The Well: Adanthar (1/16/07)

[adanthar]

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oh, the person I talked to was a 2p2er and meant you were too tight in general, not just at the pca. thoughts?

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*shrug* One thing I can think of is that when I'm on autopilot, I definitely also play very tight, maybe 13/10ish in PT. If I have other things to do, I play on autopilot a lot, so that could be it, too.

A bunch of this is because I don't care about LP steals all that much, really (especially in the last six months when tournaments have started playing more aggro). In fact, with a healthy stack I rarely steal at all. One resteal is worth almost 3 steals, y'know...

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adanthar, a fair number of intelligent posters talk about how easy sngs are to beat and yet, few of them seem to want to play them. why stop beating the 55s on pacific?

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I played on Pacific(2yrs ago maybe?) to bonus whore and you could only play one table at a time. I've heard now you can play 4 although I'm not 100% sure. This table limit makes it a waste of time to play there since you could be playing 8 tabling at other sites with thousands more players.

Also, SNGs have a profit ceiling and once you hit that at the 215s, 530s, or whatever the kids are playing these days, the general progression has been a switch to cash games where there is more money to be made.

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I never played at Pacific myself (a guy PM'd me he used my strategy there and it worked through a decent sample size, heh), but basically, this. Playing the 530's requires a very specific skillset, memorizing pushbot charts endlessly, and then gets you (5% x # tables)/hour...so, a very highly trained monkey could do it, and then on top of that, in order to net actual money, you need to do 20 tables of them at a time, so you also go through 1500 break even stretches over the course of, say, a week. It's enough to kill yourself and I've got no idea how people still do it.

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You've mentioned before (and in passing in this thread) that your playing style is very read-dependent. Some questions about that:

1. At a table of ok to pretty good (but not very good) players, what specifically are you looking for?

2. Do you base reads on frequencies that a player does something, even if there's no showdown to confirm what they had? For example, I cbet the first three heads up flops I see...can you draw any assumptions from this? I open raise twice from MP the first time around after I'm moved to your table...anything to do with this knowledge?

3. Do you consider reads to be more valuable against good players, or against bad players?

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These are good questions, but the answers are pretty specific and I don't want to give away too much. Okay...let's say we're playing on Stars. Stars has the mighty 4x raise tell, which alone is worth a ton, but basically *any* raise size on Stars that isn't a 3x slider raise is some kind of tell 80%+ of the time. Then it's just a question of whether those people call light or are giving off reverse tells, etc.

Now let's say we're playing at Bodog. Bodog doesn't really have default bet size tells, but it does have (to name two things) big stacks that limp light (but don't raise light) and a high share of bubble stallers. So, there, I try to pwn limpers fairly often and abuse the bubble like crazy - it works far better than at Stars, where people have been trained to call light on the bubble for months now.

That's how the basic, site level reads should work (and yes, they exist for every site/are extremely important for some.) To go further, you take that default profile and modify it based on the person's PA HUD stats, what you've seen him show down, how likely it is that that reraise you saw was a squeeze, and so on.

Whether a player is good or bad is nowhere near as important as the type of good or bad he actually is and what the metagame is at the moment. There are some really bad LAGs that are very hard to exploit ordinarily if they're, say, on your left in a tournament when everyone has 20 BB, and there are some normally really good, tight players that nonetheless make ridiculous bubble folds/just don't understand their implied odds in a given situation aren't what they think they are. Basically, it's not whether they're good or bad, it's whether they're accidentally playing (in)correctly at the moment and what you can do about it.

[registrar]

This is another teenage list question. [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] There is a 6-handed poker invitational and you make the final table. The money is worth winning enough to be motivational but not enough to skew the point of the question. Which five players would you most like to pit yourself against?

[adanthar]

I get the point of the question, but I don't care too much about being the best, just winning the most money. Game selection matters enough to me that you'll never see me at a table with anyone remotely 'good' unless it's in a tournament or there's a gigantic fish or six to balance it out.

but to answer your actual question, Ivey, Negreanu, Cunningham, Patrick Antonius and Barry G. would probably be it...and then they'd own me so I'd win no money, which sucks. Therefore, I'd like to pit myself against five people that have never heard of the word 'poker' before. That works out well.

[zoobird]

Hmmm...now I'm going to have to post those questions on MTT and see if anyone else is willing to spill the beans. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Another question - how much time do you spend analyzing/learning vs. actually playing? Was the % breakdown different when you weren't that good yet?

[NYWalker]

1. Do you see much differences in action/play styles between online MTT vs live MTT? If so, what are they?

2. Do you consider playing online MTTs as practice and live events as real war field?

3. Do you any negative parts (if there are any) of online poker by allowing teenagers to play real money poker before they reach 21?

[adanthar]

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Another question - how much time do you spend analyzing/learning vs. actually playing? Was the % breakdown different when you weren't that good yet?

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I don't really have specific percentages, nor do I actually play that much poker, heh. I don't think a day goes by that I don't spend at least some time thinking about a hand or AIM'ing with somebody about something they just played, though. A lot of the learning part is just multitasking while playing nowadays.

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1. Do you see much differences in action/play styles between online MTT vs live MTT? If so, what are they?

2. Do you consider playing online MTTs as practice and live events as real war field?

3. Do you any negative parts (if there are any) of online poker by allowing teenagers to play real money poker before they reach 21?

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1. Oh god live players are so bad...

2. ...so bad that live is pretty much the practice part, if anything. I mean, the PCA was an obnoxiously tough field this year, but it wasn't exactly the WCOOP ME. Hell, I might've had the toughest draw in the tournament and a guy at my table still managed to just call with the nuts on the river.

3. For starters, if America ever fully legalizes poker, 21 and up will be a requirement for sites to avoid prosecution. I don't think that's even a question, and I do think that poker will eventually gain some sort of legal status, so what's happening on gambling sites now is short term at best.

My personal feelings on the matter, FWIW: winning players have a very different perspective on poker than losing players, and teenagers have a different perspective on money than people that have held down a job. The psychological effects of *winning* upon teenagers are written all over this forum, and to be honest, they aren't exactly a positive (just look at the amount of money the average 20 year old BBV poster has saved vs. the money he has spent on coke and hookers.) The psychological effects of losing money is equally bad even for winning players - I'm sure there are people on antidepressants from losing streaks right now in this very forum - and while I have no idea what it is on losers, I assume it can be worse.

Yeah, we all know some underage players that can handle it, but I don't think the vast majority of 18 year olds is or should be trusted to handle online bankrolls, winners or losers. I'm not foolish enough to think that this is a popular stance here, but regardless, my personal beliefs don't even matter in this situation. The reality is that if and when America decides to tax online gambling rather than ban it, an age limit will certainly be part of that deal.

[NYWalker]

One last question for you.
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3. The psychological effects of *winning* upon teenagers are written all over this forum, and to be honest, they aren't exactly a positive (just look at the amount of money the average 20 year old BBV poster has saved vs. the money he has spent on coke and hookers.) The psychological effects of losing money is equally bad even for winning players - I'm sure there are people on antidepressants from losing streaks right now in this very forum - and while I have no idea what it is on losers, I assume it can be worse.

Yeah, we all know some underage players that can handle it, but I don't think the vast majority of 18 year olds is or should be trusted to handle online bankrolls, winners or losers. I'm not foolish enough to think that this is a popular stance here, but regardless, my personal beliefs don't even matter in this situation.

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I appreciate your honest and frank statement for this *unpopular* stance. As grown-up, we all know the reality doesn't have to be popular in naive minds. We know poker is a "zero sum game", players don't produce anything but rather than transferring money among people. 5% top players take the rest 95% ones' money. The deny of reality drives the losers to participate in the game.

If you later on become a well-known pros and own a popular poker website, will you allocate significant budget to educate young players from being too addicative and being unrealistic about the game?

Thanks. NYW.

[zoobird]

Poker is actually a negative sum game, not a zero sum game (other than home poker).

Are you suggesting that Cake Poker should publicize the potentially negative effects of poker on youth?

[NYWalker]

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Poker is actually a negative sum game, not a zero sum game (other than home poker).

Are you suggesting that online Poker should protect the youth from potentially negative effects of poker.

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From business point of view, you think it's more profitable to rake the entire $40k education fund from a young kid and let him broke without ever graducating OR let the same smart kid finishes the best law school and get a $200K job then come back playing poker at your site for a lifetime? which one is a win-win situation when you take the entire society as a whole?

[zoobird]

I'm not disagreeing with you at all. Just couldn't tell from your post whether you knew that Adanthar actually owns 1% of Cake Poker or not.