[LearnedfromTV]

msnl perspective. This is fun stuff but I think we're very very far from unexploitable play.

The following is very hypothetical. But let's say 23/19, distibuted some particular way by position, is optimal preflop. So if you put six 23/19's who play optimally postflop at the same table, they break even (minus rake), and if you replace one with a 30/20 or a 20/10 who plays optimally postflop, the new guy gets exploited into going broke or becoming 23/19.

Fine. That's what it might look like. But even if preflop numbers are mostly converging somewhere among decent players, that hypothetical optimal ecosystem is really delicate. And if you disturb it with a couple fish and a couple mini-fish, like people who play 23/19 but suck (they're everywhere! - I'm one of them), not to mention a [#$%@!, etc] shortstacker.. well, even just for preflop, profitable play and optimal play diverge really fast. And that doesn't even touch on the "optimal play postflop" assumption being ridiculous. Maybe people are approaching something like optimal cbet% for a given pfr, etc, but there's no way it extends much further, like into double-triple barrel frequencies; if anything, the number and type of possible boards makes this sort of thing very unlikely.

I'm not sure what the right scale is, so these numbers are just made up to illustrate a point, but if, say we've gone from an unexploitability factor of 10/100 to 20/100 in the last year, I think the only way we get close to/over 50 is by taking a bunch of really good players, putting them in a closed system - no new fish, and when some of them turn into fish and go broke, they can't reload - and let them battle. With new money flowing into the system it'll never get close.