I left Replay a review on TrustPilot today based on @flashlight’s very good suggestion.
It was disheartening to see so many 1-star and 2-star reviews based solely on the claim that “the deals are rigged.” I’ve addressed this many times elsewhere, but here I would like to take a different approach. Hopefully this post will be of use to someone, if only to reinforce that they shouldn’t listen to those comments.
The #1 reason players lose chips on Replay is not being good enough at poker.
That’s it! That’s all! “Good enough” includes bankroll management, something many players ignore as it is “just play chips.” That is a fair perspective, but recognize that if you are regularly putting 10% of your bankroll on the table, there is a frustratingly high chance that you will GO BROKE.
People don’t realize how much they are playing with fire. Then it happens—they get burned a few times in a row, leaving them holding ashes—and they blame the dealer.
Ask any player with over 100M chips and they will tell you about some of the most ridiculous stretches of bad luck you’ve ever heard of. This isn’t unique to Replay; this is what playing lots of poker looks like.
A common misconception is that poker is a game where if you make the right decisions, you get to win. More accurate: poker is a game where if you consistently make the right decisions over hundreds of thousands of hands, it’s likely you will win. You could play absolutely perfectly—a standard none of us even comes close to, by the way—and still lose over a 10k hand sample. You could, in fact, still lose significantly! Now imagine you’re not playing perfectly (read: every single one of us). The odds are much less in your favor.
Many players have some success, then go on a terrible downswing and conclude that something is “rigged against them.”
It’s much more likely that instead, you were merely playing breakeven or slightly losing poker, and enjoyed some good luck initially. Now you are losing, perhaps compounded by unusually bad luck—but you were probably never playing as well as you thought you were.
Poker is very, very hard. Even the pros you watch on TV or live stream, many of them are losing players or barely winning. For tournament players, it’s pretty common to be profitable or not, over the course of an entire year, solely on the basis of 1 big event that either went your way or didn’t. For ring/cash game players, your whole week can swing on 1 single hand.
Most players don’t realize this is the norm. Most players haven’t properly internalized the level of variance they are signing up for every time they sit down at a no-limit table. This leads to all kinds of cognitive dissonance, aka “you lost, and you expected to win, so now you’re calling FOUL”
I was lucky to come up with some really talented poker players who have won lots of money playing this game. They are mostly better than me. Some of them are much better than me. Meanwhile, I’m not saying I’m anywhere near the best player on Replay, but I’m fairly confident that I’m somewhere in the top 500. Do you see what I’m getting at?
The “average” Replay skill level is LOSING. This is not a knock on anyone’s personal character; it is just a fact. At least 70% of players on the site are basically playing a strategy that should not win in the long run. Some proportion of those players DO win in the short run, become convinced they are playing well, and then freak out when they regress to the mean.
If you are of those who proudly say you “never bluff,” congrats, you are a losing player. Stop whining.
If you rarely 3bet preflop, and limp a lot of hands, congrats, you are a losing player. Stop whining.
If you mostly fold holding Ad3d on 2s 4s Kd because someone else bet 1/2 pot, and never even consider raising as a semi-bluff, congrats, you are a losing player. Stop whining.
I could go on but you get the idea. We could talk about large numbers and nitpick the specs of the RNG, but that really misses the point: poker is hard, winning long term is hard, and most players simply underestimate what “hard” looks like in practice. I’ve seen multiple players shoot up to a higher bankroll than I have, despite the fact that I play more hours on Replay than probably anyone on the site and use a somewhat sound strategy. Most of those players have also plummeted back down at some point, losing 2/3 of their bankroll or more. They weren’t actually playing better than me; they were playing a higher variance style and enjoying a run above expectation. I say this to emphasize how difficult it is to consistently win at no-limit games.
Among the most common complaints in the “it’s rigged” vein is the claim that “the same players win all the time.”
WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS, MY FRIEND?
