I specialized in small, quick tournaments for this reason. Live players still weren't used to the even faster pace of online play but with rapidly escalating blinds it was critical. They were lulled into indecision and procrastination by the low early blinds, not realizing that they escalated quickly to force stacking out of the small players. I could easily make $1k+ a day clearing Binion's tournaments.
I tried playing in a couple of Venetian Deep Stack events and usually busted out. I finally adapted to the slower play, longer rounds, bigger field and frankly better players to leave after two days of play with the same payout from winning one three hour Binion's tournament. The biggest upside being able to say I got my name published in Card Player magazine. LOL. Since for me it was just entertainment and I could reliably pay for my vacation in the smaller tourneys I went back to small ball.
Now that WSOP's in the summer, online poker is mostly dead in the US, televised poker mania has died down, and I have kids, I don't bother going anymore, but it was definitely fun and modestly lucrative for a while in my 30s.
If it's not brutal - you're simply on a hot streak, or playing in unbelievably easy games.
Poker at the end of the day, is a matter of who cracks mentally. It is just so tedious. You can see this in live games for small stakes most clearly when someone gets bored after a couple hours of shit cards and does something he/she would never do an hour in. They call it tilt, I call it your inner wisdom letting you know you're wasting your life away.
As a last hurrah before getting back to startups I traveled to one big live festival..played terrible in the $10k main event due to poor sleep after travel and got 3-outed just before the money after playing great in a satellite to the $25k. It's one thing to miss the money after playing great for ~5 hours in a $500 tournament from the comfort of your own home...consistently walking away -$15k+ in the hole after expenses for days worth of effort? No thanks.
I think it's why people also believe there is "beginners' luck" - there isn't really - the entire game has tons of luck. But when confronted with someone who clearly isn't skilled but wins anyway, poker fans really don't want to face the reality that the game is mostly luck.
Another issue with poker - at least Texas Hold'em - is that the best strategy is folding 90% of the time, which is just boring.
I'm sure there are much better bluffing games.
Imagine casinos that had cash chess tables or basketball courts. Would you have enough dead money willing to risk playing? I'd wager no. You'd get occasional fish willing to try but they'd get dunked on and go home. Without enough new money, the game would dry up as the best players and the casino accumulate all the rest.
I find a huge co-relation between how poker and wall street is aligned.
(Skill has a lot bigger edge in Omaha.)
Good players generally play around 20% of their hands, but even that vastly changes based on how aggressive the player is. Also, there is much more to factor in than just the hand you are dealt. You might want to play a tighter range (play less percentage of hands) in early position (let's say first or second to act in a betting round), compared to being last to act (where you might want to play a higher percentage of your hands). This is because being last to act in each betting round extremely useful in poker (If you want to know why, there's a lots of great articles on the internet who could explain much better than I [1]).
You don't need to be any cleverer than that until people pay enough attention that they won't call you unless they think that they have you beat. Then you will have to go for a wider range and start to play a better strategy.
Just recently got back playing and am trying to learn to play against real players. I'm down overall after about 50 hours of play, but not very much. Any advice?
The Mathematics of Poker (Chen and Ankenman)
Applications of No-Limit Poker (Janda)
Expert Heads up No-Limit Hold 'em (Tipton, this one is nice as the author is a Computer Scientist and also has a course on building a solver.)
Professional No Limit-Hold 'em (Flynn, Miller, Mehta)
Finally, you should get a membership to something like Upswing or RIO to help synthesize the information into a useful framework for play. Also, you'll want access to something like PIO or Pokersnowie for analysis of your hands.
It’s geared toward online cash playing, but I ignore most of the HUD stuff and can use all the concepts in my live games.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Grinders-Manual-Complete-Course-Onlin...
Let's take a very simple toy game. You are dealt a 1 to 3 in order of increasing strength. The deck has one of each card, so if you have a 3 your opponent does not. We have one round of play with only a bet or a fold allowed. The goal of our game is simply to maximize the number of mistakes our opponent makes. A mistake would be folding when he has the better hand, or calling when he has a worse hand. We're going to assume we're playing against a good and logical player.
We can analyze this game pretty easily. Our opponent is always going to call when he has a 3 since he can beat anything. And he's never going to call with a 1 since he can't beat anything. So our chance for an edge comes with 2s. We need to get him to call our 3s with his 2s. If we only bet our 3s, this is probably not going to work. He'd suddenly see that everytime you go to showdown, you end up with a 3. And indeed he probably would not even default to calling with 2s because, from his perspective, he only beats a 1 anyhow.
So we need to create a more balanced range that makes it where this decision is not so easy. One idea is to bet our 3s and 2s. But this would be a big mistake for reasons already alluded to. Imagine we have a 2. He has either a 3 or a 1. He's going to be able to play perfectly. No, betting a 2 will never lead to a mistake. So the only other option we have is to bet our 1s! And yeah this is where you start to see the optimal strategy. Now if he folds his 2s when we bet, he's making a mistake 50% of the time! Interestingly enough, if he calls with his 2s he's also making a mistake 50% of the time!
It's only by creating a balanced range did we create a strategy where our opponent is forced to make mistakes. And in regular poker too a general strategy is to aggressively play the top and bottom of your range. The tough decisions of course come in with the middle of your range. But you generally do not want to mix the middle and top of your range for reasons similar to this toy game. You might push your opponent off a '2', but in general you're making it pretty easy for him to play correctly.
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One other aside is that, depending on the current state of the games, it might be literally impossible to win at certain stakes on certain sites. Your max edge is pretty limited in poker. Even if you're playing against horrible players, you can only win for x bets per 100 hands (big blinds per 100 hands is the general measurement of profit - e.g. 8bb/100). When I quit playing, sites were on a sharp upward trajectory of stupidity with rake. If your edge is 15bb/100 and you're paying 20bb/100 in rake (which is not uncommon at small stakes) you're going to lose money, even though you're crushing the other players. It seems silly to worry about $3 in a $200 pot, but that $3 is ultimately going to play a far bigger role in your earn rate than anything else. This only stops being true at midstakes around $3/6 and especially $5/$10. $5/$10 being the blinds, so a normal buyin would be $1000.
I call it stupidity because I think they felt jacking up the rake was an optimal decision business wise. Winning players take money out of the games, whereas when bad players play all money eventually gets taken in rake. But they miss the meta. Many of those bad players are playing because they want to be one of the good players. That good player might take some 6 or 7 figures out of the games, but in turn inspire deposits from bad players that might be many times that. E.g. the reason I got involved in poker was because of a good winning player by the name of CTS. And then at my lower stakes games I found comparable players to aspire to emulate and so on up the stakes.
Like so many industries, optimize to maximize your profit and you very often end up doing the exact opposite! MBA = masters of business annihilation.
A game of poker is not one hand of poker. It is typical in poker games to be all in and have a 70% chance of winning. If you are playing a bad player and you go all in 5 times against this person with a 70% chance of winning is there any luck involved? To me it looks more like printing money.
>Another issue with poker - at least Texas Hold'em - is that the best strategy is folding 90% of the time, which is just boring.
You should not be folding 90% of the time.
Depends how closely matched people are. Last few times I've played games with friends/family who aren't poker players, I literally took all the money and I'm just using poker 101 strategy. The skill is all in getting people to play with you more than once :(
And if you ever watch casino games -- it's just a constant money spigot from fish to sharks.
But then as you note the skill cap isn't very high. Once everyone figures out the strategy it goes back to being mostly luck and who has the biggest bank account to ride out the bad times.
That's what I always appreciated about professional poker players. Their patience and their emotional regulation. Both of which made me terrible at the game.
Another game I like recommending is Fluxx. It teaches you how to lose. The game is very chaotic and there are things that can happen which cause you to just lose. Or just win. There is some amount of skill involved, but you can be forced in a situation where you cause someone else to win randomly. You learn to divorce your efforts from the immediate results and to accept loss and move on. Partly because the games are pretty quick.
That’s what keeps the fish around!
Variance is a bitch.
A cold deck is one that has been rigged to the advantage of one player, and then swapped in after the cut and shuffle (hence its "coldness"). Typically the deck would be stacked to give the victim a fantastically good hand, but the cheater one that's slightly better. The victim would bet a great deal thinking their hand was good only to lose at the end.
Players now use the term to describe the rare occasions when someone loses with a particularly strong hand in a fair game.
I played a ton online before the Black Friday days and did pretty well, and will usually try to play a few big live tournaments a year, but these days I mostly just play cash games as a fun hobby and a way to grind out some extra income. There's less variance and the money is more consistent.
That being said, as brutal as the swings in tournaments are, cash games have nothing like the rush of running deep in a poker tournament. The intensity and increase in stakes/prizes as the blinds move up and more players get knocked out and you inch closer to the big money is almost like chasing a high. So for me, cash games are the way to go if your goal in poker is to make money, but tournaments are a fun way to chase the dragon from time to time. I personally don't think I would have the stomach to play tournaments full time though.