7 ms·

(Former pro and high stakes player, occasional solver developer) This is actually one of the best poker articles I've ever seen in generalist media. Not too c

by splonk 5y ago

(Former pro and high stakes player, occasional solver developer) This is actually one of the best poker articles I've ever seen in generalist media. Not too clickbaity, reasonable high level overview of game theory, a (very accurate IMO) quote from old pro Erik Seidel about the state of the game just 15 years ago, a discussion on variance vs. EV and results, and most importantly, an emphasis on math, randomization techniques and emotional control rather than the TV image of staring in someone's eyes and reading their soul. Probably the one biggest misconception people have is that pros have sick reading abilities since TV likes to emphasize staredowns, when the actual single biggest skill long term pros have is the ability to lose hand after hand for hours and still play their best game. Incidentally, the anecdote at the top of the article is pretty intuitive game theoretically. Basically on the river you need to bluff with some portion of your hands, or else nobody will ever call when you have a good hand. The natural portion of your hands to bluff with is the absolute worst ones - you don't want to bluff with your middling hands because you have some small chance of just winning a showdown when it checks around. On a board of Kc4c5c2d2c, 7d6d is quite likely the absolute worst hand you can hold given the action that's taken place, therefore it's the one you bluff with. (For some pot/stack sizes it's possible that you bluff so rarely that you have to choose between 7d6d/7h6h/7s6s, but that's getting into details.)

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DennisP 5y ago
Interesting, I read some Sklansky books about 15 years ago and he talked about semibluffs, where you're partly bluffing but you've also got some chance to win. Sounds like strategy has evolved into doing the exact opposite.
- GoatOfAplomb 5y ago
  The distinction is that semi-bluffs are for when there are still cards to be dealt.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Ahh, ok thanks.
  - beardedetim 5y ago
    Would we call that thin value betting on the river?
    - GoatOfAplomb 5y ago
      I don't really think of thin value betting and semi-bluffing as the same concept on different betting rounds. Thin value betting gets its positive expectation (versus checking) entirely from getting called with a worse hand. It doesn't really have positive expectation from inducing a fold the way that semi-bluffing does. At least, that holds if you assume the opponent will always call with hands above a threshold and fold with hands below it. Which is correct play (though kindly ignore raises, for simplicity - but they don't blow up the argument). Only if they behave very strangely, e.g. folding with the very best hands and worst hands but calling with the decent ones, can I see a better connection with semi-bluffing on early streets.
      - GoatOfAplomb 5y ago
        I should also say my explanation assumes we're in last betting position here. If we're first to act, the logic is somewhat more complicated than I can successfully conjure up here without going back into the books - it's been many years since I played seriously.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
So how much have you won and lost in total? I don’t have any knowledge of poker, so I don’t know how to ballpark this. And the impersonal questions are boring after seven lifetimes, so I thought I’d ask. It would be interesting to see a GitHub style graph of poker activity, with won and lost corresponding to added lines and removed lines.
- splonk 5y ago
  6 figures. Turns out there's a lot more (and less risky) money in software development than there is in poker. I gave up the professional poker life pretty early and actually made quite a lot more as a talented "amateur" with a Silicon Valley software dev salary that took away the risk of ruin constraints I had a pro. Plus I didn't really enjoy playing professionally anyways - it's pretty mindnumbingly boring to play the number of hands you need to in order to get the EV/variance tradeoff to some acceptable point, at least for me. My highest and lowest sessions were in the 5 figure range (cash game player, not tournament), so I was never up in the really nosebleed stakes, but I was high enough up that a lot of the nosebleed players would play in my games. Some of them have an impressive ability to play their A-game even when switching between games an order of magnitude in stakes apart. Some of them, uh, don't. People you've seen on TV are overwhelmingly more likely to be in the second category and were generally welcome in my games, at least for monetary reasons. (There was an old screenshot of Phil Hellmuth sitting at a full 9- or 10-handed 300/600 limit hold'em table online. He's out of chips and every other player is sitting out, waiting for him to reload. I have a pretty similar live story about him.)
  - magixx 5y ago
    I imagine that for pro players to play at their best can be taxing and wouldn't be surprised if some just wanted to play less costly games for more what they could deem to be more fun.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - 5y ago
bloodyplonker22 5y ago
> Probably the one biggest misconception people have is that pros have sick reading abilities since TV likes to emphasize staredowns, when the actual single biggest skill long term pros have is the ability to lose hand after hand for hours and still play their best game. This is absolutely true, but let me add to this: live pros like Phil Ivey, who have played the game in person virtually their entire lives, do have sick reading ability. However, it mostly works against amateurs. Actual pros know how to hide their tells better. If you take an online pro who has been clicking at the computer all day on multiple tables, that pro will not have anywhere close to the reading ability of Phil Ivey.
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  I think old school pros like Ivey and Dwan are very good at reading the entire table. Dwan emphatically and correctly states who had the best hand against his bluff [1]. Ivey emphatically and correctly basically calls a guy a liar at the end of a hand over what the guy said he folded [2]. They have amazing "situational awareness". [1] https://youtu.be/dS_uv88YuPs?t=179 https://youtu.be/dS_uv88YuPs?t=179 [2] https://youtu.be/IN1bW4jo4i4?t=72 https://youtu.be/IN1bW4jo4i4?t=72
  - MaxfordAndSons 5y ago
    Indeed, but it should be made clear that these kinds of reads aren't necessarily (or likely) coming from physical appearances alone - there's all sorts of metadata to consider. For example, in the Dwan hand, the timing of Eastgate's call on the flop tipped his relative hand strength, showing that he had a very strong hand but also capping his range. A hand weaker than trips would have deliberated between folding and calling, and a hand stronger than trips with a weak kicker would have likely paused to consider raising. Of course, savvy players can fake these timing tells, but Dwan also knew that Eastgate was out of his depth (a tournament player making a charity appearance on a televised cash game because he'd just won the WSOPME and had yolo money), so he was unlikely to be doing this - more situational metadata.
vincentmarle 5y ago
> The natural portion of your hands to bluff with is the absolute worst ones - you don't want to bluff with your middling hands because you have some small chance of just winning a showdown when it checks around. I don't understand this logic, can you elaborate a bit more? What do you suggest to do with middling hands then?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jliptzin 5y ago
  I think he’s saying you don’t want to “waste” a bluff on a hand you might end up winning anyway just by checking it down.
- tziki 5y ago
  > What do you suggest to do with middling hands then? You try to get to a showdown. With middling hands there's a chance the opponent has a worse hand. It's when your hand is so bad your opponent has you almost certainly beat that you get to the bluffing territory, as that's the only way for you to win.
- splonk 5y ago
  One very simplified model is that on the river, all your hands fall into certain buckets, from strongest to weakest. (I'm ignoring a ton of nuance here and there are actually many more buckets in a real game) - Worth betting, because you have the best hand - Worth calling, because your hand is good enough to beat a bluff (and maybe some value bets as well). - Intending to fold, because your hand is bad, but maybe it's good enough to win if the opponent's hand is worse and they don't bluff. - Worth bluffing, because your hand is so bad it can't win otherwise. The middling hands would literally be the middle two buckets in this example. Call with the better ones, fold with the worse ones. (To complicate this more, in a real world situation the worst part of the "intending to fold" bucket might become a "planning to bluff-raise" bucket, due to similar logic as to why you bluff with your worst hands.)
  - bluecalm 5y ago
EGreg 5y ago
Good to see poker theory approaching the way I naturally thought when I played on PokerStars (before Chuck Schumer and co shut it all down for us). People used to make fun of me for playing limits and sucking out on people. And no limit I would have some crazy strategies to fake out a table and make them anger-bet into my connected straight flush draws, when I was “representing” a two pair etc. On large tables, often you want many people to stay in, until the river, because then the pot is big enough that multiple people will go all-in. You just have to be very sure you probably have the best hand (such as a flush that you were drawing for). I woul actually “goad” people with raising small amounts, whenever I had suited connectors for example, and if I hit a draw or the nuts on the flop, I would act as if I am “protecting” a top pair or so. On the other hand, when you are on a draw and if you want to see the next hand on the turn, you have to bet the flop much harder, because then it signals to most “basic” people that you’re “protecting” a hand — therefore gaining you an informational advantage when you do hit — as well as the “intimidation” factor that lets you “check” the turn to see the river — because they often think you’re checkraising them and also check, giving you another free card. You pay more on the flop but have two free cards after. Also If you don’t hit your draw, sometimes they didn’t hit either, and you can take it down with an aggressive bet since you were “representing” that you flopped a strong hand. To summarize: 1) play large tables 2) play suited connectors, or suited Ace-something 3) limp in or if you are late-position, double the bet to make people call and grow he pot and be more excited to bet later, you also represent a reasonably high pair 4) after a flop - if you are one card away from hitting a very strong draw (eg ace high flush) then bet hard on the flop — late position is always best for this… otherwise you have to bet less to keep people in 5) regardless of whether the turn card makes your draw, check on the turn … you may have to call any bet if multiple people stay in, and play the odds 6) if you made the nuts on the river, checkraise all in (since you represented that you are protecting a flooped hand). 7) there were also timing factors, people get more annoyed if you take too long. And you can play multiple tables online until you hit these kinds of starting hands People said I was playing wrong but I intuitively felt like this would give a lot higher payoffs than just straight play with no bluffs. PS: Against a really intelligent table where people don’t churn, you’d have to leave after a couple big wins and do the same thing elsewhere. The whole idea in poker is to take advantage of most people just executing some common strategy or mindset.
ramoz 5y ago
Similar story here. I’ve always played, mostly online, before Black Friday (pretty sure I was a minor when it happened) but played all the offshore sites through college. Professional software career took off and bounced out, finally ~3y ago I decided to get back into it and I would only play challenging games (only thing challenging about a 1/3 or tourneys is the grind). So, started with 2/5, within a week was playing the 10/25, 25/50. 1. Emotional control and pushing through the variance are key, I would play all nighters and it was mostly a subtle rise up vs big pots (except the one that did me in) 2. You absolutely do read players, I didn’t need to be a pro to learn how to observe the degenerates. Even decent players signaled things here or there (obv not how they eat an oreo , but I had a knack for knowing when someone was off their style). And it’s not even close wit a normal group of friends. 3. the sharks and their meta game… I had run up to about 50K within 3 weeks from my starting 2-3K. Had the pipe dream. I thought I had a growing bond with the pros. When I say pros I’m not talking grinders, I’m talking consistent big winners. About a handful of them. None of them tv personalities. - There were few times we’d run into each other, but I picked off a few donk bets here or there. However their persistence is what did me in. Went the entire month observing their advanced play style, which the meta was harsh, there were few rivers that mattered more than pre flop and continuation/donk betting. This style of play was like nothing I was seeing on tv. But I was winning with them. The last time I played, about a month into my run, I was on a 12h 25/50 game winding down, turned 30k into 70k (had 20k sitting back) pulled QQ and went up against a pre-flop donker. I face a 3 bet and get that gut feeling but put on lower pair or AK. Flop rainbows, large betting action. Turn, junk, I face an insane Re raise after testing a raise of my own, I know it’s off but it’s either AA/KK or AK at this point. My guts off but I’m too far in to quit. On the river I’m defeated, check, face bet, ultimately end up throwing 50K into the pot, lose to aces. I never had a gut feeling so intense though. Like I was screaming at myself to get out. But I was caught. Such a draining hand I never went back. I don’t have the discipline to grind games, and the tech industry pays more.
- Stasis5001 5y ago
  When you say tech industry pays more, I'm assuming the effective long-run hourly earnings of poker players is way less glamorous than it looks from an outsider seeing highlights? Doing a basic google search led me to https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/6737/ https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/6737/, which seems to suggest that 81 players earned over 1mm USD in 2021. But presumably those players don't earn that YoY, and even if they did, plenty more software engineers earn > 1mm USD per annum, so this seems to support your conclusion. OTOH, I have no insight to the home games or whatever sources are not included in these rankings, so I'd love to hear a little more.

by splonk 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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DennisP 5y ago

Interesting, I read some Sklansky books about 15 years ago and he talked about semibluffs, where you're partly bluffing but you've also got some chance to win. Sounds like strategy has evolved into doing the exact opposite.

GoatOfAplomb 5y ago
The distinction is that semi-bluffs are for when there are still cards to be dealt.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Ahh, ok thanks.
- beardedetim 5y ago
  Would we call that thin value betting on the river?
  - GoatOfAplomb 5y ago
    I don't really think of thin value betting and semi-bluffing as the same concept on different betting rounds. Thin value betting gets its positive expectation (versus checking) entirely from getting called with a worse hand. It doesn't really have positive expectation from inducing a fold the way that semi-bluffing does. At least, that holds if you assume the opponent will always call with hands above a threshold and fold with hands below it. Which is correct play (though kindly ignore raises, for simplicity - but they don't blow up the argument). Only if they behave very strangely, e.g. folding with the very best hands and worst hands but calling with the decent ones, can I see a better connection with semi-bluffing on early streets.
    - GoatOfAplomb 5y ago
      I should also say my explanation assumes we're in last betting position here. If we're first to act, the logic is somewhat more complicated than I can successfully conjure up here without going back into the books - it's been many years since I played seriously.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

So how much have you won and lost in total? I don’t have any knowledge of poker, so I don’t know how to ballpark this. And the impersonal questions are boring after seven lifetimes, so I thought I’d ask. It would be interesting to see a GitHub style graph of poker activity, with won and lost corresponding to added lines and removed lines.

splonk 5y ago
6 figures. Turns out there's a lot more (and less risky) money in software development than there is in poker. I gave up the professional poker life pretty early and actually made quite a lot more as a talented "amateur" with a Silicon Valley software dev salary that took away the risk of ruin constraints I had a pro. Plus I didn't really enjoy playing professionally anyways - it's pretty mindnumbingly boring to play the number of hands you need to in order to get the EV/variance tradeoff to some acceptable point, at least for me. My highest and lowest sessions were in the 5 figure range (cash game player, not tournament), so I was never up in the really nosebleed stakes, but I was high enough up that a lot of the nosebleed players would play in my games. Some of them have an impressive ability to play their A-game even when switching between games an order of magnitude in stakes apart. Some of them, uh, don't. People you've seen on TV are overwhelmingly more likely to be in the second category and were generally welcome in my games, at least for monetary reasons. (There was an old screenshot of Phil Hellmuth sitting at a full 9- or 10-handed 300/600 limit hold'em table online. He's out of chips and every other player is sitting out, waiting for him to reload. I have a pretty similar live story about him.)
- magixx 5y ago
  I imagine that for pro players to play at their best can be taxing and wouldn't be surprised if some just wanted to play less costly games for more what they could deem to be more fun.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- 5y ago

bloodyplonker22 5y ago

> Probably the one biggest misconception people have is that pros have sick reading abilities since TV likes to emphasize staredowns, when the actual single biggest skill long term pros have is the ability to lose hand after hand for hours and still play their best game. This is absolutely true, but let me add to this: live pros like Phil Ivey, who have played the game in person virtually their entire lives, do have sick reading ability. However, it mostly works against amateurs. Actual pros know how to hide their tells better. If you take an online pro who has been clicking at the computer all day on multiple tables, that pro will not have anywhere close to the reading ability of Phil Ivey.

dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
I think old school pros like Ivey and Dwan are very good at reading the entire table. Dwan emphatically and correctly states who had the best hand against his bluff [1]. Ivey emphatically and correctly basically calls a guy a liar at the end of a hand over what the guy said he folded [2]. They have amazing "situational awareness". [1] https://youtu.be/dS_uv88YuPs?t=179 https://youtu.be/dS_uv88YuPs?t=179 [2] https://youtu.be/IN1bW4jo4i4?t=72 https://youtu.be/IN1bW4jo4i4?t=72
- MaxfordAndSons 5y ago
  Indeed, but it should be made clear that these kinds of reads aren't necessarily (or likely) coming from physical appearances alone - there's all sorts of metadata to consider. For example, in the Dwan hand, the timing of Eastgate's call on the flop tipped his relative hand strength, showing that he had a very strong hand but also capping his range. A hand weaker than trips would have deliberated between folding and calling, and a hand stronger than trips with a weak kicker would have likely paused to consider raising. Of course, savvy players can fake these timing tells, but Dwan also knew that Eastgate was out of his depth (a tournament player making a charity appearance on a televised cash game because he'd just won the WSOPME and had yolo money), so he was unlikely to be doing this - more situational metadata.

vincentmarle 5y ago

> The natural portion of your hands to bluff with is the absolute worst ones - you don't want to bluff with your middling hands because you have some small chance of just winning a showdown when it checks around. I don't understand this logic, can you elaborate a bit more? What do you suggest to do with middling hands then?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jliptzin 5y ago
I think he’s saying you don’t want to “waste” a bluff on a hand you might end up winning anyway just by checking it down.
tziki 5y ago
> What do you suggest to do with middling hands then? You try to get to a showdown. With middling hands there's a chance the opponent has a worse hand. It's when your hand is so bad your opponent has you almost certainly beat that you get to the bluffing territory, as that's the only way for you to win.
splonk 5y ago
One very simplified model is that on the river, all your hands fall into certain buckets, from strongest to weakest. (I'm ignoring a ton of nuance here and there are actually many more buckets in a real game) - Worth betting, because you have the best hand - Worth calling, because your hand is good enough to beat a bluff (and maybe some value bets as well). - Intending to fold, because your hand is bad, but maybe it's good enough to win if the opponent's hand is worse and they don't bluff. - Worth bluffing, because your hand is so bad it can't win otherwise. The middling hands would literally be the middle two buckets in this example. Call with the better ones, fold with the worse ones. (To complicate this more, in a real world situation the worst part of the "intending to fold" bucket might become a "planning to bluff-raise" bucket, due to similar logic as to why you bluff with your worst hands.)
- bluecalm 5y ago

EGreg 5y ago

Good to see poker theory approaching the way I naturally thought when I played on PokerStars (before Chuck Schumer and co shut it all down for us). People used to make fun of me for playing limits and sucking out on people. And no limit I would have some crazy strategies to fake out a table and make them anger-bet into my connected straight flush draws, when I was “representing” a two pair etc. On large tables, often you want many people to stay in, until the river, because then the pot is big enough that multiple people will go all-in. You just have to be very sure you probably have the best hand (such as a flush that you were drawing for). I woul actually “goad” people with raising small amounts, whenever I had suited connectors for example, and if I hit a draw or the nuts on the flop, I would act as if I am “protecting” a top pair or so. On the other hand, when you are on a draw and if you want to see the next hand on the turn, you have to bet the flop much harder, because then it signals to most “basic” people that you’re “protecting” a hand — therefore gaining you an informational advantage when you do hit — as well as the “intimidation” factor that lets you “check” the turn to see the river — because they often think you’re checkraising them and also check, giving you another free card. You pay more on the flop but have two free cards after. Also If you don’t hit your draw, sometimes they didn’t hit either, and you can take it down with an aggressive bet since you were “representing” that you flopped a strong hand. To summarize: 1) play large tables 2) play suited connectors, or suited Ace-something 3) limp in or if you are late-position, double the bet to make people call and grow he pot and be more excited to bet later, you also represent a reasonably high pair 4) after a flop - if you are one card away from hitting a very strong draw (eg ace high flush) then bet hard on the flop — late position is always best for this… otherwise you have to bet less to keep people in 5) regardless of whether the turn card makes your draw, check on the turn … you may have to call any bet if multiple people stay in, and play the odds 6) if you made the nuts on the river, checkraise all in (since you represented that you are protecting a flooped hand). 7) there were also timing factors, people get more annoyed if you take too long. And you can play multiple tables online until you hit these kinds of starting hands People said I was playing wrong but I intuitively felt like this would give a lot higher payoffs than just straight play with no bluffs. PS: Against a really intelligent table where people don’t churn, you’d have to leave after a couple big wins and do the same thing elsewhere. The whole idea in poker is to take advantage of most people just executing some common strategy or mindset.

ramoz 5y ago

Similar story here. I’ve always played, mostly online, before Black Friday (pretty sure I was a minor when it happened) but played all the offshore sites through college. Professional software career took off and bounced out, finally ~3y ago I decided to get back into it and I would only play challenging games (only thing challenging about a 1/3 or tourneys is the grind). So, started with 2/5, within a week was playing the 10/25, 25/50. 1. Emotional control and pushing through the variance are key, I would play all nighters and it was mostly a subtle rise up vs big pots (except the one that did me in) 2. You absolutely do read players, I didn’t need to be a pro to learn how to observe the degenerates. Even decent players signaled things here or there (obv not how they eat an oreo , but I had a knack for knowing when someone was off their style). And it’s not even close wit a normal group of friends. 3. the sharks and their meta game… I had run up to about 50K within 3 weeks from my starting 2-3K. Had the pipe dream. I thought I had a growing bond with the pros. When I say pros I’m not talking grinders, I’m talking consistent big winners. About a handful of them. None of them tv personalities. - There were few times we’d run into each other, but I picked off a few donk bets here or there. However their persistence is what did me in. Went the entire month observing their advanced play style, which the meta was harsh, there were few rivers that mattered more than pre flop and continuation/donk betting. This style of play was like nothing I was seeing on tv. But I was winning with them. The last time I played, about a month into my run, I was on a 12h 25/50 game winding down, turned 30k into 70k (had 20k sitting back) pulled QQ and went up against a pre-flop donker. I face a 3 bet and get that gut feeling but put on lower pair or AK. Flop rainbows, large betting action. Turn, junk, I face an insane Re raise after testing a raise of my own, I know it’s off but it’s either AA/KK or AK at this point. My guts off but I’m too far in to quit. On the river I’m defeated, check, face bet, ultimately end up throwing 50K into the pot, lose to aces. I never had a gut feeling so intense though. Like I was screaming at myself to get out. But I was caught. Such a draining hand I never went back. I don’t have the discipline to grind games, and the tech industry pays more.

Stasis5001 5y ago
When you say tech industry pays more, I'm assuming the effective long-run hourly earnings of poker players is way less glamorous than it looks from an outsider seeing highlights? Doing a basic google search led me to https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/6737/ https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/6737/, which seems to suggest that 81 players earned over 1mm USD in 2021. But presumably those players don't earn that YoY, and even if they did, plenty more software engineers earn > 1mm USD per annum, so this seems to support your conclusion. OTOH, I have no insight to the home games or whatever sources are not included in these rankings, so I'd love to hear a little more.