That sounds reasonable Joe. I don’t know why whoeverheis gets so personal, it’s not even about any of my hands. That comes across a bit weird. Thanks for your input Joe.
I would add it is the unholy mix of hormones and ego that creates such foolishness. Both sex and poker need knowledge to advance and most folks wouldn’t even think about researching the subjects.
Scratch
Calculate the expected value, try to get in good, hope you make it 'till the end, and shove at the right time… not that different actually.
Joe - sorry it took a while to get back to this one. Lots of logistics to work out ahead of the storm in case it was as bad as they said it would be.
I re-read my post and its one of those things where in my head I was serving deconstructed Beef Wellington but apparently undercooked spaghetti with cut up hot dogs made it to the plate. I’ll try to salvage a little of it here and then put the stuff about rankings on the thread for that subject.
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The aside about my hand - was just making a comment that dominating hands lose all the time. Losing an 80/20 hand is not an indication of a site being rigged. It was also a good opportunity to vent a little steam about said hand not holding at a crucial time
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The 1st hand - I just ran into a hand by accident that showcased a lot of what people see every day at lower stakes. It just happened that the goofy player in this scenario was the highest ranked of the bunch by a huge factor. No, you cant judge by 1 hand but if you see a player doing the same thing enough times, I think its fair to make a note about it. You can’t make claims about bad beats and rigging when hands like this are commonplace. Equity of all hands decreases with more hands in the pot and you will see a lot more odd hands made because a lot more odd hands were played in the 1st place.
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[quote=“JoeDirk, post:1160, topic:2578”]
the number of chips in their bankroll is still very predictive of their ability, at least as the ranks get better
[/quote]
I’m going to disagree to a large extent with this. Is there any correlation between #chips and ability? I’m sure there is a small positive correlation but I would be shocked if it even reached a 25% level. I will try to get a post about rankings on the appropriate thread but there is much more to figuring out someone’s rank based on skill than the number of chips in the bank. #chips alone only explains #chips. It does not tell you if someone is playing 6-tables at a time for 10+ hours a day or 1 table twice a week for an hour each time. It does not tell you what stakes they are playing etc. - are they playing people with similar size bankrolls or playing at tables far beneath their bankroll? Just between these 2 players, assuming general competence, the higher volume player at lower stakes probably would earn far more than the lower volume player. In this case, chips earned has almost no explanatory power. Yes, I am pulling from actual examples of players and play I’ve seen, including players in the top 100.
Anyway, there are more factors to consider here, including time on the site and whether the player is on ring games or exclusively MTT. There is also the little problem we have here is that there is no consensus on what characteristics constitute a higher ranked player vs a lower one. Regardless, I’m not trying to be difficult here, just trying to flesh this out a bit.
- Esfandiari - I didn’t say he wasn’t good, just that he isn’t as good as his ranking would suggest, for the same reasons I don’t buy into the #chips ranking thing here. I was trying to make the point that he jumped into the very elite ranks as a result of a single event. I doubt even he would think he’s a top-5 all time tournament player, above people like Helmuth and Seidel and Brunson … Yes, he still plays a ton of tournaments BTW.
I was trying to point out that even at the top echelons of the game, rankings are almost meaningless based on a single factor. Plus, those rankings don’t even tell you how much of those wins were actually “owned” by the players themselves. Would you rank someone differently if he won $1M but had pieced out 75% of his action? Would you credit him with only the 250K or the whole 1M or would you totally discount the numbers and the player because he basically bought chips?
Again, sorry for the nearly useless post earlier. This one isn’t much better but that’s all I have in the tank for the moment.
No worries. I understood the main idea of your post. I am tilted a bit myself after turning a nut flush only to lose to a rivered boat in my 3rd hand of 3-handed 50k/100k ring to lose 5,000,000. I shouldn’t even be playing at those stakes with my bankroll (12.5m buy-in out of ~80m total).
I actually think rank is more predictive of skill than 25%, but there would be a huge systematic heterogeneity of variance if we were to look across the entire range of ranks. Its predictive validity would rise as ranks rise (which is obvious because there is so much more room for variance at lower ranks). I agree completely that many factors you mentioned make rank a far-from-perfect indicator of skill, particularly volume of play and ring versus tournaments. Being the best tournament player in the world, it would take a lot longer to reach the same chip total with an amazing MTT and SnG winrate, compared to say, sweeping up 800k or 1m every hour against mediocre/bad players in 2k/4k or 5k/10k ring.
I don’t think the current ranking system is perfect, but adding complexity to it could make it worse, rather than better. When I sit down at a game on Replay, my predictions of skill and playstyle based on rank are almost always met. High ranked players make lots of terrible plays, but less obviously or frequently than lower ranked players. When I first started playing on Replay, it appeared to me that lots of players were generally competent and fairly equal, but over time the difference can become clear very quickly over a very small sample (~20 hands). For example, many people watching me play would not be able to differentiate my “skill” from the 500 ranked player or maybe the 15 ranked player, but there is a difference, on average. Of course, the 500 ranked player could be new and on their way up to number 1, or they could be amazing but refuse to play any buy-in larger than 20k, but in general rank seems quite predictive. Of course this is all purely academic because skill is not quantifiable, but chips, as the outcome measure, seem like a reasonable proxy.
As far as the pros go, it is pretty difficult to compare them because they would probably all perform at different levels if they were heads-up with each other versus at a full-ring table of pros or in a deep tournament full of amateurs. I think Esfandiari was one of the more consistent winning live tournament players of his time, even before the Big One for One Drop, but I do agree with your point that winning the most money doesn’t put him among the best players. We could name dozens of pros currently playing who are better than Esfandiari based on consistent results and from watching some of their play. But if you were to rank Esfandiari compared to the general population of people playing poker in 2011, he would certainly be in the top 1% or a fraction of that, meaning that putting him near the top based on his results is not worlds removed from his actual ability, it is just not as fine-tuned as it would need to be to rank the best of the best. Someone like Jamie Gold winning the WSOP main event shows that luck can be a huge factor in winning a tournament, but Esfandiari is more than one tournament, even if he never really was one of the best in the world.
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Ouch! I watched the hand and it was just a perfect setup for a big clash. That river card would have made me queasy but I would have been all smiles up to then. Even with the paired A on the river, not much you could do. He was sizing his bets very well. Frankly, could have been a lot worse for you. You may have lost the absolute minimum possible there.
Nice to be able to chat in a reasonable manner about these topics. Kind of refreshing to be honest. For me, ranking is almost entirely an academic exercise. I think its interesting to discuss how to define it and how it should be calculated. Aside from that, it doesn’t mean much to me. I never knew the chip counts of players over at WPT and we had no ranking systems. After a while of seeing the same faces at final tables over and over again, you get a good feel for which players are your toughest competitors. In the cash games I play I wouldn’t even begin to know how or where to apply the concept of ranks.
All I need to know about someone of Esfandiari’s play is that I don’t want to go against it if I can avoid it. I have been at tables with pros (not him) in tournaments and those guys are not playing the same game as I am. For one thing, the reads they have are just freaky accurate. For the most part I have tried to avoid confronting them and let people who want to “test the pros” have at it unless I have a true monster of a hand.
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About that particular hand, I could have found a fold the way it played because he made that pot-sized bet on the river. On a paired board where he bet every step of the way, having AA, AJ, or JJ, seemed very possible, and increasing his bet size showed a ton of strength. I don’t think he would even have bet that big (or at all) with AK or AQ on that board, and it was not a great spot to bluff on a flush board with two aces after I showed a lot of strength. In a full ring game, I would have put him on a narrower raising range and found the fold, but in a short-handed game, his range could have been wider (although that could include other possible boats). My hand blocks most of his possible smaller flushes (I had K9), and I don’t think he would have bet them like that on that board. It’s interesting to see myself make a cry-call at very high stakes (for my bankroll) based on my absolute hand strength rather than the board texture. It is the most fundamental error that people make all the time. I know (and like) DaddyWorbucks, and I know he is capable of trying to run a bluff on me. When the board paired, particularly the second ace, I knew I was pretty much done, but after hitting the perfect card on the turn, I just thought “F it”. I wonder, if I had jammed the turn, if there is any chance he folds. I doubt it.
It is always enjoyable talking about poker and difficult to do in everyday life where most people either don’t care or have a very simplistic view of the game. I’ve never played with any pros before (that I am aware of), but they do seem able to make amazing reads. Trying to only play premiums against them is just playing into their strengths, like this hand where Daniel Negreanu puts the guy on his exact hand and uses it as a mind trick to get him to fold. To be fair, the guy’s betting pattern was quite obvious (and common on Replay), but it is cool to watch.
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As a total coincidence, ran into this article interviewing Seidel discussing rankings dated March 13th, 2017: https://americascardroom.eu/blog/2017/03/the-race-is-on-erik-seidel-discuss-his-chase-of-negreanu-and-colman/
He had an interesting take on it, including the idea of eliminating each player’s top win.
I’ve played that hand in my head a few times now. I have no experience with the player or his betting patterns but I don’t see how it would have played out with less damage to you without a hero-fold on the river. FYI - I don’t think I’m good enough to make that fold 95% of the time. If you raised the flop, he calls or jams. If you called the flop and jammed the turn he calls most likely (because you didn’t raise the flop).
Honestly, I think most players are going broke on that hand in your spot. It was a hit to your bankroll but not nearly as damaging as it could have been. As I said before, it was a perfect setup for a big confrontation. The only real “mistake” you may have made is one you identified yourself, playing over your bankroll. If that is the 1 mistake you make from time to time and you limit the damage done when you lose, you are playing better than 99% of the people you are likely to meet.
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There is no way that the cards are random on this site (and probably several other poker sites). Forget betting for a moment and just look at the mathematics of the event. Suppose you have a square table with four corners and you mark them A,B,C and D. Now deal two cards to each corner face up and lay five cards face up in the middle of the table. Now look at each “Player’s” hand and see who has the winning hand. Record the results. Shuffle the cards and redeal. Once 100 hands have been dealt you cannot expect to see that A,B,C and D “won” exactly 25 hands each but it might raise your eyebrows to see that one corner gets 40+ and one corner gets 5-8 “winners” which is what happens on Replay Poker in my opinion. As you progress to 1000 hands you will see the problem is magnified. Now, that indicates to me the cards are certainly NOT random. I cannot say for a second that the results are “fixed” but they certainly are not random!
This is what I love about the higher levels of the game. Having a plan of action aside from outdrawing your opponent is something most people don’t have a clue about. In fact, I’d bet a fair amount that the 1st bit of thought many players put into a hand occurs after they limp into a pot and see a flop. Daniel had the perfect read but could never have gotten away with his play if he didn’t also have position. Well, all that plus a giant set of stones for good measure.
Watching top-level poker is a treat for me. I wish I could train my mind to work like that, under pressure. My nightmares involve being the player Negreanu is torturing, captured on video for all time
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It plays out correctly over a large enough sample on Replay (and most other poker sites/casinos/games, I reckon). Over 100 hands, you would not expect each hand to win exactly 25 times. You would expect there to be variance, such that the players might win 38, 30, 20, 12, but with a large enough sample, you would expect the averages to be 25. However, that does not factor in that poker is a game of skill. Each player may have the best hand 25 times, but that does not mean they will win the pot. If they fold preflop or get bluffed off their hand, they will win fewer pots.
But what happens even more frequently (that many people fail to recognize) is that players are not winning more or less total pots, but rather that they win smaller pots when they win and lose bigger pots when they lose, leading to a negative overall winrate. I’ve been on the end of so many crazy hands, both to my advantage and disadvantage in 175,000 hands on Replay, that I am confident saying that your premise is incorrect.
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I suggest you sit in that corner.
It could be argued that I played that hand wrong by not jamming the turn. I could have gotten called by worse and gotten my chips in good instead of bad. Results-wise, trying to set a trap saved me some chips, but it was probably the wrong play. I do think I could fold a flush on that board a fair percentage (maybe almost 50%) of the time, but I this was one of those I couldn’t.
When it comes to bankroll management, there is a big issue on Replay with chip inflation. Some players (not too many) are able to run up hundreds of millions, but for the rest of us, it is frustrating to adhere to bankroll management and not be able to play at the big tables without being at a disadvantage (risking too much of my bankroll). I just played more at 50k/100k, and I think I am close to their level, but I started with 80m, and I should not be playing those stakes without at least 120m or a lot more than that, to follow good bankroll management. Now I’m down to 65m. With 80m, I shouldn’t even be playing at 20k/40k (6m buy-in), but I prefer the higher level of competition at the higher stakes, and I am kind of bored of chipping up 800k at a time. I know I could compete at 50k/100k with a little more practice, but I am not sure I have the patience to play for several more months at 5k/10k or 10k/20k until I can get to 120m+. I was averaging being up 3m a day at 20k/40k, but I was getting a little tired of that too. Maybe it’s just that tournaments are more fun than ring, especially for play money…
I have heard this a few times but not really sure what is meant by it. Could you give me a quick primer on it?
I totally get what you are saying about the level of the game and find myself in the same situation. I only started playing online poker less than 3 years ago on WPT. I built up 40+ million chips in 2 accounts, most of which were from MTT’s. Not sure the conversion rate to this site but it was a decent amount, especially since I played casually and even took over 6 months off entirely. Then the site closed at the end of 2016 and all the players had to find somewhere else to go. A good portion of us landed here.
I have struggled with the concept of starting over from scratch here. I don’t see a scenario where I could put in the time to build a 100 million+ bankroll within a year or even 2 in order to be able to enjoy some of the better ring games. Just like I wouldn’t go back to playing 200NL simply because I switched where I played my cash games live, I don’t feel any desire to go back through the lower stakes games online just because I had to switch sites. I may stick to SnG’s / MTT’s pretty exclusively here for this reason. Not really sure yet but I do feel less inclined to play overall because of it though.
So, I do see the temptation to ignore all bankroll management rules to get to the desired level. Very hard to make the case for ignoring 1 cardinal rule of poker in order to play a better game though. I don’t have a good solution for this issue myself but I hope you find one satisfactory for you. Of course the optimal solution would be to find a way to raise to overall level of play so that games got better even at the lower stakes.
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It could also be argued that you should have raised the flop. Can’t second guess yourself about things like this though. The biggest question in terms of how you played the hand would be whether you played it any differently because of the stakes or not. Did you refrain from jamming the turn because you were playing for higher than normal stakes? If so, then you need to look at that decision more closely. If not, don’t worry about it. It was a tough hand and you could make good arguments for playing it any number of ways.
Why not? I do it all the time…
It is interesting to keep thinking about that particular hand. When my opponent takes the betting lead I like to them keep betting, and in my experience going for a check-raise against good opponents can allow them to fold and reduce the number of chips I win. But that is a perfect reason why I should have raised the flop. If he hadn’t flopped top set, then a raise on the flop could have won me the pot on the flop if he missed or he could have even folded an overpair if I barreled the turn. But my logic was basically that I had a good price to draw and I didn’t want to get raised off of it. When I hit my hand, I let him bet again, and I didn’t want to check-raise because I thought he was strong enough that I could get another bet on the river from an overpair or a J, but that he would fold those hands if I showed too much strength. So, in retrospect, I wouldn’t have played the hand any differently. On the river I needed to fold, and I really only called cursing my luck, which shows that I’m lacking the discipline required to play against better opponents. I knew that I was beaten because at that point I had to put him on at least a J, so AJ made the most sense. KK or QQ would have slowed down on the turn. The flush came in and he seemed undeterred, and a pot-sized bet on a flush board shows more strength than AK or AQ. A lot of bad players on Replay will go for stacks with 3 aces on this board, but not good players.
I don’t have a textbook definition for chip inflation, but I look at it like regular inflation or income inequality. The site gives a daily bonus, other bonuses, and lets players buy chips, and those chips are then very quickly lost to players at higher and higher stake levels because there is a big gap between those who play at least ABC poker and those who don’t. The result is that in order to play with those better players you have to be able to either 1) beat them with high variance (i.e., buy-in for most of your bankroll and win) or 2) spend enough time beating the lower games until you move up.
Just like you, I played tournaments almost exclusively and only at low to medium stakes for the first year and a half I was on Replay. I still think tournaments are more fun than ring, but I only had about 8m in chips, and I felt like I knew everything there was to know about those types of tournaments on Replay, and I was familiar with 5-6 good players who I would typically encounter in those tournaments. I knew who the best regulars were (eg., Cottage, BigBuddha, Scratch). But I also realized that there was another group who I was only playing against occasionally (e.g., Bromholm, ManU, Birba). Playing ring, I realized that there was more to be learned from a different game-type, and that there were a few dozen or even a couple of hundred players who were good, who I could learn from.
I went from 8m to about 60m in a couple of months, but then I kind of topped out in the middle of high stakes where 2k/4k was too low for me but 20k/40k was too high, bankroll-wise, and I realized that a lot of those good players weren’t really that good, they were only good at exploiting how bad everybody below them was. I got bored of waiting to flop sets and double up, so I left the site for a few months (and I had positive life stuff going on, so I have never had time to play as much as I used to when I was doing the low stakes SnG leaderboard to try to win that sweet 345k prize). But I love watching poker, and I never got to play anymore because my home game broke up, so I came back. At first I was bad because I tried to incorporate high level trickiness when going for value is the way to win here, and I jumped up beyond my bankroll only to find myself below 30m. But then I realized that I could beat the 20k/40k, and that only some of the top 100 players are better than me, so I went back over 80m. But now I don’t know what to do. 20k/40k is technically still too much for my bankroll (especially now that I’m down to 65m), but I would like to play against the top 100 players. I’m going to try to stay focused and grind until I have enough chips to play on an even footing at higher stakes. What makes it more difficult is that the site is so underpopulated at high stakes that it can be hard to even find a game. The lower ranked players who take their shot generally get gobbled up immediately (especially since they are usually playing beyond their bankrolls), and only the same small group is left.
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The US Dollar has not been backed by gold or silver for almost 50 years. It has been considered paper money ever since; the government prints all the money it wants and as it runs the printing presses the value of our money plummets. The same is true for the Replay Chip. Since Replay Poker virtually prints new chips every day either free or via purchase and every month by bonus chips, the value goes down and down because millions of new chips are created into the system.
A little over a year ago I had 30 Million chips and I was rate 197. I have ten million more chips this year and I am rate 297. Now the person who is ranked 197 has around 70 Million chips. In the last year I would have had to more than double my earnings just to keep my ranking. A big part of this loss of earnings was because I played games I hardly played before Hi-Lo and Tournament. So if I want to catch up I would have to stick with Ring.
I am unsure what conclusions can be made but would love to hear some.
Scratch
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Ultimately, the inflation itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing because every player’s “rank” aka bankroll is relative to everyone else’s. Increasing the rake would be one way to reduce inflation. I hate rake in an actual casino, but for Replay chips, it is hardly noticeable. The rake is also extremely low. In 20k/40k ring, the max rake is 500 or 1.25% of one big blind. They could make the rake a percentage of the pot (like 2%, which is still very low) with a cap, and that would reduce the inflation somewhat. It is ridiculous to play a 25,000,000 chip pot in 50k/100k with a rake of only 1,000.
The only way inflation matters is by creating a bigger gap between the top players and the rest. 40m is rank ~300, 80m is rank ~175, 230m is rank ~75, and 7.5b is rank 2. I don’t necessarily think it is a huge problem, and I was the one complaining about it…
JoeDirk wrote: “Ultimately, the inflation itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing because every player’s “rank” aka bankroll is relative to everyone else’s.”
So Joe,
I guess the conclusion is that I suck at Hi-Lo and Tournament? Damn!
Scratch