Poker is harder?

[Rotating Rabbit]

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Poker will most likely always be beatable by a few players to some extent, but "beatable" might end being 0.1BB/100 and collecting empty drinks cans would end up netting more (not to mention the mega-variance you suffer as you approach break-even).

The real question is: "will poker be beatable for a decent winrate in the future?" and projecting the last 3/4 years into the future doesn't look good to me.

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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This is how I see it too. I think 1 year ahead is probably optimistic.

[sdfsdf]

if you seriously think poker has not gotten harder since pre-frist then you are a retard. theres nothing to argue and nothing else to be said.

[FernTheBrute]

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On another note, one thing people seem to have forgotten in this thread is the fish themselves! If good players are having a harder time beating poker then it stands that the fish are also finding it much harder, and will be losing their money even quicker that they did before. Since most of the fish play for enjoyment then the fact that they lose their money twice as quick is going to make them decide to stop playing poker much quicker than before. Also if a fish just sits down with a table full of rocks (eg: current online F/R LHE games), then the chance for some positive variance to make them think for a while they are a winner is going to be lower than it once was also putting them off playing.


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There is something wrong in what you wrote... yes the game is tougher, but the fish is not loosing money faster because of that. It's the exact opposite: the game is tougher because the fish is looses less money beacause he increased his average skill level.

But I agree with the very last part of your post: the fish is loosing less money, but he looses it consistently instead of having big swings that may make him belive he's a winning player at some point. So even tho he looses less money, he might leave the game sooner, realizing he's a chronic looser.

[questions]

Lest we all lose sight of what poker is about, I'll reiterate what Phil Gordon points out in his Little Green Book: poker is about money. Not winning pots. If your primary aim is to win more pots than other players/demonstrate how skillful you are at it, you will lose a lot of money over the long-term. On another board, someone pointed out that he had had a recent session where he didn't win a single pot and yet ended up in the black!

Put another way, if someone told you that you could enter a single hand at the Bellagio against, say, Matusow and Jane Harmann at the Bellagio and have a chance at a $4 million pot (or whatever it was), would you really care how skillful you are at poker?

In other words, you just need to exploit one mistake in order to make money. I guess that's a big part of the appeal of poker.

[Rotating Rabbit]

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On another board, someone pointed out that he had had a recent session where he didn't win a single pot and yet ended up in the black!


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That is indeed impressive. Was there a powercut?

[boondoggle]

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if you seriously think poker has not gotten harder since pre-frist then you are a retard. theres nothing to argue and nothing else to be said.

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Are all of your posts this informative? Perhaps 2+2 should give you a paying position...

[boondoggle]

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The real question is: "will poker be beatable for a decent winrate in the future?" and projecting the last 3/4 years into the future doesn't look good to me.

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Juk, you seem like a nice guy but I think you are simply way off. Poker is going nowhere and smart people will continue to make money at poker regardless. Everyone's statements seem to be based off this ideal theory that people continue to get better and better which is incorrect.

For example, some people cited that 2 years ago there were donks going all in with A9o vs AA and people miss those days. What people do not understand is that was an exception and not the norm.

Most people are comparing the easiest point of online poker to now and declaring doomsday. Its all gonna be fine. Take a deep breath and relax everyone. Poker is fine.

My favorite saying--adapt or die.

cheers
Boon

[Dave2020]

Boondoggle,

It seems to me you have just been replying to the posts you feel are easiest to reply to. I disagree with your "just adjust your game" attitude and would like you to respond to Rotating Rabbit's post. I think his tennis analogy here is great!


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There is no doubt the game is getting harder to win. As the losers get better, the winners win less. This process continues until everyone is a loser to the rake. Sure, we're not there yet, but its coming closer every day.

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[img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] This thinking just makes me laugh, no offense.

I mean we see all these threads about "poker is about skill," "poker is about skill", "poker is about skill" and yet the underlying idea to posts like the one above is, "poker is becoming less about skill."

There are all kinds of reasons why this thinking is totally wrong. As Sklansky has written, you make money by playing well and exploiting others' mistakes. And as you yourself get better, (in theory) you can move up in stakes, making more money in absolute terms.

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Before you 'laugh' think about it because you're not getting it.

Its a closed system. Consider the simplest case where there are two players. Player A is better than player B.

Money won by A = money lost by B - rake

Now, all learning curves are concave. Thus, in time, if both players play together, the difference in skill between them will narrow. Player A may always be better than B, but the difference will be less pronounced as time goes on. An analogy: consider you're an expert tennis player and you start playing a beginner. Obviously you cane him. Over time if you play enough, he will get better quickly, but you won't improve much. You may beat him every day for ever, but you'll win less easily as time goes on.

This is important because while your relative skill difference decreases, the rake does not. Thus there will come a point when the loser has improved enough such that the winner does not beat the rake. Ie they both lose to the rake. In a world where all players are equal, all players lose.

The only way to avoid this eventuality is if enough newcomers to the system are introduced on an ongoing basis. The exact craeteria for this is hard to calculate.

What I have said above is NOT (as you say) mutally exclusive with the point that 'skill is important'. Skill IS important, but the above is still true.

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[questions]

As to players getting scarcer, it's funny to see people talking out of their rear ends, because numbers as to five-day average (3/1-5) on Stars is just about back to where it was pre-Neteller shutdown.

[kdog]

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For example, some people cited that 2 years ago there were donks going all in with A9o vs AA and people miss those days. What people do not understand is that was an exception and not the norm.



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This is true boon but what you have to remember is that for many/most here the internet was the first (and for some still the only) place they have played. Since they had nothing for comparison that was the norm.

I think you can draw a good parallel with what's happened to the internet games in the last couple of years to what happens in an area where B+M poker is legalized for the first time.

The games are so soft at first you can just sit there playing only the best hands and make a nice profit because there is so much dead money in every pot. But that gradually changes. The bad players either quit or get better and since the initial rush to try something new is over there are less new players coming into the games. You can still make money playing but you have to actually play, not just sit there and wait for the donks to hand you their cash.