball game wearing a 75lb backpack, but in compensation there was a second basket for you that was only seven feet off the ground. There are some obvious huge advantages in that dynamic and some obvious huge disadvantages and whether you do it or not depends a lot on who you're playing, how long you're playing, whether or not there's a girl watching, etc etc etc raton fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Aug 19, 2016 |
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Aug 19, 2016 20:27
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Another illustration of "you need a stronger hand to call" comes when you consider dominance vs position. Say the devil offered you a deal and for a hundred hands you would either have a hand that dominates your foe (so one card, the higher one, is the same and you have a better kicker, like you have AK and he has AQ so he only really wins with a Q) or a hand where you were dominated but had position in that hand. Which deal do you take? This is not an easy decision as both spots are so good for you. Personally I'm going with position. Let's he raises say in middle position with AJ and I'm behind with A9. I don't know he has AJ of course, so he raise can be a lot of things there from my view. There are two aces left in the deck so the odds of another A coming are the same as flopping a set. The rest of the time I can hit a 9, he can hit a J, but by far the most common situation is we both miss. If i reraised him pre I'm going to bet most of the time when checked to, he's going to have nothing and fold. Once in a while he will raise me as a bluff but that's okay, were allowed to lose to good bluffs. If I called pre is he going to just check to me? (Often no.) If he bets and I just call will he give up? (Often no.) Will I be able to raise him on a pure bluff when he raised pre and then bet the flop and I have nothing very much? No. What if he bets, I raise, he calls , all preflop, and the nightmare scenario happens and the A comes so he has A with a J kicker and I have A with a 7 kicker. Live or deep stacked enough it's not hard to get them to fold. They are not comfortable vs you with anything other than AK and sets really because your play makes seem like that's what you have as far as he's concerned. And if he does want to stay I really won't have that hard a time figuring out I need to go. If I just called though? Now I have no idea if he's just continuing aggression, has me beat, or whatever. Position dominates dominance but a lot of your positional value is lost if you are not aggressive. Raising A8, getting reraised from the button and calling is awful most of the time, but facing a raise, having A8 and reraising and then playing poker isn't bad. Of course this doesn't mean that this is a good default idea necessarily but at least it's not bad. If you regularly play dominated hands out of position you'll lose a ton of money, and while we would love to have a dominating hand in position of the remaining permutations dominating oop < dominated ip. If you go back through the post you'll see how it's hard to come up with a spot here where a) you play a hand preflop and b) it's a better idea to call with it than raise it. Competent villains know all of this and will fight back (sometimes check raise flops they miss, stuff like that) but a lot of people aren't competent or aren't paying attention and even a competent player is usually doing this as a loss reduction strategy instead of thinking "I'll set up really awful spots for myself and then maybe win anyway lol." It's possible that the obvious strategy can be overdone or that some genius will recognize it right away and make a shift that turns that strategy into an advantage for him. It's extremely unlikely this happens in a 1/2 live game or in the micros online. Sometimes in a search for the exception that proves the rule you end up confusing yourself as to why the rule is the rule to begin with.
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Aug 21, 2016 21:10
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The most common situation where it's okay to call preflop in small stakes no limit Hold'em: You have a hand that will either make dogshit or the nuts AND the pot is probably going to be multiway ("if I raise they're both going to call anyway.") If you make a flush or a straight with 65s you can still play vs. lots of people and win, wherereas pairing your A with AK you often aren't going to win if there has been betting and you're at the river with two other guys. Hands like 33 play like this multiway too. You want people to call your bets when you have a better hand than then. (This is only part of the reason you might bet so I'm talking about certain situations now -- fairly common ones, but still.) If you have a hand like a flush usually you are so strong that you want everyone calling your bets.* So why build a situation where there are less people to do it? You want like three people gritting their teeth and clicking call while whispering "pot odds" to themselves so you 3x every dime you put in there. *Of course "I haz flush I ween" can be a disaster if you ignore the board. If you played like you have a flush and the board is K  T 4TK and he's excited to get money in you're a hot dipped poo poo if you're happy about having QJ or even AQ or whatever. On the turn you should have been positive if a little wary, but by the river and he's still betting is pretty ominous. However if it's something like A87K4 and you have the flush you should be thrilled into heaven with all the chodes that now have to call with 56, AK, sometimes AQ/AJ, sets, 87, etc.
raton fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Aug 21, 2016 |
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Aug 21, 2016 21:33
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There are very few spots in poker where you can have it both ways. The amount of potential money to be made in a given hand is a consideration of the expected value of your hand (which is how often it wins times how much money it wins on average) and the expected value of your bluffs (basically how much of the end pot that he owns that he will give up to you due to aggression). Note that both of these depend on what range of hands villain plays (and how he plays them). If you have a table of samey villians it's easier to generalize and just say you have one amalgamated foe to beat out of a profit. If this foe plays too wide a range and/or carries it to showdown too much your bluff ev is almost nothing. If he plays too small a range and will not carry it deep into a hand without a guarantee your value ev is almost nothing. People fix these obvious weaknesses in their game as you move up but don't try to force value where structurally there just isn't any. If people play a multidimensional game you end up in lots of interesting spots. If they play a rigid one dimensional game then they have told you how to beat them in an optimal way. Now let's assume you have someone who is thinking a little bit and not just set mining or whatever. The best single piece of advice I've heard for this spot is "we're generally okay letting people draw to two outs." Consider their range of hands. Note that if they have bottom pair they have five outs to beat you, of they have an open ender eight. Those hands don't get free cards. We are okay letting them draw to two but not five. The game then becomes "how much can I charge and keep them in." A good place to start for that is on wet boards you can charge about 3/4 pot (kinda wet) to full pot (soaking wet). On dry boards you can charge 1/2 pot to 3/4 pot (depending mostly on how much he thinks you're full of poo poo, which mostly will depend on how high the board is, since he will assume you have paint if you have raised preflop -- in short a high flop that you hit gets around 1/2 pot, a low flop that you hit, so like A8 on 862 or binking a set on a low board) closer to 3/4. The reason bet sizes change vs board texture is that board texture largely determines what holdings he can have (no straight or flush draws he either has 5 outs, 2 outs, or he has your beat, almost all of the time). E: I assume you know what a dry and a wet board is, if not just ask. Against actively engaged players you might want to use other factors over board texture to help you with flop bet sizing (personal history, leveling, obvious statistical weaknesses in their game) but against your typical semi attentive low stakes player I think flop texture is your best overall guide, along with the obvious SPR considerations where they apply, of course. On the turn there is only one more card to come so your exposure to getting drawn out on is less. However it is very difficult to generalize turn play in NLHE. In many respects the turn is the heart and soul of two card poker so always give turn decisions a lot of careful thought. Remember the goal is always always always to show as much profit as you can on average. Never get distracted from your profit motive, the minute you lose that you have no useful rudder on how to go ahead in a hand. (And, of course, profit is win - loss, so don't go apeshit on the win column if it's poison for the loss column). In aggregate extraction. raton fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Oct 4, 2016 |
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Oct 4, 2016 17:15
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Wetness is a kind of volatility. A wet flop is one where there are a lot of ways for the likely current best hand to turn into a non winner. Wet = I have top pair top kicker now but on the turn half the loving deck is going to make me wonder if I'm still the likely winner. Dry = just flopped a full house and there's no way really for him to have trips / had QQ but a AKx flopped so either he's going to win every time or I am. Basically on dry flops the turn and the river cards are often irrelevant, whereas on wet flops they're likely to be important. It doesn't have anything to do with big hands although in NLHE there is a correlation (in other forms of poker like PLO flops can be very wet without the underdog making a monster to win pretty frequently, partly because straights are much more vulnerable in that game, partly because it's easier to make a better two pair than villain in that game, etc). Very wet flop 9 86J T3Q  T8A 96A A5Very dry flop raton fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Oct 6, 2016 |
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Oct 6, 2016 22:20
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Figure your average table drops somewhere between 80-120 bucks an hour, something like that. Your share (if you're not notably loose or tight) is going to be around a ninth of that. 3/6 limit can be pretty hard to beat the rake on. I was a bartender before and I apologize to the dealers out there but tipping can be a real problem for staying +EV if you're playing 1/2 or 2/4. At those stakes I only generally tip when I win a a ~100 BB pot or greater and I tip one dollar. I will occasionally tip if I've won a bunch of smaller pots and feel bad about it. If the table goes short handed (either six or five or less, depends on the place) you can request a rake reduction from the dealer (who will ask the floor). I always tip a dollar on being granted the reduction. It's a maxim among dealers in Vegas that the 1/2 tables tip better than the 2/5 tables generally do. This is because grinding for a living becomes reasonable at 2/5 so those tables have a lot more players who flat out don't tip. I do tip dealers that are friendly to me way more than those that aren't. When I was in Vegas playing a lot I had some dealers that hated me and some that seemed to really like me. The only difference was probably a bad run at the outset or me being in a bad mood, but whatever. At least I shower before I go in. raton fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Nov 15, 2016 |
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Nov 15, 2016 03:38
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The best poker dealer in the world is a ~35 year old Hispanic woman (half Dominican I think? I forgot, she also looks 7-8 years younger) who works at the Venetian. She's at least 30% faster than the next fastest dealer in there (and almost everyone in the Venetian is world class), talks quick enough and nice enough to always lift the table which is a huge boon in a room with a couple of grinders at most tables, never makes an error and almost never breaks her pace, and she knows almost everyone's name that's in there semiregularly. There are a lot of great dealers out there but she's supernatural. Can't remember her name right now but if you're there and she sits down to deal you'll know it's her.
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Nov 15, 2016 03:48
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It's okay to just try to play well and accept that you're losing money to the rake or whatever too. If you're trying to make money you should probably be looking at around 5/10 limit (at least -- that usually means 8/16 because you don't usually see 5/10 limit, but maybe you can beat the rake at 4/8) anyway -- the rake is big issue with profitability in the smallest games a room sets usually.
raton fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Nov 15, 2016 |
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Nov 15, 2016 04:27
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Here's a chart I made for a presentation I'm doing later on today
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Nov 30, 2016 12:40
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You're right, the first three bubbles in play should be compressed and align more or less with Little Green Book. I'm not going to talk at all about how you actually get money online though and wanted to leave a little guidance there for Americans -- depositing is a pain in the rear end for us. I can't really edit it now anyway because I made it online and didn't save anything, I suppose I'll just mention that you can shuffle any of the columns up or down in time as you wish.
raton fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 18:56
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Your link doesn't work.
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Jan 11, 2017 03:03
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Carnegie Mellon has a bot that's dominating against a few very good pros that's streaming and being talked about at the moment. Of course HU limit hold'em was "solved" a good while ago now, this time around it's Head's Up NLHE. The bot was built through machine learning, playing solely against itself, and was not fed any statistics or info about the players it would face in advance of this contest. Bots have been playing on poker sites for a long time, of course, so this is really just another notch in the belt of AI vs. human minds. More info: https://www.riverscasino.com/pittsburgh/BrainsVsAI/ There was also a Reddit thread recently from the human players: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5qi3i9/we_are_professional_poker_players_currently/ One of the human players summarized their difficulty with the AI as something like "It puts more pressure on us correctly than any human player can."
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Jan 29, 2017 07:45
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I LIKE COOKIE posted:so I play poker, but I'm really impatient and tend to over-bluff when I don't get cards. I'm a pro bluffer(in my head), but the people I play with all the time have come to learn that I'm typically full of poo poo. so my question is I used to do this a lot too. What helped me was to realize that I wanted my bluff value to stay at least part value, and if you want that to have to "spend" it wisely over the course of 1000 hands or so. I also try to think of a few spots as bluffing indulgences where I can get out of line. Like the 3am game with tight lowstakes guys where I'll just start stealing every button or cutoff, or the "well that's the worst card in the deck for him" bluff. I mean, obviously you should bluff more in the cases no matter what but what helps me is to think of them in a way that keeps the bluff monster satisfied. Difficult decisions in your brain are often literally two parts of your brain trying to outshout each other. The examples I heard (on a Radiolab episode I think) was people were asked a few questions with mixed considerations while in an MRI machine and brain activity was monitored. If you ask someone a Scrabble question the part of the brain that does language lights up, not much else does, and people produce reasonable responses. If you ask them "You're hiding in the basement with ten other refugees and your baby and enemy soldiers are at the door outside. Your baby is sick, inconsolable, and is crying constantly. If the enemy soldiers find you they will kill everyone in the room. What do you do?" two district parts of the brain light up, the logic center (11>1) and the empathetic kind of parenting area (protect your child at all costs). Results were 50/50, and in general the people that couldn't kill their baby had brighter and larger scans in the empathetic center than the logic center, and vice versa. Anyway, if you know you have a tendency that's hurting EV the ideal thing would be to just excise it, but if you know you have a tendency and try to fix it and can't it may be easier to intentionally appease or distract the nonlogical part of your brain to make the self management task easier.
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Jan 29, 2017 18:07
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It's easier to love Bobby Fischer than Magnus Carlsen, and honestly it should be. It's cool that as scattered and animalistic as people are that we can build tools over many generations whose capacities so obviously outstrip our own, at least for their purpose (and some day in the future maybe in every way that matters), but each one of those is just another item on list at some point. It's an urbanization of ideas, moving from a distributed organic past to a concentrated, gridded out future and there's an obvious and undeniable loss there no matter how much you love city life. raton fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jan 29, 2017 |
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Jan 29, 2017 18:51
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You also get to be The Guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ0zHJuTIY raton fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 15:45
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It just seems goofy to me. Unsportsmanlike definitely not, if they think they give away that much info with, like, the pulse in their loving neck then go ahead and cover it up. Sunglasses I can understand if you don't want people to know you're looking at them at particular times but I look at the same person at the same time most any hand anyway so there's no reason for me to wear them. Pupillary dilation? Give me a break. It is however absolutely ridiculous to go in on any of this poo poo at a 1/2 game. If you're playing for a living at 2/5 or up or whatever then you know, fine, I get it, it's your livelihood and you have a right to overdo it. For the lowest game in the house full of casual players? Come on man. For a while in Vegas (in certain casinos at certain times) they were not allowing people to put their hoods up on their hoodies. I think this was mostly for image reasons as the older locals hate certain things, one of those being black people, and by extension hoodies, especially with the hood up. Note that wearing glasses and things like that isn't strictly +EV. Sometimes it can be a struggle to see hearts vs. diamonds if you're in the three or four seat and the casino is dark, put on glasses and maybe you make an occasional mistake about that where if you weren't wearing glasses you wouldn't have. Maybe you get a drunk retard coming out of the nightclub who has an extra 1200 in his pocket that he's going to either try to double in twenty minutes or lose because he struck out in the club -- which table is he going to sit at, the one with normal looking people or the one full of people dressed up like the loving Black Mage? If you're trying to make sure the drunks have fun so they rebuy a few more times it's going to be harder to do that wearing a balaclava than it would be with your honest normal face. I want a lot of people to play poker and enjoy it. Not just because I make more money that way, but because poker is a genuinely good game that makes most of the people who play it better people. It gives a social arena for older folks whose friends have died off. It's one of the purest games for games sake out there with a rule set that's arguably simpler than go (rare beats not rare, you take turns bidding on the pot with certain restrictions on the size of these bids, that's about it) and a set of rules for perfect play that's probably larger and more nuanced. Part of my job as a poker player (and human) is to make what I like as open to other people as I can so that they'll be happy to try it out and do it with me and honestly that's the reason I don't gear up to play poker. The worst thing I do is bring a fanny pack with the faceplate from my car stereo in it and I only do that because my loving car got stolen and the radio cut out of it at the Venetian one time.
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Jan 31, 2017 00:01
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bengy81 posted:Post pics of fanny pack please. TIA It's black I don't wear it I just carry it in and either check it at the check in desk or if they don't do that hang it off the back of my chair. I have had people ask me to wear it before. I also keep my phone charger and comp cards (when I'm in Vegas) in there.
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Jan 31, 2017 07:51
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Imaduck posted:My friend says that 100% of players at the table that have backpacks are pros. In my experience, story checks out. I might have to expand that to fanny packs as well. You should Part of the reason I got the fanny pack actually was because there was another really bad reg that had one in Vegas at the time and I thought if I'm going to out myself I might as well associate me with him.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:56
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Someone gets a healthy snack out of the backpack hanging on his chair = probably avoid
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Jan 31, 2017 21:57
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IED enthusiast posted:Those were the golden days. Everything is skippable if you already know it. If you want to know if it's worth your time because you're already a ways along in what you know about poker I'd suggest finding a copy somewhere and reading the chapter on Stack to Pot Ratio. If that material is familiar maybe that book isn't the best use of your time. The rest of the material in it is pretty much covered in most decent introductory books (but I think they do a good job of it) so SPR should delineate the books utility for you if you are wondering about it. If you're picking up poker for the first time ever in 2017 I think it's going to be worth your time one way or another but I remember your avatar from old poker threads so I don't think this is the case for you. raton fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Feb 16, 2017 |
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Feb 16, 2017 18:18
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IED enthusiast posted:Sorry, I'm not implying the ACR RNG is rigged, maybe I was just seeing a lot of family pots, or perhaps a little collusion or something of that sort. I just thought the sample was really odd, but again it was a small sample so not really significant. I also find all the automated ACR phonecalls to be more than a bit intrusive and annoying. I think it provides a good model for how to think analytically about something in poker. Everybody gets by instinct things like odds and hand reading (even if they're terrible at it at least they can see the utility right off the bat) but that's poker from 1700-2007. Things like SPR or what I call shaping (don't know if there's an actual term for it, I basically mean betting with the intent of forcing polarization or nonpolarization for villain based on what you think is better for the hand) are extra more modern poker tools that a new player has to learn to build for themselves at some point and what SSNLHE does is show you how to build probably the simplest one of them. So it's good as your first poker book to show you, like, a method of improving rather than just saying "here is the material."
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Feb 16, 2017 18:53
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More people should play poker because it is cool and good, is what I think.
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Feb 16, 2017 22:38
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Some newbs at my regular game said I looked like an accountant because of my gingham button down  (I stole many pots from them)
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Feb 17, 2017 18:23
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Bad flop against that player IMO, hard to get worse to call, hard to get better to fold. I think of you push she folds everything JJ or worse almost all of the time. Play is image dependent here. It's bad to assume that she has you beat as she rarely does. So you do want money in overall here. There are a ton of A and Ks in her range and giving a free card to ~ six outs isn't great. I think the best option is to push flop and just hope she doesn't have a Q and can't fold some nonset pair, be satisfied with taking down your little pot 80% of the time. If you had been very active and she didn't like you this could be a great spot to have a chance to get a call from worse but I doubt that was the case given your stack/wording. Other option is hope for check-check and ship turns that aren't A or K to try to get more calls but honestly I don't give an old lady at those stakes credit for "he didn't bet flop so his range is wider so I think my eights are good here so I call" so really all you're doing is giving her a draw that she'll only pay on if she hits. Especially given how people like that play in torneys. Of course if you do this and she calls with a Q someone at the table is going to think "what else could she have called with what a bad bet" but you don't have a good bet, a fold is crazy right now, and checking is also bad. As played ship turn and hope she doesn't aw-shucks you with JQ/QT/KQ. raton fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 22:35
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SPR is awkward there. If there is anyone who bets behind me I'd probably go for a c/r -> ship all non 8 turns. Given proflop play, number in, and that you remove so many bettor combos I think it's a lower than usual chance you get any action behind. Betting small (to induce a raise) has the same problem and is probably too fancy for a tournament spot like this anyway. I guess nearpot flop (two callers would be baus) / nearpot non-8 turn / think about river if it gets there. I would not be thrilled about an A on the turn either. I'm not very confident about this line. Doing what I said to do and getting raised is a little gross but M is like 14 or something so you can't really nitlord here. I guess you just kinda have to go "I won the lotto I think?" and roll with it.
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Feb 21, 2017 06:30
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Imaduck posted:I agree again. Seems like check raise is a pretty standard play. If it checks around, bet out on most, if not all, turns. For some reason I thought this was live, don't know why. If it's online c/r all day expecting a call / ship turn.
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Feb 21, 2017 09:49
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