Also, Whey, really enjoyed your last vlog with your new apartment tour.

Some other new vloggers popping up here as well and I'm all for it. New faces, new personalities, more poker!!!

YouTubers deleting comments is pretty standard.

In this case if I were Trooper and the quoted $2000-for-the-year figure is not correct I'd delete it too.

What if the last couple of years have just been a long con by TheTrooper97 and he's going to sit down at 5/10 and bankrupt vegas?

On Limon's show, Lover asked if Trooper had a backer and Trooper said no.

This he did do. He went on a 4.7k upswing during the 100 hr challenge.

Nope. He won't ever get another job unless he absolutely has to. IE if he's broke, and clearly he isn't right now.

Who knows. He always seems bored of the grind. Can't blame him.

Going broke could be the best thing to happen to Trooper because it will force him to get a job and do something productive rather than being stuck in the $1/hr 1/2 grind.

I don't think he has much fun when he plays, especially when he worries so much about going broke. At 2/5 he will go broke faster unless he runs really well. But it would be entertaining for the vlog so idk.

I guess he thinks he is better prepared for 2/5 because he likes to trick opponents and thinks he can use his skills to trick people at 2/5 better and more often without as many calling stations in the game. This isn't much different from the reasoning I'm seeing in the Youtube comments. Don't think LVGrinder is going to be scared though.

And obviously just because someone thinks they are good at being tricky or whatever, that doesn't mean they are good at it.


Because he assumes he is good at poker. Or at least good at beating 1/2 NL. Whether it's because he has reasons to think he is good, or he is holding on to that belief because of his ego or whatever, it's an assumption he is really holding on to.

Trooper was shaking like a leaf when he went to play 2 5 at Bellagio. I got my popcorn ready but I recommend you be very careful Troop. I think you value your freedom way more than providing entertainment. You seem more comfortable grinding at lower stakes since you have a low monthly nut. Don't be pressured by Andrew and Jake Cody. They are the devils. They are telling kids to drop out and make $70 an hour in the US and Europe.

#TeamTroops
#StopAndrew&Jake
#SaveourChildren

They must be super solid to be playing 1/2 for a living.

No ****. Nobody disputes this. In this instance there is really no difference between $9hr and breakeven though because if you make $9hr (over the long term) you can't support yourself playing poker.

A 2/5 player has a ton of leaks? You don't say? I woulda never guessed it lol

Living at the Manor, yes. Living where he lives now? No, not without other sources of income.

Except that trooper hasn't made 18k+/year off poker the last 5+ year minus the the year he crushed STT w/ Harry at the wsop and the year he hit the BBJ...

Well **** Nate, if we really wanted to get nitty without promo money & freeroll the Troop is up something like $400 for the entire year. You make very valid points. Just makes you think what would have happened if he didn't run hot during the MGM promo month.

When it comes to moving up stakes I shouldn't be one to give advice since I was a big ol puss and didn't even start to play 2/5-3/5 regularly in L.A. until this year, just playing the $100 buy in 1/3 unless I was in Vegas. However, that being said, I think it's a good idea for Trooper (if he has the cash on hand to support it) to play a more TAG style and move to the Wynn 1/3 $500 buy in, the Rio 2/3 and the Bellagio 2/5 $500 buy in games. His success would depend on his ability to adjust to the regs in those games and his working on improving his game to play an effective TAG style.

The 1/2 uncapped at the Nugget seems to play pretty big sometimes but really he needs to not be pussyfooting around in the lower buy in games. He overplays hands and gets tilted and has to play catch up in games that are hard to catch up 100s of dollars at a time in.

Why are you talking about 5/T regs? My specific quote was:

In case you didn't realize, 1/2 is significantly easier than 5/T so it's a bit of an apple's and orange comparison. That being said, my quote below remains true at 5/T as well:

I've played in those 5/T games enough to know that a lot of those "solid" pros in the Vegas 5/T games aren't nearly as good as you think they are.

No, it really doesn't. If you are crushing live poker your edge is way too big to have a year long breakeven streak. Normally long breakeven stretches in live poker involve bad play and tilt as well as runbad. Perhaps you should read up on the winrates thread.

Conveniently you use variance to make the point that Trooper is a winning player but somehow ignore it when considering how one could survive off a $9 hourly at 1/2.

i was honestly unaware limon was a poker god

*btw if someone says they are $50/hr or $100/hr but ran terrible for huge sample...they are no longer at that win rate the 'runbad' is factored in

I had 1200 bb downswing in 1-2 and thought I was going insane, if I lost or broke even over some of the aforementioned lengths of time I'd be homeless

I'm not sure what makes you think professional poker players are super wealthy. They aren't. The guys they play with are the super wealthy ones. I'm one of those guys...but once upon a time I scrapped together a living playing 5/T. I played it back in 2011/2012 and am well aware of how the games were. If you think 2012 5/T was in anyway comparable to the 1/2 games that Trooper plays you are off your rocker. I was playing with SNEs on a daily basis (black friday....HELLO).

This has been well researched. I know several full time players that have made over $70/hr at 2/5. These are in softer games than what you will find in Vegas.

Did you ever consider that Trooper may be a long term losing player and is simply running above expectations?

There is a player that averaged $40+/hr at the red rock 1/2 game over 1453 hours. Could he be running above expectations? Sure. Is there any chance he could ever have a losing year playing this game? Absolutely not. I know tons of players that have played for a living at 2/5 and 5/T+ for many years and none of them have had anywhere close to a losing year ever.

When you are crushing poker is like printing money and if you don't know this then you have never crushed. Everyone has downswings and bumps but lol @ a 1 year downswing in super soft live games.

Has the Trooper been talking about moving up to 2/5 or is it just his fans that want him to take shots? I skimmed his latest vlog and he was in a 1/2 game.

Trooper played 2/5 one day but is planning to take shots when he has winning sessions. He says he wants to do it to keep the vlogs fresh. It's unclear which games he will actually be taking shots in and whether or not he will play higher than 2/5.

To me it sounds eerily like DGIharris's plan in his thread where he would shot take T/20+ when he had a winning week at low stakes.

Wtf? Trooper just said in the last video that he doesn't steal blinds a cash game?????

Are u insinuating that's he's dumb if he doesn't ?

Correct me if I'm wrong but Husker has an online background I believe. There is a lot of value in stealing blinds online. The same can not be said about live where the dynamics are different (rake is prohibitive, players are more sticky pre/post flop, and there are far less opportunities to steal blinds in the first place).

What game are you referring to? Where did I say that?

The online versus live stealing blinds in a cash games connundrum. I generally think it is worth it to try and steal blinds in both.

There are just many dynamics that make it different. For instance, raise sizes in live games are much larger...and have to be to get a similar result (a fold). I already mentioned rake, but where I play there are also promo drops which make it even worse.

Then there is a question of stack sizes. In games where stack depths can often be much deeper than online (such as Golden Nugget or possibly Planet Hollywood where Trooper often plays) there can be more value in seeing a flop than stealing. Furthermore, the skill differential between a good player and a bad player is much greater in live play than online, again making it more advantageous to play postflop (and thus making plays such as limping potentially profitable and correct).

Of course, all this ignores the fact that some games will go to a flop 100% of the time (live plo is often like this, but NL games can be as well). If all hands are going to a flop, then the value of trying to steal preflop can not be positive. I'm not saying that raising is incorrect or unprofitable. I'm simply saying that your reason for raising is not to steal if every hand goes to a flop.

What you've seen in the videos is the vast majority of my play over the past few months. When I started the vlog I made a conscious decision to make it the way I wanted it to come out, quality wise, regardless of how many hours that took away from grinding. Which in turn guarantees I would be making less money, to start. Luckily I've been running amazing. So my income hasn't taken much of a dent during this stretch.

I'm going to address this in the vlog but I had a medium sized downswing just before starting the episodes. Between 9/15 and 9/28 I lost $8331. I don't have to tell you guys that looking at these tiny samples is basically meaningless. But I'm well aware of how the small sample in the videos looks skewed to look more positive. I certainly don't claim to be some poker genius and have repeatedly said in the vlog that we're (I'm) running really well, and that it doesn't always work like this.

Also, when I'm analyzing hands in the videos, I rarely if ever say something like "this is what you should do." I often say things like, "I think," "I'm not sure what's best here," "I don't like my sizing," "you can maybe do this or this, I decided to do this," etc. I'm not trying to sell myself as an expert and have no expectations of ever making strategy videos for Run It Once.

I also knew that I would never put in the work required to beat reg-heavy afternoon 5/10 games at the bellagio for a respectable clip (by professional players' standards). So I decided to make videos instead and see where that goes.

Although I have been getting lots of free coaching in the comments, so that's nice.

I know of no live reg who has broke even for 2000 hours. This is absurd! That's basically like saying you broke even at CG for the year. You are defo doing something wrong and most certainly not playing static(staying within BR management).

Hi Adam, liked your blogs.
The one regarding the WR, you kinda knew you would get backlash. Like you said it's really hard to know as hardly anyone shares WR's. So anyone with a few thousand hours under their belt can guesstimate, mine would be:

less than 5% of winning players make 10BB+ and estimate most winning players, perhaps 80-85% are 0BB/HR-5BB/HR. The 10-15% of winning players that are left would be between 5BB/HR-10BB/HR

I'm not a full time 5/10 player yet. But i would hope a top tier 5/10 regular(not an elite reular) would be very capable of making 6BB/HR-9BB/HR.